Bolio MIT text formatter

Software
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MIT A.I. Memo No. 602 Flavors: Message Passing in the Lisp Machine by Daniel Weinreb and David Moon, published in 1980, contains the following production note on page 6 of the PDF scan:

This document was edited with the Zmacs and Emacs editors, and formnated by the Bolio text justifier. It was printed on the MIT’s Dover Printer.

What kind of formatting language or tool was Bolio? Was it conceptually similar to troff? What operating systems did it run under?

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This doesn’t answer your question but might possibly help the investigation:

In another development, 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. Much more consequentially, it strove to describe document contents rather than formatting, an idea wholeheartedly adopted by Texinfo.

Meanwhile, people at MIT developed another format called Bolio. Richard Stallman (RMS) worked on converting Bolio to use TeX as its typesetting language, resulting in BoTeX. The earliest BoTeX version seems to have been 0.02 on October 31, 1984.

BoTeX could only be used as a markup language for documents to be printed, not for online documents. RMS combined BoTeX and Info to create Texinfo, a mark-up language for text that is intended to be read both online and as printed hard copy.

Unfortunately there’s a so-called koan which mentions Bolio’s naming, which dominates the search results (for me)

A cocky novice once said to Stallman: “I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?”.
Stallman replied forcefully, “Names are but names, Emac & Bolio's is the name of a confectionary shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.”

His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, “Neither Emac or Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.”

Yes, you guested it, an ice cream koan.

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Thanks, Bolio search results are indeed noisy because of that koan.

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And I haven’t helped, by mentioning it! Indeed quoting it…

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I believe I have a working version of BOLIO on ITS. I haven’t been able to rebuild the binary successfully from source yet but will keep trying. BOLIO is written and specified by LSB, a LISP (MacLISP/Zetalisp subsystem building tool).

I did recently get LSB running (built from source) on ITS. I went down this path because MacLISP “format” on ITS and Multics was implemented in LSB and I had no LSB implementation to rebuild it.

I’ll post an update here if I can successfully build BOLIO and generate documentation from text formatted with BOLIO. I have several documents that require BOLIO for formatting.

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If you build a simulated ITS from here: GitHub - PDP-10/its: Incompatible Timesharing System, you’ll end up with an ITS with a working BOLIO implementation. It is used, in the build, to build the AMBER documentation on the Chaosnet.

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Welcome, @eswenson and thanks! I see in the various commits this one which adds Bolio:

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