Runoff (program)

The title of this article is incorrect because of technical limitations. The correct title is runoff.

runoff was the text formatting program on the Multics operating system.

It was a descendant of the RUNOFF type-setting program from CTSS and was originally written by Jerome D. Saltzer. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy translated that from MAD assembler to BCPL; they then moved the BCPL version to Multics when the IBM 7094 on which CTSS ran was being shut down.

This runoff code was the ancestor of the machine language roff that was written for the fledgling Unix.

A later version of runoff for Multics was written in PL/I by Dennis Capps, in 1974.