Re: Removal of catman from base

From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_phk.freebsd.dk>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:20:53 +0000
--------
In message <alpine.BSF.2.21.1709121210140.54096_at_orthanc.ca>, Lyndon Nerenberg writes:
>> 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.

I'm pretty sure that SVR1 had catman and roff was an extra and somewhat
pricey software package.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk_at_FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Tue Sep 12 2017 - 19:21:11 UTC

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