[dboreham]

Very interesting also for insight into "what were they trying to do?". In several cases this was actually "facilitate printing bell labs technical papers without paying a printing company". Also interesting that the first part of Unix to be developed, and it was done as a stand alone project not with the goal to become a full OS, was the filesystem.

[foobarian]

It's amazing how much of modern computing infrastructure was inspired by printers. Richard Stallman's almost entire life's work comes to mind.

[giantrobot]

Consider big companies before departmental printers. A memo would be typed and then have to go to the reprographics department for copies or typing pool. Anything more complex than a memo would need to go to an outside printer to be typeset and printed.

So you're looking at hours to days (weeks in the case of technical documentation) turn around time. All the labor was also very expensive.

Departmental printing could cut the turn around time to minutes or hours and reduce the manual labor significantly. This got cheaper and more accessible with desktop printing.

While e-mail is often abused anymore it's much more manageable than the reams of paper even relatively small companies had to deal with just to communicate internally.

[macintux]

And laser printing was a key factor in the Mac’s early success.

[smhenderson]

And now a favorite goal of small/medium business is to use computers to go completely paperless.

[pjmlp]

That was never the goal of UNIX per se, rather the way Dennis and Richtie managed to get hold of funding and management support to keep going at it.

> When the Computing Sciences Research Center wanted to use Unix on a machine larger than the PDP-7, while another department needed a word processor, Thompson and Ritchie added text processing capabilities to Unix and received funding for a PDP-11/20.[5] For the first time in 1970, the Unix operating system was officially named and ran on the PDP-11/20. A text-formatting program called roff and a text editor were added. All three were written in PDP-11/20 assembly language. Bell Labs used this initial text-processing system, consisting of Unix, roff, and the editor, for text processing of patent applications. Roff soon evolved into troff, the first electronic publishing program with full typesetting capability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix

[dboreham]

True, but if you read Brian's book, he provides more details and color: nroff was the first real Unix application, and the first PDP-11 was purchased by the patent dept on the understanding that the Unix group would develop nroff. roff pre-dates Unix and didn't have the capabilities required by the patent group (automatically add line numbers to printed documents).