[HN Gopher] Manual for PUB (a markup language in 1971) - Larry T...
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       Manual for PUB (a markup language in 1971) - Larry Tesler
        
       Author : fanf2
       Score  : 64 points
       Date   : 2024-11-15 09:42 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nomodes.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nomodes.com)
        
       | robin_reala wrote:
       | _The cover image is a Hieronymous Bosch woodcut of an English
       | pub._
       | 
       | I'm not sure the author has seen the rest of Hieronymous Bosch's
       | oeuvre.
       | 
       | Edit: seems I phrased this badly, my point was that a Georgian
       | woodcut circa 1810 is unlikely to be from Bosch (1450 - 1516).
        
         | mitchbob wrote:
         | Larry was a worldly guy with wide-ranging interests. Were you
         | thinking that if he knew about The Garden of Earthly Delights
         | he wouldn't have chosen a woodcut of a pub for the PUB manual?
         | Bosch has been thought of as a heretic [1] and that could have
         | been part of the appeal for Larry, who pushed against
         | orthodoxies throughout his career.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#Interpretatio...
        
         | shrubble wrote:
         | Doesn't really seem out of the ordinary; even in high school in
         | the 1980s the Bosch paintings were well-known.
        
           | rjsw wrote:
           | ... from album covers.
        
         | The-Old-Hacker wrote:
         | This 2020 document says that it's a "cut-and-paste" from a
         | Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) woodcut print. Which seems much
         | more likely.
         | https://www.saildart.org/simple/booklet/SAILDART_PREVIEW_202...
        
       | EternalFury wrote:
       | The irony is that this rendered pretty poorly on my phone. Ignore
       | me, though, as I like the idea.
        
       | pmkary wrote:
       | Pub getting attention made my day. I wondered how everyone forgot
       | about it and how no one ever mentioned that it actually gave
       | birth to TeX and Web. Good job hacker news
        
         | throwaway81523 wrote:
         | troff (1972) and eqn (1974) also existed. I don't know if they
         | were influenced by PUB. SCRIPT (1968)[1] had macros but it's
         | unclear whether they were present at the beginning or added
         | later. RUNOFF (ancestor of troff) doesn't appear to have had
         | macros. I've heard that Forth documentation was produced using
         | a formatter written in Forth, that let the user switch between
         | documet text and Forth code, but idk the dates or specific for
         | this.
         | 
         | Anyway I'm sure PUB was influential but the idea of markup
         | languages with macros certainly wasn't unique to it.
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup)
        
       | throwaway81523 wrote:
       | "The PDP-10 operating system was TENEX, later called TOPS-10."
       | (PUB manual, page 2).
       | 
       | What.
        
         | kps wrote:
         | Should be "The PDP-10 operating system was TENEX, later called
         | TOPS-20", no?
        
           | throwaway81523 wrote:
           | Um no.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-15 23:01 UTC)