Subject: Re: XMan utility X10 origins
From: Barry Shein
Date: 27/03/2026, 16:25
To: Kristaps Dzonsons

I can't find the source code tho maybe it's somewhere. I even looked
on X.org's site at the X10 distros and there's not much in those. But
maybe they could find the source.

It probably was around 1986, I was at Boston University, that sounds
right.

Unix as you know has this large shared online manual all written in
troff using the mandoc (or similar, probably ms, an so you could type
nroff -man file...) type setting macros.

The output isn't very complicated so it occurred to me I could
translate for example "change to bold font" to the appropriate X10
call, etc, etc.

This way anyone with an X server on their bitmapped screen could view
something which looks like a nicely printed manual page.

It also meant that one could open xman on a central file server and
view man pages from that server rather than have a copy of the entire
manual tree on their local system. In 1986 a 20MB (yes that's Mega)
disk for a desktop system could cost $600 so having just one copy of
the man pages for many people on the campus was worth the effort.

I believe, without much evidence, this is the same motivation which
led Marc Andreesen to develop web browsing.

That is, to share common documents within CERN where he worked. Disk
was very expensive.

HTML is even quite similar to Microsoft's RTF ("rich text format")
which MS used for their online help files in the 1980s which weren't a
distributed system. Every Microsoft system had its own private copy of
all the help files unless someone had implemented file sharing I
suppose (like NFS but MS's, "shares", "SMB" and all that.)

Granted HTML had other precursors like GML, SGML, etc. A common
document presentation language was "in the air".

No one else was involved in writing xman until Chris Peterson updated
it for X11.

If you have any other questions feel free...

On March 26, 2026 at 20:11 kristaps@bsd.lv (Kristaps Dzonsons) wrote:
 > Hi Barry,
 > 
 > My name is Kristaps Dzonsons---by way of intro, I've written a few 
 > utilities (mandoc, the rsync clone, etc.) that folks seem to like using. 
 >   But this is about history.  I've been sprucing up the Unix Manpage 
 > History [1] site with information about related tools, formats, etc., 
 > and xman is one of those tools I'd like to bring up as a first of its kind.
 > 
 > I wonder if I can bother you with a few questions about xman?  Like 
 > other mails in the history, I'd like to publish (redacted for privacy, 
 > of course) any responses with the history, if that's ok with you.  If 
 > not, just let me know and I won't.
 > 
 > First of all, do you have any source code for the X10 version of xman? 
 > I can find an early version of the X11R3 version (Chris Peterson), which 
 > cites you; but not your X10 version.
 > 
 > Second, would you care to say what led you to write xman in the first 
 > place?  I estimate the year to be 1986: does that sound reasonable? 
 > What systems were you using at the time?  Was anybody else at the time 
 > involved in graphical representation of manpages?
 > 
 > Thank you, and best wishes from a sunny Portland, Oregon,
 > 
 > Kristaps
 > 
 > [1] https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html