Nils-Peter Nelson has asked me to post this response for him.
Send responses to him at "n...@research.att.com" and not to me.

==========

In article <4l8ufi$...@taco.cc.ncsu.edu>,

This is a relation of what happened to DWB, not a justification.
<history>
DWB is the collective name for over 80 Unix commands that
generally relate to troff.  DWB was under continuous development
in Bell Labs from the 1970's through 1994, first in Bell Labs Research,
then in Unix System Laboratories, then in my own group in Bell Labs.
USL abandoned DWB when it abandoned tools in general and focused
on the basic operating system (1987).  They signed an agreement
with SoftQuad, which was sensible for external folks but left
AT&T documenters in the position of buying AT&T software from another
company at a greatly increased price.   In addition, Brian Kernighan
of Research continued to improve troff, but SoftQuad did not
have the rights to his improvements.  I picked up the ball to
reduce cost for internal AT&T folks and preserve compatibility
with Research.  Our own funding was from license fees.
<flame>In 1994, our biggest internal customer took our software,
installed it on all their machines, then declined to pay.</flame>
Because this happened in the second half of the year,
and I was supposed to make revenue match cost, I had no choice but
to disband the group and get the cost down to zero.
We all found other jobs in AT&T, though Jaap Akkerhuis elected
to return to his native Netherlands.
We left the source code in the custody of another organization,
which has since disbanded for other reasons. There is one person
assigned part-time, in case interest re-awakens.</history>

There are currently at least three common versions of troff,
all stemming from the original Bell Labs version by Joe Ossanna:
an ancient variation from Bill Joy that, remarkably, still gets
shipped by Sun ("no /dev/cat"); the SoftQuad version, based on
USL's DWB 2.0; the DWB3.x versions from my group, in cooperation
with Brian Kernighan.  This version is widespread
inside Bell Labs, Lucent and AT&T and includes
many PostScript printer support commands and X Window stuff
like the Picasso drawing program.  To answer the orginal question,
you can rotate tables and Picasso can rotate text, but not grap.
Since you could choose to pipe grap into picasso (instead of pic)
it's a trivial enhancement.

I'd claim DWB 3.4 is "the real troff" since it is in synch
with the original Research effort.
To get "the real troff":
  AT&Ters can get free binary versions (but not source!)
  from babel.ho.lucent.com,
  Everyone else can buy source (but not binary!) from Lucent
  Software Solutions, 1-800-462-8146.
There is no support group anywhere. There is no one to complain
to if this explanation distresses you.  There is no one who
understands it better than I do, if you are unsatisfied with
my explanation.  I seldom read this newsgroup
so please send follow-ups to n...@research.att.com
(lucent.com works, too).