runoff was the text formatting program on the Multics operating system. It was a descendant of the RUNOFF type-setting program from CTSS and was originally written by Jerome H. Saltzer. Bob Morris and Doug McIlroy translated that from MAD assembler to BCPL; they then moved the BCPL version to Multics when the IBM 7094 on which CTSS ran was being shut down. A later version of runoff for Multics was written in PL/I by Dennis Capps, in 1974.This runoff code was the ancestor of the machine language roff that was written for the fledgling Unix.