In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the old manual online at http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html with some modern annotations. This PUB was influential in at least two ways:
- It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for The Art of Computer Programming on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real" digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf
- Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here: https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/...
Here's an 8-minute video of him accepting an award at a SAIL reunion (I think) for his work on PUB: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949 (with some audience comments by John McCarthy and a joke by Knuth).
- It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for The Art of Computer Programming on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real" digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf
- Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here: https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/...
Here's an 8-minute video of him accepting an award at a SAIL reunion (I think) for his work on PUB: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949 (with some audience comments by John McCarthy and a joke by Knuth).