Re: Removal of catman from base

> That was actually not why catman was brought into the world:  ATT/USL
> thought text-processing was The Goods so they unbundled it base SVR
> and invented catman to make up for the missing nroff.

Not quite.  They (AT&T) sold the rights to sell typeset manuals to some 
publishing house (I forget which), at which point they stopped shipping 
the *roff source for the manpages on the source tapes.  Instead, you got 
pre-formatted "cat" pages on the source tape.  I think this happened 
starting with SVR3.

catman(1) was always about doing bulk nroff runs against the whole of 
/usr/man, because, back in the day, running nroff on demand was slow. 
Even on a 785.  (catman without nroff would have been a no-op.)

--lyndon