Thanks for this insight. Bodvar
fim., 2. apr. 2020 kl. 17:09 skrifaði Frank Stearns <fra...@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 > > _______________________________________________ > > This message is from the Framers mailing list > > Send messages to framers@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 listad...@frameusers.com > _______________________________________________ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@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 listad...@frameusers.com
