Jim Hall, the founder of the FreeDOS project, worked for a week in Linux using only the commands available 50 years ago in Unix 4th edition. He compiled a Fortran 66 program, edited and formatted a document with ed and nroff, and more. This series of posts reports on his experiment:
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Great experiment! One thing to arrange (somehow) is to disable line editing and completion on the command line.
Working with ed should be a great intro to using sed at some later point in evolution!
Here’s the output of the nroff as I reran his experiment:
And here’s the rendered postscript from groff (presumably close to what troff would have produced back in the day)
I did some nroff experiments with Coherent back in the early 1990s and what I took away is the -ms macro package is reasonably simple and intuitive to use.
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