An arguable distinction: I thought hard about claiming priority for -ms. Joe Ossanna intended option -m to foster macro packages from the outset. -man was an early use, hidden in the man command. But -man was not packaged (in the sense of being an announced feature that can be used from its external description) until v7. -ms appeared in v6. Doug Arnold Robbins &lt;arnold(a)skeeve.com&gt; wrote: > Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: > >>> Why create ms when you have mm? >> >> Well, the real reason is that ms was the very first macro package. >> It has held up spectactularly well, evolving much less than the >> underlying [ntg]roff. >> >> Doug > > Or say, rather, the first *general purpose* macro package. The man > macros predate it. :-)