Old PCsenvironmental hazard 3248

The core philosophy of Unix is that of a toolbox.

A toolbox contains the tools required by a tradesman. It doesn't have to contain anything else.

easily combined to make tools for specific tasks as required by the user. Those who made the standard tools, don't have any idea about the eventual application of the newly-forged tool. They just follow some simple rules one how stuff hangs together...

I think you've grabbed the wrong straw out of the haystack. The ancestor to the Documenters Workbench was the ermmm "excuse" for putting development time into Unix at Bell Labs.

For the first 15 years of my Unix usage, I didn't do any "native" document processing other than looking up the online manual pages. Nor would anybody else on the first system I installed because the document processing stuff was kept to the bare minimum of just the manual pages and what it took to format-display them.

I used the system to build applications. See if you can find the straw labelled "Programmers Workbench" (or similar).

Of course, most people got Unix systems for business because the core operating system was robust and relatively efficient while providing a standard programming interface regardless of hardware architecture. This meant that database engines and their applications were a big driver to getting Unix into businesses; much moreso than document processing.

Unix has always been a general-purpose system.

There's a lot of the philosophy of Unix embedded between the covers. -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign "Laws do not persuade just because X against HTML mail they threaten." and postings Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4BC - 65AD.