Subject: Re: Fwd: History of Unix Manpages: man-db
From: "John W. Eaton"
Date: 31/03/2026, 07:35
To: Kristaps Dzonsons

I was a grad student at the University of Texas from 1986 until 1992. Our department had a variety of different Unixy systems including AIX, SunOS, Ultrix, and HP-UX, and maybe some that I've forgotten.  I also had access to some others through the university computation center.  I remember that the man programs on these systems behaved differently. Maybe I was mistaken, but I remember that they did not all allow for local man pages to be installed, or to set the search order for separate directory trees containing man pages.  I wanted consistency in behavior across all the systems and I wanted the man program to be able to find the man pages corresponding to the programs I had installed locally.

I was just beginning to learn C and had become aware of the GNU project just a few years before so I decided to try to write a portable free software implementation of man in C.  My implementation of man was my first significant C program.  I don't think I have any version control history from back then, but I do have two tar file releases of it, one from January 1991 and the other from August 1991.

While I was working on my version, I became aware of Tom Christiansen's Perl implementation of man but continued working on my program anyway because I was having fun learning.

Shortly after my August 1991 release (version 1.1!) I became too busy with other things to keep up with any changes.  Somehow it was picked up in some Linux distributions and others started maintaining it.  I didn't work on it again and I'd be surprised if any actual code of mine still remains!

I don't know any of the people who continued to develop and maintain it later, or how to contact them now.  Sorry I can't be of any help there.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

jwe


On 3/18/26 2:38 AM, Kristaps Dzonsons wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> My name is Kristaps Dzonsons---I'm writing with what may be an oddball question, but one I think only you can answer.  In short, I'm fleshing out my History of Unix Manpages, https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html, with the history of the manpage formats (man.7 and mdoc.7) and tools (man, apropos, etc.).
>
> I can see your name in the AUTHORS section of man-db's man(1) as being the originator, along with a rough date of 1990.  (All of man-db's current repos bulk-imported from around 2001, so there's nothing before that.)  Would you mind if I pester you with some questions about it?
>
> (I'd originally sent this to xxx@xxxxxxx as it appears in the early man-db stuff, but it bounced---apologies if you get it twice!)
>
> I guess by way of starting, in 1990, the BSD man(1) system had been around since about 1983, and the AT&T man(1) shellscript since UNIX V2. Assuming you're correctly labelled as starting man-db, can you confirm that you put down those first bits; and if you've the inclination, a bit of rumination about what you compelled you to start this effort?
>
> If it's ok with you, I'd like to include any responses (redacted for privacy, of course) as first sources in the history.  No worries if you'd rather I didn't, however.  Just let me know!
>
> Apropos this, would you happen to have Wilf's e-mail address?  I can only find his Surrey one, and that bounces too.
>
> Warm regards,
>
> Kristaps
>