The System360 Model 20 Wasn't As Bad As All That 3888

The first internal (to Bell Labs) success of Unix was in displacing such a dedicated WP for our patent department.. The system was called Astrotype, it ran on PDP-8, and used 2741s for output. The advantages we offered were mainly two: first, an early nroff was tweaked to provide the somewhat peculiar PTO formatting requirements (in the Description section of a patent, the lines are numbered sequentially by page; in the Claims sections, the lines are numbered from 1 in each claim).

Second, we got Teletype to make us the bulk of the math characters (mainly Greek letters) to put on the upper quadrant of the Model 37 Teletype type box so that everything could be printed all at one go and the typists didn't have to stop and change type balls to a special one with the appropriate symbols.

Later, post Patent dept, we had a series of real typesetters, starting with the GSI C-A-T, which flashed the letters on photo paper from film images, and later one that used a CRT to form the images that exposed the paper.

Other people were doing similar things, but it was clear that the manufacturers weren't yet fully into the computer age. E.g. both the C-A-T and its successor wanted to be run by paper tape and not online.

Dennis