[texhax] DR TEX

[Michael Barr]

Perhaps some of the confusion that this created can be explained by the fact that it seems to be based on TeX 1.  See "TeX and Metafont" for details.  One of the main differences was that there was no fixed escape character.  DEK required that the first character of the input file be the escape.  If that was a period, that was it.  And I think the period may have been used in some of them.  Other differences were that there were no counters.  There were increment and decrement functions, but only by 1.  I don't recall if there were dimensional variables, but there were no arithmetic operations.  This would have made anything like Latex impossible to implement.  On the other hand, once you changed periods to backslash, I think a TeX 1 file would run under TeX 2.

I wrote my first book in TeX 1, using TeX and Metafont as documentation.  It was eventualy converted (by then Springer editor Roberto Mineo) to a beta version of Latex and published at the end of 1984.

Michael