What program IBM used in 1970s and 1980s to prepare, format and typeset those docs??
I know that UNIX crowd usually used something like TROFF or NROFF, then TeX.
But I doubt that IBM didn't have their own software for this task.
IBM did indeed have its own software for this task.? And it made it available to their customers, for a fee, of course.? The core was the IBM "SCRIPT" product,?sold under several names,?but most-lately "Document Composition Facility" (DCF).??
SCRIPT was inspired by the ur-formatter, RUNOFF[1], which ran on MIT's Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS), and goes back to the late 1960s.? Soon afterward, some IBM'ers built a set of SCRIPT macros and a pre-processor to support writing documents in Generalized Markup Language[2].? IBM released that work as the "GML Starter Set" for SCRIPT/VS.? Internally, it continued to develop the markup language and came up with what was eventually?released to customers as "BookMaster", a fully-fledged book composition and formatting system.? The ".BOO" files that we've been discussing were produced as one form of BookManager output (it could also do text-only, fully-typeset, etc.).? IBM also released a set of programs that read those files, called "BookManager", and even a free version called "IBM Library Reader" for OS/2 and Windows, that could read documents specially "stamped" for it.
In the 1990s, as HTML[3] took off, Gary Richtmeyer, of IBM and later AT&T, wrote "B2H", a BookMaster-to-HTML converter that did a great job of putting BookMaster books on the web (from the source form, not the .BOO files).? That code was released freely and runs today just fine on VM/SP and later (I haven't tried it on VM/370 yet), OS/2, Windows, Linux (and other unices), and MVS (and presumably z/OS).
Ross
[1] RUNOFF was also the inspiration for roff,?the original Unix formatter.
[2] GML was the inspiration for XML.
[3] GML was also the inspiration for HTML.
