[Framers] Nostalgia - was Re: FrameMaker 2015

Thu Apr 2 17:05:09 PDT 2020

Just when I've been wondering if I’m really as old as I look, or only as
old as I've always thought I was (meaning 20-something), in jumps Frank
Stearns! Like Lin Sims, Lynne Price, et. al. You're one of the early-on
posters I remember saving lives - mine and those of others - back in the
days of comp.text.frame and similar "pools" of pain-loving techwhrlrs.
Thanks for chiming in all you old-timers. Glad to hear you're still here.

I second the comment about dodging a bullet over a nit-pick! Remember that
Groucho Marx, a word-wrangler if there ever was one, said he'd never join a
group that invited him.

One of the folks among the Jacks and Janes of all trades who comprised
Ashton-Tate's dBASE II tech support group that I was lucky enough to hire
into back in '86, (and one exception to Groucho's rule, at least for me,)
turned out to have been a music transcriber. Yeah, a hand-powered  music
writer, who made the scores for large orchestras, etc. He saw the
calligraphy on the wall, namely that technology, bad as it was then, wasn't
gonna stop encroaching on his skills.

As to nostalgia for lost technologies, Ashton-Tate bought Mac-based
FullWrite Professional, probably one of the only real competitors to FM's
range of features then, or perhaps ever, had it survived. So many stories
in that valley of silicon. Until development couldn't climb the hill fast
enough, and A-T pulled the plug on FullWrite, it was in the running at the
place where I first saw FM on Mac and Sun.

I haven't seen anything recently from Klaus Daube. He's been compiling FM
history.  www.daube.ch There's always more to the story.

On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 11:31 AM Frank Stearns <franks at pacifier.com> wrote:

> 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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