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.
Other versions of Runoff were developed for various computer systems including Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputer systems running RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX on Digital's PDP-10 and for OpenVMS on VAX minicomputers, as well as Sperry Unisys Univac 90/60 mainframe using the EDT text editor under the VS/9 operating system. These different releases of Runoff typically had had little or no relationship to each other in terms of how formatting commands and arrangement of text was performed except that they all used the convention of separating presentation text from Runoff commands by indicating a command to Runoff by beginning the line with a period.