[Framers] Nostalgia - was Re: FrameMaker 2015

Fri Apr 3 04:55:12 PDT 2020

Klaus is fairly active on the Adobe forums, and still working on useful
scripts, too.

On Thu, Apr 2, 2020 at 8:05 PM Peter Gold <peter at petergold.photography>
wrote:

> 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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> >
> >
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-- 
Lin Sims