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

[microcode at zoho.com]

On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 11:08:30AM -0500, John Francini wrote:
> 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 Kossow???s terrific archive of documentation, including the DECsystem-10/DECSYSTEM-20 software notebooks. However, alas, the Software Notebooks sets in the archive don???t include the original RUNOFF documentation. 
> 
> There???s 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 ??? 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 happened???
> 
> john
> 

Thanks for the notes and interesting history. I believe it was indeed RUNOFF
or some variant. From a quick look around on the net the samples I saw look
like what I remembered. The OS I used it on was TOPS-20 but I have no idea
which version. Would have been circa 1982/83 probably.