Jeffrey Ullman, Stanford University and Gradience Corporation

Those born after about 1975 cannot imagine the cumbersome process by which formal documents, ranging from business letters to books, were produced. Drafts were hand-written and then typed by a secretary using a typewriter. If corrections were needed, small errors could be handled by erasing or by applying whiteout, followed by typing of the correct words. But length-changing errors required that the entire page be retyped and the error-checking process be repeated. When computers first became widespread in businesses and schools, many people started typing their documents on punch cards. Similar to the cards that were used in the famous Florida vote of 2000, the cards represent letters when you punch out certain holes, creating “chad.”

A document such as a thesis could be typed on cards, fed to the computer, and printed line-for-line on a printer. Early printers were like typewriters, but faster. This arrangement solved the problem of handling small errors, since only one or a few cards would have to be repunched. Several early computer-science students saw the potential for doing better, especially as they confronted the daunting task of typing their PhD theses. In 1964, Jerry Saltzer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created for this purpose a pair of programs: Typeset, which was an early form of a text editor, and Runoff, which was an improved formatting system. Bob Balzer, at Carnegie Mellon University, created software similar to Runoff, called LEAD (List, Edit, and Display), at about the same time. Programs like Runoff and LEAD not only reproduced what was on punch cards, but also formatted the document by placing on one line as many words as would fit, typically a maximum of 80 characters per line. This advance solved the problem of having to retype large amounts of text when words were inserted or deleted. Special commands, which were not part of the text, could be inserted to control matters such as justification, that is, alignment of text on the right, as in a book, as well as on the left.

The Typeset/Runoff system inspired a group of researchers at Bell Laboratories, leading to Joe Ossanna’s NROFF (new runoff) program. A “macro” capability was added to allow repetitive formatting concepts, such as section headers or indented paragraphs, to be defined once and used easily many times. The “MS” macro package by Mike Lesk was widely used as a standard for formatting of text. But the printed output