Tech report Browse: an on-line manual & system without an acronym

This article describes Browse: an on-line manual system oriented to VDUs, consisting of a manual database and a retrieval program. Browse was built to provide a reasonable user-interface to the Berkley Unix on-line manual at fairly low cost in terms of system resources. The retrieval program provides a basic set of user commands for selecting desired information from menus. To overcome some of the tedious aspects of the basic commands, higher level operations have been defined. Currently only an extremely primitive mechanism exists for producing hardcopy output from Browse: performing this task "properly" is seen as a hard problem. In spite of this, user acceptance over a period of eight months has been quite good.This work has been supported, in part, by grants from NSERC.