fot?

[barbara beeton]

On Thu, 10 Dec 2020, Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:

> Besides being a homage to the 3-letter file termination of DOS.
> PN
> 
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 6:33 PM Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>           Subject: fot?
>
>       David Fuchs confirms that "fot" is meant to suggest a
>       "photograph"
>       (of the screen).
>
>       Aside: my best previous guess was "file online transcript",
>       because
>       that's what it is. (I.e., the "online transcript" put in a
>       "file".)
>
>       Best,
>       Karl

A 3-letter file extension has nothing to do with DOS, which didn't even
exist when TeX was being developed.  It's a limit of the SAIL operating
system for the DECSystem 10, on which TeX and MF were developed.  The
limit for file names was 6.3.  Traces of this can still be seen in the
names of the Computer Modern fonts, several of which would be more
easily understood with a few more letters in their names.

 						-- bb