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I searched on the Internet for the answer and found none. How can one find it? Also, I write "SLITEX" because methinks every letter of the name is, even if small, raised or lowered, the capital one but feel free to groundedly correct.

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If you download LaTeX 2.09 from /CTAN/obsolete/macros/latex209/distribs/latex209.tar.gz, (by the way, it is still possible to run this distribution using TeX today since TeX itself hasn’t introduced any incompatible changes)

you will find in the file general/slitex.tex,

% SLITEX VERSION 2.09 <25 March 1992>
% Copyright (C) 1992 by Leslie Lamport

Since it is contained in the 209 distribution, it is not surprise that SLITEX is made by Lamport himself.

If you have further doubts, in Norman Walsh's dated LaTeX guide he said

For a description of SliTeX, you should consult Appendix A of "A Document Preparation System: LaTeX" by Leslie Lamport, ISBN 0-201-15790-X, published jointly by the American Mathematical Society and Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

I'm unable to find the 1st edition online, but if you are lucky might able to find one in your local library.

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  • Google Books scanned it, but doesn’t make the full text available. There’s a description of the slide document class on page 80 of the 1994 edition, and today, we’d probably use beamer.
    – Davislor
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 22:57
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For a description of SliTeX, consult Appendix A of A Document Preparation System: LaTeX by Leslie Lamport (First edition, ISBN 0-201-15790-X), published jointly by the American Mathematical Society and Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. SliTeX has been eliminated as of LaTeX 2ε, i.e. 1994. (The all caps SLITEX spelling stems form the fact that it was a FORTRAN program.)

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  • slitex was not a program (fortran or otherwise) it was a tex format like latex
    – David Carlisle
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 17:21
  • Yes. I have been told, however (and no reason to doubt) that SLITEX (the command) was used to compile those slides. Not that it really matters, at this point …
    – Ingmar
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 19:51
  • the slitex command was an alias for tex &slitex just as the latex command was/is an alias for tex &latex
    – David Carlisle
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 19:53
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    It was probably because majority OS that time (for PDP-10 & IBM360) type command names in capitalized cases.
    – LdBeth
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 23:57
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    There was apparently a FORTRAN program named SLITEX but what I find of it is [here](osti.gov/biblio/5384184). I find no relation to the TEX (so written for the reason in the question) format.
    – some_other_in_the_crowd
    Commented Aug 22, 2023 at 14:31

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