[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[Paul Sture]

In article <kejjpv$lu9$1 at dont-email.me>,
 David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:

> Paul Sture wrote:
> > In article <an0qmpFduj7U4 at mid.individual.net>,
> >  billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> > 
> >> Just out of curiosity, I just looked at a couple of manpages on a
> >> FreeBSD system and none of them exhibited this straight-right-margin
> >> of which you speak.
> > 
> > uname -sr
> > FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p1
> > man bash
> > 
> > DESCRIPTION
> >   Bash  is  an  sh-compatible  command language interpreter that executes
> >   commands read from the standard input or from a file.  Bash also incor-
> >   porates useful features from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh).
> > 
> >   Bash  is  intended  to  be a conformant implementation of the Shell and
> >   Utilities portion  of  the  IEEE  POSIX  specification  (IEEE  Standard
> >   1003.1).  Bash can be configured to be POSIX-conformant by default.
> > 
> > (edited to strip first 5 spaces of each line to avoid wrapping in this 
> > post)
> > 
> > Note how multiple spaces are distributed along the lines to get right 
> > justification.
> > 
> 
> This is just "good intentions" with a "bad result".  I'm guessing the 
> goal was to make the page look uniform and such.  But the cost ended up 
> being harder to read.

Digital Standard Runoff aka DSR could do this too, but sometimes I would 
find myself rephrasing paragraphs so they didn't look stupid, which 
could easily happen if you used several long words on one line.

I really impressed my new boss in 1982 by writing him a memo generated 
by DSR (this involved reversing the green lined paper on an 11/750 LA 
console and folding the paper down to A4 size, then a photocopier on the 
result, but it got the result I wanted).

I used DSR for several years after that when writing reports for 
customers about what I had done to their systems.  The advantage of DSR 
was that it was on every VMS system I came across.

It was great when the idea of word processing for everyone hadn't yet 
caught on.

-- 
Paul Sture