Joe Ossanna worked at Bell Labs from the mid '50s until he died in 1977. He was part of the team that designed Multics, the first timesharing operating system at Bell Labs and MIT. Then he worked with Thompson, Ritchie, and Rudd Canaday programming Unics, which later became Unix. He was noted for writing a version of nroff (called troff) that managed the team's new Graphic Systems CAT phototypesetter. In 1973, he wrote the first Unix troff in PDP-11 assembly language, then two years later rewrote the code in C.