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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 programs. Karl Berry has continued maintenance since
Texinfo 3.8 (manual edition 2.22).
Our thanks go out to all who helped improve this work, particularly the
indefatigable Eli Zaretskii and Andreas Schwab, who have provided
patches beyond counting. François Pinard and David D. Zuhn,
tirelessly recorded and reported mistakes and obscurities. Zack
Weinberg did the impossible by implementing the macro syntax in
texinfo.tex. Special thanks go to Melissa Weisshaus for her
frequent reviews of nearly similar editions. 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. Much more
consequentially, it strived to describe document contents rather than
formatting, an idea wholeheartedly adopted by Texinfo.
Meanwhile, people at MIT developed another, not too dissimilar format called Bolio. This then was converted to using TeX as its typesetting language: BoTeX. The earliest BoTeX version seems to have been 0.02 on October 31, 1984.
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 online and as printed hard copy.