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by imd 1117 days ago
man comes from Unix, info comes from Emacs and maybe the OSes it was developed on. The GNU project also comes from that ecosystem, so even their drop-in replacements for the original Unix tools have info pages.
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Specifically, info appears to come from ITS. Stallman hacked on ITS back in the day, and the first time I logged into an ITS system (http://up.dfupdate.se/, if you're curious) and used the online help system, I suddenly realized why GNU was always trying to foist this weird manpage alternative on us.

(I remember back when I first got into Linux, like early 2000s, it seemed like a lot of the core GNU man pages were just stubs that said "For documentation, use the info system". Luckily they seem to have backtracked on that?)