[Framers] Nostalgia - was Re: FrameMaker 2015

[Böðvar Björgvinsson]

Thanks for this insight.
Bodvar





fim., 2. apr. 2020 kl. 17:09 skrifaði Frank Stearns <franks at pacifier.com>:

> 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
>
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