Talk:Text Executive Programming Language

There are very few references in existence for the Text Executive processor developed by Honeywell around 1979. The only documents I have on it are the TEX Quick Reference and my old TEX programs. The TeX Book by Donald Knuth mentions it in passing (see pg 1 in the book) as his choice of TeX for his typesetting system conflicted with the copyrighting of the name TEX in all caps by Honeywell Information Systems.

In actuality, TEX programs were named mypgm.tex and were run with the TSS command: tex mypgm.tex which is very similar to the TeX of Donald Knuth. Also TEX programs were a collection of line editing commands (ie your tex program could do some programmatic line editing ala text processing). Some programmers used it to rewrite documents for document processing so that the runoff command could generate a pretty printed document (although much more primitive than Knuth's TeX).

To my knowledge, this writeup is the only publicly available information on the lost TEX programming language.

So please don't mark this document for deletion because the references are so few.

Bob Bemer was the key proponent of it and I suspect he may have named it TEX because of its obvious text editing capabilities and more personally because he was a Texan. Some of the TEX libraries were stored in the TEXAS catalog (what directories were called in Honeywell TimeSharing System) which strengthens that suspicion.

He also had some references to it on his personal website that were never fully completed before he passed on. I have included these in my References section. I also found that some universities keep old computer magazines for reference and so I'm trying to track down the Interface Age articles on TEX written by Bob Bemer Jedishrfu 05:28, 9 November 2007 (UTC) Jedishrfu 06:06, 11 November 2007 (UTC) Eric Clamons actually came up with the name, Text Executive. I have copies of the Interface Age articles... I'll be glad to provide them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by RichardKeys (talk • contribs) 16:22, 16 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Proper formatting style

The word "TEX" does not need to be bolded in every single sentence. -- œ^™ 05:04, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]