@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Yep - with a custom kernel that had support for usb storage devices back ported into it. Building the kernel was a nightmare as the MIPS CPU meant the defaults were all for SGI systems.
oh damn, someone who used it professionally. absolutely fascinating, what was performance like back then? i know its pretty shit nowadays but its been 24 years
@@genderender I'll see if I can get it fired up over the weekend and run my thesis through it. I don't remember it being annoyingly slow, but then when I was at uni all the paperwork (including departmental memos) was done in LaTeX on a VAX 11/780, so even a 33MHz PC seemed blazingly fast. Installing was a real pain in the early days though, when you had to run Knuth's TeX source code through web2c to get something you could actually run a compiler on. I'd say the experience was not as bad as building X Windows, but better than gcc - unless you had to build cross-compiler support in that (at one time I was expected to provide a SPARC-based version of gcc that would produce m68k executables for a lab full of Atari TTs). Happy days.
It's not "Tecks" and it isn't "Tek" either. "Insiders pronounce the χ of TEX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’, so that TEX rhymes with the word blecchhh. It’s the ‘ch’ sound in Scottish words like loch or German words like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist." - The TEXbook
I keep trying to explain the virtues of LaTeX to classmates in my engineering labs. It's a skill I also learned in the 90s and going back to school 30 years later, it's still hands-down the best tool for dealing with equations. I also use a LaTeX plugin for Discord to make talking about classwork easier.
I used an Atari ST together with Origami, a folding text editor (folding helps a lot in managing large LaTeX documents) and LaTeX to write my physics diploma thesis back in those days. The 70Hz monochrome black-and-white monitor of the Atari was perfect for this. And LaTeX has everything you need to write a scientific paper or thesis, with all the complicated math in it. The thesis topic was hard, but writing it was so easy.
1:20 Knuth is indeed _very_ clear about the pronunciation and yet you say it with a /kʰ/. That would actually match the Attic Greek pronunciation of τέχνη, but yet again, Knuth is very clear he means the later, Koine Greek and modern Greek way of saying it. edit: Still, thanks for the nice video! I have not expected LaTeX to run on 80s microcomputers. (Most distributions are gigabytes in size nowadays… And it was originally made for mainframes right?)
This for me is where the ST shines with its hi Res mode. The Amiga (my machine of choice of the time) couldn't touch this feature which opened up a slew of application possibilities that demanded crisp hi fidelity without a flicker to give you a fit
An Amiga with the ECS or AGA chipset could also display a similar screenmode, but you needed a monitor that could display it; e.g. a multisync monitor... With the OCS chipset one could add a scandoubler/flickerfixer to achieve the same result. One could also use an A2024 monitor for a flickerfree monochrome/grayscale experience.
I loved the mono monitor, it was pretty much like looking at paper and ink. I use Mono mode through a VGA adapter these days and it's far from flicker free!
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit I still have my Atari ST Mega 2 connected to a Samsung LED monitor using a VGA cable/adapter and the picture is flickerfree.
I knew the ST had LateX but never really used it until university by which point I'd moved onto Linux/x86. That said the Falcon used to hang off a SL/IP connection of my main box and I often had my email (PINE) open on it. I never thought to have it render my fourth year project. :)
It took an st 4 minutes to process a 200 page book.. And a state of the art website running on servers a million times faster than an Atari, about 20 seconds? So much for efficient coding.
True, but that includes the time to load and render the page in a PDF viewer in javascript. THings being slower back in the day, was I think an advantage. It forced you to concentrate on the content in the editor, rather than seeking the gratification of seeing the pretty version.
apart from the difference spent sending the data over the net (a pdf is not small) and rendering it, TeX is horribly inefficient by standard of today's computers. It was made for (and on) the slow, low memory machines of the 70s and 80s and has not received any updates since… the early 90s or so. Especially the memory constraint was difficult because fonts can be huge, so tex still does a lot of swapping around its limited number of internal registers - which would not be necessary on a modern machine with multiple GB RAM. And it uses auxiliary files (for references, toc etc.) as a sort of swap (also not necessary today). All of which mean there's a non-negligible overhead for each tex-invocation. It also is not parallelizable. That said, I haven't tested it but I'd guess over 90% of those 20s are the fault of the online nature of overleaf.
Actually the thinner margin side of a twoside document is where the binding should be. It is supposed to give even gaps among the three margins: left of text, between the pages, and right of the text. Additional allowance can be added for any paper lost to binding
I installed your image with Geneva Neodesk etc on my (real hardware) STE. I'm not sure why I don't have a neodesk control panel and can't get my accessories to show. Otherwise it's nice. Also Can Warp9 load with NVDI? Thank you for these videos and your images. I'm really enjoying having my ST up and running in a way my ST never did when I was using it in high school.
