[texhax] LaTeX in old computer

[John C Frain]

I remember running gTeX in PC DOS on an XT.  It ran just about ok except for
font generation which was painfully slow.  I have used various versions of
TeX since on 80386, and various version of the Pentium processor.  Recently
I have been running the current version of MikteX on a 400 Mh Pentium Pro
with 512 MB RAM (about 9 years old) without any problems.  The initial
install took a lon time but the program runs fast enough.

As gTEX came on floppy disks (about 7)  and it contained a workable system
it was considerably smaller than existing versions of TeX.  The next version
that I used was 3-All-Tex (Perhaps the name is not exact) from the early
90's.  In recent years I have used TeX-Live on a 333Mhz pentium 2 with 278MB
memory,  Tex-Live and ProTex (updated over the web) on the Pentium Pro.  Tex
was usable on all these PCs.






On 01/02/07, Hartmut Henkel <hartmut_henkel at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>
> > It would be more interesting to compare TeX with word processors which
> > provide a comparable output quality.
>
> Mainly the roff family (http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/), and
> scribe (seems to be completely extinct by now) come to the mind. The
> roffs are still rocking, actually more than ever by groff
> (http://groff.ffii.org/) and nroff/troff
> (http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/). Since the seventies they can be used
> also for mathematical typesetting. Some time ago they adopted TeX's
> paragraph alignment algorithm. But while in say 1986 TeX was already
> available on PCs, the roffs were still found only on workstations. They
> have a nice tool/pipe philosophy, different programs chained for tables,
> equations, pictures,... Btw, TeXLive 2007 will contain a script for
> converting pic(groff) generated pictures into something that can be
> further processed by pdftex.
>
> Regards, Hartmut
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-- 
John C Frain
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2
Ireland
www.tcd.ie/Economics/staff/frainj/home.html
mailto:frainj at tcd.ie
mailto:frainj at gmail.com
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