On Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 10:13 Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> For folks running binary only systems from Masscomp/Sun/DEC/HP/IBM and the
> like, it is possible it was different.  The fact is I know Masscomp
> supplied ditroff on all systems and just ate the $5 license fee.   We
> also license transcript from Adobe and included that.   My memory is that
> was just a one-time charge and no redistribution.   I'm not sure what Sun
> did, but I think they supplied the BSD troff, vcat and the like (Larry may
> know for sure).  I'm pretty sure HP supplied at least the BSD/vcat family;
> but they have updated to ditroff.   I've forgotten what DEC settled on. By
> the time of Tru64 it was ditroff on the system, but with Ultrix it may have
> been you got the troff/vcat off the BSD tape had their was a fee for the
> ditroff/transcript package.
>

Off the top of my head, SGI also did this. Man pages in the standard IRIX
distribution were provided pre-formatted ("catman") and any sort of roff
was a separately available, for extra $, product called Documenter's
Workbench.  I know that this was the case in IRIX 4 and 5 (early-mid '90s),
not sure about earlier, and I believe that IRIX 6 finally rolled it into
the standard distribution.

The trouble was that if you had a package that provided standard man pages,
you had no way to format them unless you were able to get a hold of groff
or the like. Not an ideal situation.

-Henry

>