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Yes, they are all in that directory. there is an acc that loads first named ACC. when I don't load it, everything works. What does it do?
Still have my copy of the Lamport book, and occasionally use LaTeX for documents at work. Great system that has sadly fallen out of use, as too many people try and use word processors for desktop publishing.
If you watched as far as the part on overleaf.com, it's not really dead. I only dedicated a minute to it, but in that system you collaberate with multiple editors, submit you paper for peer review and even final submission for publication. It's pretty awesome.
Absolutely - there are still people using it, especially for science papers. But I used to work for several journal publishers, and we had a big problem with people submitting MS Word documents even though we stated clearly that articles must be submitted in formats like LaTeX or SGML.
Considering that the 68k alone appears to be roughly on par with a midrange 80286 (give or take), I find the performance highly impressive. I also didn't expect the preview to work as well as it did, half-anticipated that you'd still have to physically print out a page to see what you're getting or wait for a page to draw in an achingly slow pace from top to botom.
I used LaTe`X on an ST for years for reports, dissertations and a thesis. It was plenty fast enough and I couldn't afford a PC at that time in my life.
I write stuff in LaTeX not because it's less annoying than wysiwyg, but because it's annoying in a different way, one that I can manage much, much better. Anyone else feeling the same?
Not this internet archive, but I've put them on my old blog site here if you want them www.overtakenbyevents.com/MultiTex-for-the-Atari-ST-Floppy-Images/
I edit Indian philosophy books, some ~800 pages long, in (lua)LaTeX. I was 8yo in 1992, and knowing I would still know (roughly) how to edit it back then gives a cozy feeling of continuity.
25 minutes to install a latex distro on an atari? not too shabby honestly. still takes my arch linux computer like 5-10 minutes to download and install texlive and the install is easily half of that. still orders of magnitude larger, but this is all far more impressive than i expected
I use the MiKTeX disptro on my mac. It only downloads the bits you use. so if you add a new package there's a slight delay while it's downloaded and configured. But my MiKTeX is only 178MB, i mean huge compared to the ST but tiny by today's standards. Other distros are kitchen sink ones ans weigh in, in the Gigabytes range.
I really don't know, that's an interesting question. For maths you can type \a, \b, \c for alpha, beta, gamma etc. But for normal text input I don't know.
@@CFalcon030 I can't speak about the early 90s and this AtariST distribution of LaTeX, but when I started using LaTeX in the early 2000s on GNU/Linux, XeTeX and TeX Live with its unicode and truetype/opentype font support was not a thing yet. We had teTeX with the original LaTeX implementation which supported metafont and postscript Type1 fonts and only 8-bit extended ASCII text. In that environment for Greek text you had to write in iso8859-7 and insert \selectlanguage{greek} and \selectlanguage{english} at every transition to let LaTeX know how to interpret the following text. I used to define custom commands \eng and \greek like so: "\providecommand{\eng}[0]{\selectlanguage{english}}" and the greek equivalent, to make language switching a bit less verbose. There was a high quality greek type 1 font, made for use with LaTeX by the University of Aegean if I remember correctly called "kerkis" which looked great when the DVI was converted to postscript and PDF.
nice to see LaTeX and TeX running on classic hardware! Looks 99% identical to my 2024 linux tex shell (texlive). The modern web version is a disservice, or made for special schools. ;) Get the real command line on your own computer!
do you mean the texlive distribution or is it a seperate shell? I'd appreciate a link as it sounds interesting. I agree with the command line bit, i did have a makefile for my dissertation LaTeX project, the nice thing about Gemini was the integrated console.
@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit the tex shell is defined in a single file tex-mode.el. The tex shell really is just an emacs buffer. But it reminds us that the tex command can be used interactively, and working with its output is useful for finding subtleties, errors and jumping back to lines of interest in the tex file at hand. Tex mode is simple and good, for me at least. Auctex is another fine option for this editor and many seem to prefer it, and I do like for instance its ingenious Reftex for handling of references, but the simplicity of tex-mode.el comes to me.
Well that's because he was proof reading the draft and not happy. It's also why TeX v1 came out in 1978! this kind of covers it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
I used the apple equivilent, but as a long time ST user, i have a slight grasp of german UIs because so much of the best software for the ST was created in Germany.
