Comment by zvr

2 days ago

In a computer lab in a university in Greece in the '80s... we had a Star NL-10 connected to a Vax 11/750 running BSD Unix.

We were using nroff(1) to typeset and print documents, using the printer built-in fonts.

And then at some point we wrote the driver so that troff(1) (which was actually ditroff, for "device-independent" troff), could generate output that set the printer in high-resolution mode and essentially printed pre-rendered bitmaps of lines.