[rescue] [off-topic] What was this markup language?

John Francini francini at mac.com
Tue Dec 8 10:08:30 CST 2015


Old DEC-10/20 user (and developer) here.  Yes, that was RUNOFF. I wrote many a
paper in it for college in the late 1970s. Far better than typing on a manual
typewriter.

The DEC-10/20 version was a predecessor to things like DSR (DEC Standard
Runoff).

I was going to point you to Al Kossowbs terrific archive of documentation,
including the DECsystem-10/DECSYSTEM-20 software notebooks. However, alas, the
Software Notebooks sets in the archive donbt include the original RUNOFF
documentation.

Therebs a reference to the RUNOFF document in the Dec-10 Notebooks master
table of contents from June 1975, but some time between then and the end of
development DEC gave the original RUNOFF to DECUS (the DEC user community, the
descendant of which still exists as COMPASS).

As a secondary note, the DECUS tape images for the DECsystem-10/20 appear to
be missing from the archive b they were there some years back. And since I
(personally) made the final set of master tapes of the DECsystem-10 DECUS
library from the master pack, I need to contact the archivist and find out
what happenedb&

john


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