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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 @command{makeinfo} and @command{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 Fran@,{c}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.
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