GNU Info

(texinfo)History

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History
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  Richard M. Stallman invented the Texinfo format, wrote the initial
processors, and created Edition 1.0 of this manual.  Robert J. Chassell
greatly revised and extended the manual, starting with Edition 1.1.
Brian Fox was responsible for the standalone Texinfo distribution until
version 3.8, and wrote the standalone `makeinfo' and `info'.  Karl
Berry has made the updates since Texinfo 3.8 and subsequent releases,
starting with Edition 2.22 of the manual.

  Our thanks go out to all who helped improve this work, particularly to
Franc,ois Pinard and David D. Zuhn, who tirelessly recorded and
reported mistakes and obscurities; our special thanks go to Melissa
Weisshaus for her frequent and often tedious reviews of nearly similar
editions.  The indefatigable Eli Zaretskii and Andreas Schwab have
provided patches beyond counting.  Zack Weinberg did the impossible by
implementing the macro syntax in `texinfo.tex'.  Dozens of others have
contributed patches and suggestions, they are gratefully acknowledged
in the `ChangeLog' file.  Our mistakes are our own.

  A bit of history: in the 1970's at CMU, Brian Reid developed a program
and format named Scribe to mark up documents for printing.  It used the
`@' character to introduce commands as Texinfo does and strived to
describe document contents rather than formatting.

  Meanwhile, people at MIT developed another, not too dissimilar format
called Bolio.  This then was converted to using TeX as its typesetting
language: BoTeX.

  BoTeX could only be used as a markup language for documents to be
printed, not for online documents.  Richard Stallman (RMS) worked on
both Bolio and BoTeX.  He also developed a nifty on-line help format
called Info, and then combined BoTeX and Info to create Texinfo, a mark
up language for text that is intended to be read both on line and as
printed hard copy.