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RUNOFF was the first computer text formatting program to see significant use. It was written in 1964 for the CTSS operating system by Jerome H. Saltzer.It actually consisted of a pair of programs, TYPSET (which was basically a document editor), and RUNOFF (the output processor).
RUNOFF had support for pagination and headers, as well as text justification. ( TJ-2 appears to have been the earliest text justification system, but it did not have the other capabilities.)
RUNOFF is a direct predecessor of the runoff document formatting program of Multics, which in turn was the ancestor of the roff and nroff document formatting programs of Unix, and their descendants. It was also the ancestor of FORMAT for the IBM System/360, and of course indirectly for every computerized word processingWord processing in its now-usual meaning, is the use of a word processor to create documents using computers. Word processing can also refer to advanced shorthand techniques, sometimes used in conjunction with specialised keyboards. In this sense of the t system.
The name is alleged to have come from the phrase at the time, I'll run off a document.
Further reading
- Jerome H. Saltzer, TYPSET and RUNOFF: Memorandum editor and type-out commands ( MIT Computation Center CC-244, Project MACProject MAC later the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science LCS , was a research laboratory at MIT. It was one of the most important computer research and development collaborations in computer history, along with the developments at Xerox PARC, Berkeley's MAC-M-193, Cambridge, 1964)
- Jerome H. Saltzer, Manuscript typing and editing: TYPSET, RUNOFF (Section AH.9.01, CTSS Programmer's Guide, Project MAC, Cambridge, 1966)
- Jerome H. Saltzer, Experimental Additions to the RUNOFF Command (Programming Staff Note 40, Project MAC, Cambridge, 1965)
