if you read kernighan's book (he was there man) about the history of unix or whatever, it's quite a lovely read and talks a lot about the motivations and origins of unix, and hopefully some new unix tools for even the experienced unixbeard. anyway, if you read that book, it's quite clear that quite a bit of effort was made at bell labs for technology related to printing and typesetting. I think it is from this for example ken thompson was famous for being like "I'm going to rewrite this firmware" in the afternoon, and knowing nothing of the architecutre or anything, had a firmware by that evening. I mean that's pretty sick speed.

Ok, we've changed to that from http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/book.pdf above. Thanks!