Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

TeX
     
         /tekh/ An extremely powerful {macro}-based text
        formatter written by {Donald Knuth}, very popular in academia,
        especially in the computer-science community (it is good
        enough to have displaced {Unix} {troff}, the other favoured
        formatter, even at many {Unix} installations).
     
        The first version of TeX was written in the programming
        language {SAIL}, to run on a {PDP-10} under Stanford's {WAITS}
        {operating system}.
     
        Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining
        quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental
        "Art of Computer Programming" (see {Knuth}, also {bible}).  In
        a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the
        problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own
        typesetting language.  He thought he would finish it on his
        sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years.  The
        language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of "The
        Art of Computer Programming" has yet to appear as of mid-1997.
        (However, the third edition of volumes I and II have come
        out).  The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such
        that nobody minds this very much.  Many grand hackish projects
        have started as a bit of {toolsmithing} on the way to
        something else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander
        scale than most.
     
        {Guy Steele} happened to be at Stanford during the summer of
        1978, when Knuth was developing his first version of TeX.
        When he returned to {MIT} that fall, he rewrote TeX's {I/O} to
        run under {ITS}.
     
        TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but
        high-quality software.  Knuth offers monetary awards to people
        who find and report a bug in it: for each bug the award is
        doubled.  (This has not made Knuth poor, however, as there
        have been very few bugs and in any case a cheque proving that
        the owner found a bug in TeX is rarely cashed).  Though
        well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of cutting edge
        technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least one bug
        in every {Pascal} system it has been compiled with.
     
        TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and
        the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E
        depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case "TeX" is
        considered an acceptable {kluge} on {ASCII}-only devices).
        Fans like to proliferate names from the word "TeX" - such as
        TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster
        (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique.
     
        Several document processing systems are based on TeX, notably
        {LaTeX} Lamport TeX - incorporates document styles for books,
        letters, slides, etc., {jadeTeX} uses TeX as a backend for
        printing from {James' DSSSL Engine}, and {Texinfo}, the {GNU}
        document processing system.  Numerous extensions to TeX exist,
        among them {BibTeX} for bibliographies (distributed with
        LaTeX), {PDFTeX} modifies TeX to produce {PDF} and {Omega}
        extends TeX to use the {Unicode} character set.
     
        For some reason, TeX uses its own variant of the {point}, the
        {TeX point}.
     
        See also {Comprehensive TeX Archive Network}.
     
        {(ftp://labrea.stanford.edu/tex/)}.
     
        E-mail:  (TeX User's group, Oregon, USA).
     
        (2002-03-11)