The origins of TeX

TeX and LaTeX might be considered "niche" today, used more frequently in mathematics and the sciences. But in the 1980s and 1990s, it didn't take too long to find a document or article that was formatted in either TeX or LaTeX.

As he explained in a 2007 interview for the Turing Awards, Don Knuth created the TeX system to solve a specific problem that was very personal to him: In the late 1970s, Knuth had updated an edition of his book. But when he received a proof copy of the second edition, he found that the printing technology had changed and the new fonts looked terrible: subscripts were in a different type style than the main text, for example.

Knuth didn't want the rest of his books to look terrible, so he addressed the problem like a computer scientist: he decided to write his own typesetting system. That system became the TeX system.

Knuth explained in a different segment of the same interview that TeX was designed as a kind of "compiler" that would turn text input into professionally formatted output. He designed the "language" around how his secretary might type up his books, and tasked several graduate students to implement it over a summer.

The TeX implementation turned out to be more difficult than Knuth had anticipated, but eventually TeX was able to generate output to control a typesetting machine through a microcontroller.

The first version of TeX was written in the SAIL programing language. Knuth later rewrote TeX from scratch in 1982, and released an updated version in 1989 along with the Metafont system to define fonts. Knuth updated TeX again in 1990. The design of TeX has been frozen after this version, although minor fixes have been released since then.