LOL Just because one guy who wrote a program says tex is pronounced tech does not make it so. It's just like Linux Gnome users pronouncing the G just because the makers say it's meant to be. Nope, the few people do not get to change the rules of English just to be trendy. Pronounce the word as latex because that's what it is! 😛
@@belstar1128 Actually, the GIF image format was created by a consortium of companies working together. There is no single creator. The misquote comes from one of the team leaders trying to make people say it as jif but the majority of the team called it gif as in gift. Majority rules 😉
uh ... it's not an English "ecks" it's a Chi, if you've read anything about TeX you'd know that. If you want to time travel to ancient Greece and argue with those guys have at it.
I've uploaded the install floppy images for MultiTeX to my old blog page
www.overtakenbyevents.com/MultiTex-for-the-Atari-ST-Floppy-Images/
Always fun to see someone back in the day buying the best LaTeX book out there and having the store receipt for it... "The LaTeX Companion".
In the mid 2000s I used to prepare all my lecture notes in LaTeX running on a PlayStation 2.
Was that under linux? They removed support for that when they brought out the PS2 Slim I think.
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Yep - with a custom kernel that had support for usb storage devices back ported into it. Building the kernel was a nightmare as the MIPS CPU meant the defaults were all for SGI systems.
The hard drive bay takes up nearly half the original PS2 chassis, so it's not surprising they dropped the Linux kit for the slim version.
oh damn, someone who used it professionally. absolutely fascinating, what was performance like back then? i know its pretty shit nowadays but its been 24 years
@@genderender I'll see if I can get it fired up over the weekend and run my thesis through it. I don't remember it being annoyingly slow, but then when I was at uni all the paperwork (including departmental memos) was done in LaTeX on a VAX 11/780, so even a 33MHz PC seemed blazingly fast.
Installing was a real pain in the early days though, when you had to run Knuth's TeX source code through web2c to get something you could actually run a compiler on. I'd say the experience was not as bad as building X Windows, but better than gcc - unless you had to build cross-compiler support in that (at one time I was expected to provide a SPARC-based version of gcc that would produce m68k executables for a lab full of Atari TTs).
Happy days.
It's not "Tecks" and it isn't "Tek" either. "Insiders pronounce the χ of TEX as a Greek chi, not as an ‘x’, so that TEX rhymes with the word blecchhh. It’s the ‘ch’ sound in Scottish words like loch or German words like ach; it’s a Spanish ‘j’ and a Russian ‘kh’. When you say it correctly to your computer, the terminal may become slightly moist." - The TEXbook
I keep trying to explain the virtues of LaTeX to classmates in my engineering labs. It's a skill I also learned in the 90s and going back to school 30 years later, it's still hands-down the best tool for dealing with equations. I also use a LaTeX plugin for Discord to make talking about classwork easier.
I didn't know about LaTeX plugins for discord, very interesting!
Brilliant video, very interesting ! The environment looked very workable. Thanks for making such great videos :)
I'm pretty shocked at how well this video did out of the gate. I was expecting a low view count. Proves you can never know on UA-cam
I used an Atari ST together with Origami, a folding text editor (folding helps a lot in managing large LaTeX documents) and LaTeX to write my physics diploma thesis back in those days. The 70Hz monochrome black-and-white monitor of the Atari was perfect for this. And LaTeX has everything you need to write a scientific paper or thesis, with all the complicated math in it. The thesis topic was hard, but writing it was so easy.
Thanks for reminding me about origami. I’d forgotten all about it. It was a really good programmers editor too.
So Latex is the precursor to Markdown?
1:20 Knuth is indeed _very_ clear about the pronunciation and yet you say it with a /kʰ/. That would actually match the Attic Greek pronunciation of τέχνη, but yet again, Knuth is very clear he means the later, Koine Greek and modern Greek way of saying it.
edit: Still, thanks for the nice video! I have not expected LaTeX to run on 80s microcomputers. (Most distributions are gigabytes in size nowadays… And it was originally made for mainframes right?)
This for me is where the ST shines with its hi Res mode. The Amiga (my machine of choice of the time) couldn't touch this feature which opened up a slew of application possibilities that demanded crisp hi fidelity without a flicker to give you a fit
An Amiga with the ECS or AGA chipset could also display a similar screenmode, but you needed a monitor that could display it; e.g. a multisync monitor...
With the OCS chipset one could add a scandoubler/flickerfixer to achieve the same result.
One could also use an A2024 monitor for a flickerfree monochrome/grayscale experience.
I loved the mono monitor, it was pretty much like looking at paper and ink. I use Mono mode through a VGA adapter these days and it's far from flicker free!
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit I still have my Atari ST Mega 2 connected to a Samsung LED monitor using a VGA cable/adapter and the picture is flickerfree.
