Presentation Tools Back In The Day

editorshistoryncursesterminal

Which tools were around »back in the day« to aid presentation Unix/Linux environments? I just wondered how somebody would accomplish something like slides in a e.g. text-based environment or low-end graphics environment.

Research has been a little difficult since websites tend to remove outdated / abandoned tools. For instance, my search brought up TPP, the Text Presentation Program, but it is as recent as 2004. It supports

any text
terminal that is supported by ncurses – ranging from an old VT100 to the
Linux framebuffer to an xterm.

This includes…

VT100 Terminal

Which raises the additional question how exactly a computer aided presentation would be held if there are relatively small screens available. After giving TPP a short try, without specifying headlines normal slide content is rendered in default terminal font size which can be as small as 12 point.

I really appreciated comparatively long and exhaustive answers that may consist out of your own experiences.

Best Answer

Not sure if you're asking solely about presentations that were viewed on a terminal or something else controlled by a computer, or were generated via computer, but I'll answer the latter.

Back in the 1970's, most UNIX users created papers and vugraphs and man pages using troff, which was both a markup language and a program to translate that markup language into a format that could be used by printers. nroff was a version of troff that took the same input language, but its output consisted of fixed-width ASCII characters. In many cases, it was sufficient for someone preparing a presentation to use nroff, print the resulting document on a lineprinter (with fanfold paper), then use a photocopier to copy it onto ordinary paper or vugraph material.

Documents that needed to have multiple fonts were sent to phototypesetters and, later, laser printers. At Bell Labs, for instance, troff would send its output, using lpr, to a GCOS system in a large comp center that drove a phototypesetter. lpr used the GECOS field in /etc/passwd, which contained one's name and other identifying data (such as department and bin number) so that the job could be billed and routed appropriately.

A set of tools grew up around troff/nroff, including the tbl preprocessor to format tables and the eqn preprocessor to format mathematical equations. Since the troff language was rather low-level (for instance, to know when to output a footer, you had to set a trap using .wh ("when") that would be activated when the output was, say, 10.5 inches from the top of the current page), macro packages such as ms and mm were written to make writing the markup easier.

ditroff was a followon to troff that could handle additional types of printers (such as Postscript laser printers); it separated troff (and nroff) into a front end and a variety of device-dependent back ends, connected with a pipe.

Related Question