TJ-2
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Type Justifying Program called TJ-2 was published by Peter Samson in May 1963 and is thought to be the first page layout program. Although it lacks page numbers, headers and footers, TJ-2 is the first application software and word processor to offer all of the features needed to indent, center, word wrap, justify, and hyphenate text, to simulate tabs, and to create two columns, page breaks and margins.
Developed from earlier Samson programs, Justify[1] and TJ-1[2], TJ-2 was written for the PDP-1 that was donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 by Digital Equipment Corporation.
Taking English text as input, TJ-2 aligns left and right margins, justifying the output using white space and word hyphenation. Text is marked up with single lowercase characters combined with the PDP-1's overline character, carriage returns and internal concise codes. The computer's six toggle switches control the input and output devices, enable and disable hyphenation and stop the session. Words can be hyphenated with a light pen on the computer's CRT display and from the session's dictionary in memory. On-screen hyphenation has SAVE and FORGET commands and OOPS, the undo.
Comments in the code were quoted thirty years later: "The ways of God are just and can be justified to man"[3] and "Girls [sic] who wear pants should be sure that the end justifies the jeans."[4]
The successors to TJ-2 include RUNOFF and TYPSET written in 1964 for the CTSS operating system[5], runoff for Multics, and nroff and troff for Unix.[6]
[edit] References
- Smith, Daniel P. B. (1997). TJ-2: A Very Early Word Processor. Retrieved on 2006-07-02. Transcription of the 1963 memo describing TJ-2, with annotations by Daniel P. B. Smith
- Samson, Peter. (2006). The Mouse That Roared: PDP-1 Celebration Event Lecture 05.15.06 Mountain View, CA, USA: Computer History Museum.. Samson begins at 1:16.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Budne, Phil (undated). Phil's PDP10 Miscellany Page. Retrieved on 2006-07-01.
- ^ Furuta, Richard (March 1992). "Important papers in the history of document preparation systems: basic sources". Electronic Publishing, Volume 5: 29.
- ^ An allusion to or quotation of the lines from the opening invocation of Milton's Paradise Lost, "What in me is dark Illumine/what is low raise and support;/That to the highth of this great Argument/I may assert th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men."[1]
- ^ Smith, Daniel P. B. (1995). "Re: world's worst comment". alt.folklore.computers. (Google Groups). Retrieved on [[2006-07-02]].
- ^ Saltzer, J. (reissued 15 December 1966). CTSS Programmer's Guide. Retrieved on [[2006-07-02]].
- ^ Barger, Jorn (5 June 1998). "Re: world's worst comment". alt.folklore.computers. (Google Groups). Retrieved on [[2006-07-02]].
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