Taking English text as input, TJ-2 aligns left and right margins, justifying the output using white space and word hyphenation. Text is marked-up with single lowercase characters combined with the PDP-1's overline character, carriage returns, and internal concise codes. The computer's six toggle switches control the input and output devices, enable and disable hyphenation and stop the session. Words can be hyphenated with a light pen on the computer's CRT display and from the session's dictionary in memory. On-screen hyphenation has SAVE and FORGET commands and OOPS, the undo.
Comments in the code were quoted thirty years later: "The ways of God are just and can be justified to man"[3] and "Girls who wear pants should be sure that the end justifies the jeans."[4]
TJ-2 was succeeded by TYPSET and RUNOFF, a pair of complementary programs written in 1964 for the CTSS operating system.[5] TYPSET and RUNOFF soon evolved into runoff for Multics, which was in turn ported to Unix in the 1970s as roff.[6]
^Furuta, Richard (March 1992). "Important papers in the history of document preparation systems: basic sources". Electronic Publishing. 5: 29.
^An allusion to or quotation of the lines from the opening invocation of Milton's Paradise Lost, "What in me is dark
Illumine/what is low raise and support;/That to the highth of this great Argument/I may assert th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men."[1]
Smith, Daniel P. B. (1997). "TJ-2: A Very Early Word Processor". Retrieved 2006-07-02. Transcription of the 1963 memo describing TJ-2, with annotations by Daniel P. B. Smith
