[Framers] News about the FrameMaker history

[Peter Gold]

Thanks, Klaus:

I first encountered FrameMaker3 on a Mac computer when I started as a
technical writer at Sybase in 1989, a week after the Loma Prieta earthquake
that flattened the Cypress highway ramp which exited a few blocks from the
company's Emeryville, CA, headquarters. The quake hit when I was swimming
in the pool behind my San Jose house, thinking that in a few days I'd be
starting a new long daily commute, and taking that exit ramp to my new job
Suddenly, the Earth moved, sloshing me nearly out of the pool, and
instantly, 50 miles of damage along the tectonic fault connected me to my
new workplace!

At that time, the tech pubs department was evaluating FM and other new
publishing tools, while continuing to create, edit, layout, and publish its
user manuals on Sun text-based workstations, using a customized flavor
of *xroff.
*Some years later, on a tech-writer's or FrameMaker forum, I read an
allegedly-factual translation of the familiar "Lorum Ipsum" placeholder
text, which, the poster claimed, validated that ancient scribes, the tech
writers of old had written it, because it seemed to say, "we love to beat
ourselves with sticks." It took me back to writing and marking-up text in
*xroff.*

After I became a certified FM trainer, in 1995, I took a full-on week-long
FM+SGML training course on the eighth-floor of Adobe's San Jose
headquarters. Just as the instructor projected a slide for the sample
chapter titled, "The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake," BINGO!! The building
started quaking. For those who'd traveled cross-country, it was momentary
horror. Over the sounds of car alarms rising from the outside parking lots,
we acclimated Californians calmed them down, and Adobe rolled out
refreshment carts. BUT, when we got back to class, the instructor
"corrected" the chapter title to, "The 1995 San Jose Earthquake." The humor
did its job. But, I'd never since been able to present the training
material without telling the story.

Reading David Murray's FrameMaker history article reminded me of yet one
more earthquake-ish connection, namely the effect FM had and has continued
to have on technical publishing. One of the earliest FrameMaker adopters
was CERN, the European research center responsible for so much basic
scientific discovery. If verifying the existence of the Higgs boson doesn't
count as a tectonic shift in the Earth's knowledge of particle physics,
what does? Research is useless if it's not well-documented and shared. FM
has deserves credit for enabling CERN's researchers to publish their work.

So, here's to FrameMaker's founders, and those who joined the team and
accreted their knowledge around the "how can this be done better?"
irritation at the core, that started the creation of a pearly solution.
Yes, we've learned to live with and love FM's irregularities and bumpiness.
But remember, also, to credit those who've persisted in keeping alive
long-running pleas for features that are still in the "to be addressed in
some future release" queue.


On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 5:25 AM Klaus Daube <klaus at daube.ch> wrote:

> Friends of FrameMaker,
>
> Today I got a mail from David Hemmendinger (Associate Editor-in-chief,
> IEEE Annals of
> the History of Computing) with two corrections for my web-page about FM's
> history.
>
> The wonderful surplus of this mail is the link to the full article by
> David Murray on
> the history of FrameMaker. The article
> (http://walden-family.com/david-murray/frame-posted.pdf) will will appear
> in the 2019
> July-Sept issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
> (http://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an).
>
> For the first time we have genuine information about the early days of FM.
> Klaus
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Klaus Daube             Phone:  +41-44-381 37 77
> Schäracher 11           Mail:   klaus at daube.ch
> CH-8053 Zürich          Web:    www.daube.ch
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> This message is from the Framers mailing list
>
> Send messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com
> Visit the list's homepage at  http://www.frameusers.com
> Archives located at
> http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/
> Subscribe and unsubscribe at
> http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com
> Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com
>
>