The TeX mascot, by Duane Bibby TEX, written as TeX in plain text, is a typesetting system written by Donald Knuth. It is popular in academia, especially in the mathematics, physics and computer science communities. It has largely displaced Unix troff, the other favored formatter, in many Unix installations.
TeX is generally considered to be the best way to typeset complex mathematical formulas, but, especially in the form of LaTeX and other template packages, is now also being used for many other typesetting tasks. It can be used to compose mathematical expressions on Wikipedia pages; see .
1 History
Knuth began to write TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental The Art of Computer Programming. In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about eight years. The language was finally frozen around 1985.
Guy Steele happened to be at Stanford during the summer of 1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX. When he returned to MITMotto Mens et Manus ("mind and hand") Established 1861 School type Private President Charles Vest (successor Susan Hockfield to take office in December 2004) Location Cambridge, Mass. USA Enrollment 4,112 undergraduate, 6,228 graduate Faculty 974 Campus U that fall, he rewrote TeX's I/O to run under ITSITS the Incompatible Timesharing System was an early, revolutionary, and influential MIT time-sharing operating system; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC. ITS development was ini.
The first version of TeX was written in the SAIL programming languageSAIL the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language was developed by Dan Swinehart and Sproull of the Stanford AI Lab in 1970. It was originally a large ALGOL 60-like language for the DEC-10 and DEC-20. SAIL's main feature is a symbolic data system based u to run on a PDP-10The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of under Stanford'sFor other meanings of Stanford see Stanford (disambiguation). Stanford University is a privately funded university in Stanford, California. It is located approximately 35 miles southeast of San Francisco, in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County ad WAITSWAITS was a heavily modified variant of the Digital Equipment Corporation's TOPS-10 operating system for the PDP-10 mainframe computer, used at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) up until 1990; the mainframe computer it ran on also wen operating system. For later versions of TeX, Knuth invented the concept of literate programmingLiterate programming is the writing of computer programs in the form of documents designed for casual human reading, similar to a work of literature; hence the name "literate programming. Documentation and source code are written into one source file., a way of producing compilable source code and high quality cross-linked documentation (typeset in TeX of course) from the same original file. The language used is called WEB and produces programs in Pascal.
TeX has an idiosyncratic version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. Knuth has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to π, at which point all remaining bugs will become features.
