[Framers] Nostalgia - was Re: FrameMaker 2015

[Frank Stearns]

In 1990 or so I'd just completed migrating some 6000 pages of DEC RNO 
(with pieces of UNIX Troff tossed in) over to LaTeX for my primary 
client of the day (Aptec Systems, a Floating Point Systems spin-off 
who made high-speed I/O computers. We're talking large fractions of a 
million dollars systems (multi-millions for the "big" systems) whose 
then fantastic bus speeds are today dwarfed by that $500 laptop at 
Best Buy or Walmart.)

One of the engineers had a copy of FM 1.3 on his Sun 3/50 
invited me to have a look. I was not impressed -- at all. (By that 
time, while mostly hating it, I could get LaTeX to sit up, roll-over, 
and play dead -- which it did do from time to time with no prompting.)

Months later, that same engineer showed me FM 2.1. Wow. Now we're 
getting somewhere, as I'd just battled through Ventura Publisher's 
endless bugs on a project for another client.

I'm not exactly sure how the decision was made, but Aptec shifted over 
to FrameMaker 2.1 (which cost money) from LaTeX which was "free". It 
might have had something to do with LaTeX bringing even the newer "hot 
rod" DEC microvaxes to their knees when I ran a job. The engineers 
would march around my cubical with torches chanting curses, while 
the system manager scrambled to find resources to handle all the 
usual product cycle crunch conditions -- doc releases parallel with 
product releases.

Aptec was also shifting over to more of those new-fangled SUN 
workstations, which were completely independent of the VAXes. "Good! 
Kick that tech-writer P-I-A over onto the UNIX systems!" The guys were 
all soooo happy that LaTeX was no longer crippling their main 
development platforms. (They finally stopped blaming me personally.)

But it did mean yet another migration of those 1000s of pages of docs 
from LaTeX over to FM. I got pretty handy with MIF and MML (remember 
MML?). Other conversion help came from macros in MS WORD-for-DOS 
(perhaps the only Word version that was worthwhile; much more reliable 
than word for windows) and lots of fun with the text processing power 
of UNIX and even similar command line functions in VMS.

FM 3.0 really started to "open up the world" and provided a whole new 
look and feel to the documents, and was so much easier to use. For its 
day "Best Looking/most functional" FM version award probably goes to 
FM3 on monochrome Sunview.

Having cut my teeth on embedded-format command word-processors and 
typesetters in the mid-1970s, WYSIWYG systems always seemed to be 
something of a sham, especially when they were so prone to bugs and 
crashes, such as that Ventura project revealed.

But I made my declaration at FM 2.1 that FM was the FIRST WYSIWYG 
system that actually made sense and lived up to the promises of such 
systems, and did so (mostly) with reliability and elegance, and 
certainly for a reasonable price and licensing scheme when compared to 
the competitors, such as Interleaf.

FM4 brought along that wonderful table editor and the API. Woo hoo! 
Now we could have some real fun. Our flagship product, IXgen, was 
born, and became highly popular. Other fun FM aids (born a little 
earlier) caught the attention of multiple people, including some folks 
at Cisco Systems who had been offered a seat on Frame's newly-formed 
Customer Advisory Board.

To their credit (and unknown to me at the time) Cisco told FM that 
they certainly had enough "large customer" representation on the board 
(Boeing, BEA Systems, US Army [IIRC] among others) but they lacked any 
"small user" representation. That's when my name came up and I was 
invited to join the board to represent independents and contractors 
who used FM. Unfortunately, the board went away when Adobe purchased 
Frame Technologies.

(For more "museum" stories, visit fsatools.com; select "FSA 
Resources", Early Products.)

More fun as the years ticked by and my company pivoted from tech pubs 
to software products, mostly for FM.

The landscape now is quite different; few folks do indexing any more. 
"Just google it" is the new mantra. This is okay for me; I can slide 
into semi-retirement and support the IXgen users who are still active. 
Thanks to all present and past users of our products.

Frank Stearns
FSA