TJ-2

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TJ-2

Memo: TJ-2: Type Justifying Program
Author: Peter Samson
Initial release: May 1963
Platform: PDP-1
Use: Page layout
Website: PDP-1 Restoration Project

Type Justifying Program called TJ-2 was published by Peter Samson in May 1963 and is thought to be the first page layout program. Although it lacks page numbers, headers and footers, TJ-2 is the first application software and word processor to offer all of the features needed to indent, center, word wrap, justify, and hyphenate text, to simulate tabs, and to create two columns, page breaks and margins.

DEC PDP-1 image courtesy Computer History Museum
DEC PDP-1 image courtesy Computer History Museum

Developed from earlier Samson programs, Justify[1] and TJ-1[2], TJ-2 was written for the PDP-1 that was donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1961 by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Taking English text as input, TJ-2 aligns left and right margins, justifying the output using white space and word hyphenation. Text is marked up with single lowercase characters combined with the PDP-1's overline character, carriage returns and internal concise codes. The computer's six toggle switches control the input and output devices, enable and disable hyphenation and stop the session. Words can be hyphenated with a light pen on the computer's CRT display and from the session's dictionary in memory. On-screen hyphenation has SAVE and FORGET commands and OOPS, the undo.

Comments in the code were quoted thirty years later: "The ways of God are just and can be justified to man"[3] and "Girls [sic] who wear pants should be sure that the end justifies the jeans."[4]

The successors to TJ-2 include RUNOFF and TYPSET written in 1964 for the CTSS operating system[5], runoff for Multics, and nroff and troff for Unix.[6]

  1. ^ Budne, Phil (undated). Phil's PDP10 Miscellany Page. Retrieved on July 1, 2006.
  2. ^ Furuta, Richard (March 1992). "Important papers in the history of document preparation systems: basic sources". Electronic Publishing, Volume 5: 29. 
  3. ^ An allusion to or quotation of the lines from the opening invocation of Milton's Paradise Lost, "What in me is dark Illumine/what is low raise and support;/That to the highth of this great Argument/I may assert th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men."[1]
  4. ^ Smith, Daniel P. B. (1995). "Re: world's worst comment". alt.folklore.computers. (Google Groups). Retrieved on [[2006-07-02]].
  5. ^ Saltzer, J. (reissued 15 December 1966). CTSS Programmer's Guide. Retrieved on Error: invalid time.
  6. ^ Barger, Jorn (5 June 1998). "Re: world's worst comment". alt.folklore.computers. (Google Groups). Retrieved on [[2006-07-02]].

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.