What's new in TeX, part 1

In the early days of TeX, the “preview” device of choice was a Xerox Dover (early laser printer). This was mostly good for checking that everything appeared in roughly the correct place on the paper but otherwise the output looked quite terrible, to a point where people would print deliberately enlarged output and reduce it on a normal photocopier to make it look nicer. While very expensive and – as basically a modified 1970s photocopier – bodily huge (think large chest freezer), the Dover did have the advantage of being very, very fast indeed (60 pages per minute or so, off a large roll of paper that it would cut into individual sheets).

The first TeX implementation I had (on the Atari ST) didn't have a proper DVI previewer, either – it came with a program that basically “printed” pages to the screen, so you were able to look at your document one page after the other but there was no going back to earlier pages (you had to restart the “printer”). Eventually I wrote my own, more reasonable, DVI previewer for the Atari, which in the end supported multiple windows, facing pages, hyperlinks, and that sort of thing. After I had started using Linux I wrote another one, based on Tcl/Tk, but at some point I went over to using PDF for LaTeX output exclusively, and even though the project was still interesting there was no longer an itch to scratch.