Congratulations on the birth of your new baby, Mr. Wescott. I'll see if I can get my employer to add it to the library.
'Taint no such thing as shameless for this -- feel free to beam and pass out the cigars.
Cheers Chris
Congratulations on the birth of your new baby, Mr. Wescott. I'll see if I can get my employer to add it to the library.
'Taint no such thing as shameless for this -- feel free to beam and pass out the cigars.
Cheers Chris
OK, just what is "NROFF"?
I'm almost as old as Jerry and I do not recognize term. [PS my 1st Fortran programs were executed by vacuum tubes ;/
Yepp, Haliod (sp?) was located in my hometown. There's stories about poor innocent secretary who muffed the name the day named morphed when CEO called.
They were originally Haloid, a photosensitive-paper company. I thought the name had been a Polaroid me-too wish. According to one of the muck-a-mucks downstairs, they almost renamed themselves "Xeroid" when they got into dry reproduction, but thought better of it. By the time I suggested the palindromic "XereX", it was too late. They wouldn't have listened to ma anyway, so no loss. :-)
Jerry
Start with
... snip ...
New ROFF.
You should try out that there new-fangled internet-web-search thingy:
It's a primarily Unix-based typesetting package, older and less sophisticated than LaTeX. Nowadays its probably used most for Unix manual pages, since it's the native format, but I'm sure I'm not alone in still using it for other purposes. It enables you to define your own macros so once you're familar with the system you can be very quick, e.g. I have one macro that starts a letter complete with my address, recipients address (in the correct place for a window envelope - takes experimentation in a word processor) and date automatically. This might not seem special but to get it all I need do is type ".LH" at the beginning of a line. Similarly I have a macro to insert a signature block at the end of the letter - it will even insert my signature if I tell it. After all, I'm far too important to be wasting time signing my own letters. ;-)
(snipped)
Hi Tim,
Ha, you may be right. I once had one of the country's greatest DSP gurus Fred Harris (of Blackman-Harris window fame) tell me that when he wrote his DSP book he was warned by his friend Bernard Sklar (of digital comms fame) that "You can never find all the typos."
Ya' know, I think Sklar is probably correct.
[-Rick-]
Sure you can... offer $25 reward for first reporter of each error. Then every student in the world will be pounding through your book.
"Calculus and Analytic Geometry" by Thomas did that. By the end of first semester there were no more rewards to be claimed ;-)
...Jim Thompson
Could be a lot of money...
If you know you plan to do that, maybe not. :-)
Jerry
At the rate that I generate typos I'm not sure I could swing it. If I had that much money I'd just go ahead and buy a small South American country, anyway.
And TROFF is Typesetter ROFF. There's also GROFF.
Jerry
Anybody else remember DEC Runoff? The name was similar, but I don't think the macros were very similar. But that was so many years ago...
It was known as roff for short. NROFF and TROFF were patterned after it. The macros were dot so much different as not yet standardized. I had several NROFF .ms files for different printers, even one for an early HP inkjet.
Jerry
No kidding? For some reason, I had always thought it was the other way around -- probably just because I used Unix nroff before I used DEC runoff.
Yes. I used a VAX cluster during the 80s and it was my tool of choice on that machine until we obtained Scribe. TeX/LaTeX was also available on it, but I didn't get into it until I bought my first PC in 1988. I remember Nelson Blackman (GTE Government Sytsems) using it for his monthly scientist report.
By the way, I absolutely loved VMS.
I've never used a VAX cluster, but I know a story about one. Since we're totally off topic from an off-topic post, I figure I can digress some more -- right?
I took a multiprocessor class in the late 80's. The class project was to write a program to be benchmarked and run on a single processor, then a multiprocessor system. It was easy the year I did it, because the campus had a brand new Encore computer system with as many National Semi
32-bit micros as you wanted to stuff into it.At any rate, you write your little puzzle solving program on one processor and benchmark the results. Then you obtain access to a multiprocessor system, tweak your code, and benchmark your results again. In theory, with N processors the final answer should come out in
1/N as much time as with one processor -- right?The instructor kept two records. At the time that I took the class the best speedup was something like 99.9% of theoretical, with a hand-built two-processor 8086 system with all dual-port RAM. The most slowdown was on a 4-processor VAX cluster, which would solve the puzzle on a single processor in about 40 minutes. When the hapless programmer tried it with all four, the plug got pulled after 24 hours.
It seems that on a VAX cluster any interprocessor communications that overflows the (small) buffer goes to disk...
It could be a tuning parameter that was mis-tuned. It seems that these DEC systems were very tunable.
I think ours were mainly used for load balancing. It was pretty amazing considering a cluster of 4 vaxes was serving 100+ simultaneous users at times - in ~mid-80s. Try doing that now, even with a 3+ GHz Pentium IV processor.
Shall I also tell about our PDP 11/70s and RSX11-M?
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