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit It really was a thing of beauty
I knew the ST had LateX but never really used it until university by which point I'd moved onto Linux/x86. That said the Falcon used to hang off a SL/IP connection of my main box and I often had my email (PINE) open on it. I never thought to have it render my fourth year project. :)
See you young whipper snapers, with your fancy x86 boxes, didn't know you were born :-) Now Latex on a Falcon, i'll have to try that out in Hatari.
It took an st 4 minutes to process a 200 page book.. And a state of the art website running on servers a million times faster than an Atari, about 20 seconds? So much for efficient coding.
True, but that includes the time to load and render the page in a PDF viewer in javascript. THings being slower back in the day, was I think an advantage. It forced you to concentrate on the content in the editor, rather than seeking the gratification of seeing the pretty version.
The Atari ST had no ads to process and render. 90% of the present processing power is used only to make your life more miserabe.
apart from the difference spent sending the data over the net (a pdf is not small) and rendering it, TeX is horribly inefficient by standard of today's computers. It was made for (and on) the slow, low memory machines of the 70s and 80s and has not received any updates since… the early 90s or so. Especially the memory constraint was difficult because fonts can be huge, so tex still does a lot of swapping around its limited number of internal registers - which would not be necessary on a modern machine with multiple GB RAM. And it uses auxiliary files (for references, toc etc.) as a sort of swap (also not necessary today). All of which mean there's a non-negligible overhead for each tex-invocation.
It also is not parallelizable.
That said, I haven't tested it but I'd guess over 90% of those 20s are the fault of the online nature of overleaf.
@@Paul-vi3on everything written in those days is a lot more efficient with the exception of optimizations concerning parallelism.
Absolutely bonkers what you could do with 512kB of RAM in 1992.
nowadays you can't even do this with 512mb on a modern os
Actually the thinner margin side of a twoside document is where the binding should be. It is supposed to give even gaps among the three margins: left of text, between the pages, and right of the text. Additional allowance can be added for any paper lost to binding
Yes, i stuffed that one up, apologies.
I installed your image with Geneva Neodesk etc on my (real hardware) STE. I'm not sure why I don't have a neodesk control panel and can't get my accessories to show. Otherwise it's nice. Also Can Warp9 load with NVDI? Thank you for these videos and your images. I'm really enjoying having my ST up and running in a way my ST never did when I was using it in high school.
glad you having fun. in that build iirc the accessories are put in the c:\gemsys\accs folder. did you put them there?
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Yes I got them to load by , not running the ACC program at load. Why is there a control panel and neodesk cp?
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Yes, they are all in that directory. there is an acc that loads first named ACC. when I don't load it, everything works. What does it do?
@DeadCat-42 it loads accessories from an alternative folder. If it works without it. Then you’re good.
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Thank you. I built a TF 536, I'm just getting ready to test it. How do I load into the upper fast RAM?
Still have my copy of the Lamport book, and occasionally use LaTeX for documents at work. Great system that has sadly fallen out of use, as too many people try and use word processors for desktop publishing.
If you watched as far as the part on overleaf.com, it's not really dead. I only dedicated a minute to it, but in that system you collaberate with multiple editors, submit you paper for peer review and even final submission for publication. It's pretty awesome.
Absolutely - there are still people using it, especially for science papers. But I used to work for several journal publishers, and we had a big problem with people submitting MS Word documents even though we stated clearly that articles must be submitted in formats like LaTeX or SGML.
It's still used! I still use it! My dog eared LaTeX book 😂
Considering that the 68k alone appears to be roughly on par with a midrange 80286 (give or take), I find the performance highly impressive. I also didn't expect the preview to work as well as it did, half-anticipated that you'd still have to physically print out a page to see what you're getting or wait for a page to draw in an achingly slow pace from top to botom.
I used LaTe`X on an ST for years for reports, dissertations and a thesis. It was plenty fast enough and I couldn't afford a PC at that time in my life.
I'm looking for a LaTeX distro for MS-DOS, which is what we used in the 90's. The emTeX version I found on the official site wont install in DosBox...
Did you read this blog? darrengoossens.wordpress.com/2021/11/14/latex-on-freedos/
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Wow! That's a lot to read. I'll try it. Thanks man. :)
I write stuff in LaTeX not because it's less annoying than wysiwyg, but because it's annoying in a different way, one that I can manage much, much better. Anyone else feeling the same?
It would be awesome to get a dump of these diskettes onto the Internet Archive
Not this internet archive, but I've put them on my old blog site here if you want them
www.overtakenbyevents.com/MultiTex-for-the-Atari-ST-Floppy-Images/
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit Thanks!
I edit Indian philosophy books, some ~800 pages long, in (lua)LaTeX. I was 8yo in 1992, and knowing I would still know (roughly) how to edit it back then gives a cozy feeling of continuity.
25 minutes to install a latex distro on an atari? not too shabby honestly. still takes my arch linux computer like 5-10 minutes to download and install texlive and the install is easily half of that. still orders of magnitude larger, but this is all far more impressive than i expected
I use the MiKTeX disptro on my mac. It only downloads the bits you use. so if you add a new package there's a slight delay while it's downloaded and configured. But my MiKTeX is only 178MB, i mean huge compared to the ST but tiny by today's standards.
Other distros are kitchen sink ones ans weigh in, in the Gigabytes range.
If I knew about this, I would have delayed getting a PC for a couple of years. However, I don't know how it would handle greek.
I really don't know, that's an interesting question. For maths you can type \a, \b, \c for alpha, beta, gamma etc. But for normal text input I don't know.
@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit i found greek fonts but the issue is the encoding. I guess i would have to check...
@@CFalcon030 I can't speak about the early 90s and this AtariST distribution of LaTeX, but when I started using LaTeX in the early 2000s on GNU/Linux, XeTeX and TeX Live with its unicode and truetype/opentype font support was not a thing yet. We had teTeX with the original LaTeX implementation which supported metafont and postscript Type1 fonts and only 8-bit extended ASCII text.
In that environment for Greek text you had to write in iso8859-7 and insert \selectlanguage{greek} and \selectlanguage{english} at every transition to let LaTeX know how to interpret the following text. I used to define custom commands \eng and \greek like so: "\providecommand{\eng}[0]{\selectlanguage{english}}" and the greek equivalent, to make language switching a bit less verbose.
There was a high quality greek type 1 font, made for use with LaTeX by the University of Aegean if I remember correctly called "kerkis" which looked great when the DVI was converted to postscript and PDF.
Latex looks nice, but why is it that groff still makes more sense to me?
I mostly only used groff/troff/proff for writing man pages. Looked at you comment and did a read up on groff and mom which does look interesting.
nice to see LaTeX and TeX running on classic hardware! Looks 99% identical to my 2024 linux tex shell (texlive). The modern web version is a disservice, or made for special schools. ;) Get the real command line on your own computer!
do you mean the texlive distribution or is it a seperate shell? I'd appreciate a link as it sounds interesting. I agree with the command line bit, i did have a makefile for my dissertation LaTeX project, the nice thing about Gemini was the integrated console.
@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit the tex shell is defined in a single file tex-mode.el. The tex shell really is just an emacs buffer. But it reminds us that the tex command can be used interactively, and working with its output is useful for finding subtleties, errors and jumping back to lines of interest in the tex file at hand. Tex mode is simple and good, for me at least. Auctex is another fine option for this editor and many seem to prefer it, and I do like for instance its ingenious Reftex for handling of references, but the simplicity of tex-mode.el comes to me.
Volume 4 didn't exist in 1976/77 when the publisher Addison-Wesley went digital.
Well that's because he was proof reading the draft and not happy. It's also why TeX v1 came out in 1978! this kind of covers it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
Still relevant in 2004 …
Umm.. When I searched UA-cam for "latex" this isn't the type I was after.. lol
if you found this instead of the other "stuff" then paint me surprised :-)
I think my TeXLive is gigabytes.
My MiKTeX folder on mac is 178MB. that's what I like about that distro it only downloads what you use.
Did you do the full TeXLive install? That downloads _all_ of the packages on CTAN, so I think that would take up quite a bit of space.
@@fermiLiquidDrinker Lots of useful stuff though.
Use Google translate via the phone camera German to english
I used the apple equivilent, but as a long time ST user, i have a slight grasp of german UIs because so much of the best software for the ST was created in Germany.
LaTeX FTW! I'm a LaTeX fetishist! 😉
Hence the Joy of TeX throw away in the video!
LOL Just because one guy who wrote a program says tex is pronounced tech does not make it so. It's just like Linux Gnome users pronouncing the G just because the makers say it's meant to be. Nope, the few people do not get to change the rules of English just to be trendy. Pronounce the word as latex because that's what it is! 😛
reminds me of how the creator of gif wants everyone to call it jif
@@belstar1128 Actually, the GIF image format was created by a consortium of companies working together. There is no single creator. The misquote comes from one of the team leaders trying to make people say it as jif but the majority of the team called it gif as in gift. Majority rules 😉
Except that the X in TeX is actually a capital chi, not an X, so English has nothing to do with it.
@@srdau2 Touche!
uh ... it's not an English "ecks" it's a Chi, if you've read anything about TeX you'd know that. If you want to time travel to ancient Greece and argue with those guys have at it.