FrameMaker history
April 19th, 2004
I've been digging around trying to find out some more about the history of FrameMaker and I came across the following email in the Framers-Digest of Tuesday, May 13 1997 (Volume 02 : Number 280):
Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 21:15:05 -0400
From: John Albino
Subject: Re: FrameMaker early history
At 02:06 AM 5/12/97 GMT, you wrote:
>One engineer did something about it; on his own, David Murray wrote
>Framemaker. He met a marketer who saw the next Interleaf in it, Steve
>whose last name escapes me now, but who was the first president of
>Frame)
Actually, Charles Corfield was the "engineer" who wrote the first version of FrameMaker -- he needed something better than other available tools for doing his dissertation, and that was the gestation of Frame. He got together with David Murray (who actually was a music major) and Steve Kirsch (who founded Mouse Systems and had a few million hanging around after cashing out of Mouse) and the company was founded, along with (Ronnie?) Blakeley who had been with Steve at Mouse systems.
The market was so hungry for an *affordable* alternative to Interleaf that Frame was able to sell lots of licenses at approx. $1,500 each for over a year for the pre-1.0 beta version, with the promise of a free upgrade to the shipping production version. (Interleaf was selling turnkey systems for around $30K at the time, and wanted the same bucks for software only.)
Frame got *real* big with FedGovCo, which appreciated it as an unbundled software package (as opposed to Interleaf, which wanted to sell only turnkey hardware/software combinations at the time), and also because Interleaf had PO'ed Sun by using a deal Interleaf had with Sun for hardware to undercut Sun's own prices for the same hardware. Sun jumped on the chance to use FrameMaker as a "Friend of Sun" and gave Frame lots of marketing support.
Frame founder Charles Corfield is now a director of, and investor in, several Silicon Valley startups.
Read a profile of Steve Kirsch at:
www.spectrum.ieee.org/publicfeature/aug00/prof.html
Seybold Report from 1996:
Adobe acquires Frame, plans full takeover
www.seyboldreports.com/SRPS/free/0ps24/P2421023.htmFrom: John Albino
Subject: Re: FrameMaker early history
At 02:06 AM 5/12/97 GMT, you wrote:
>One engineer did something about it; on his own, David Murray wrote
>Framemaker. He met a marketer who saw the next Interleaf in it, Steve
>whose last name escapes me now, but who was the first president of
>Frame)
Actually, Charles Corfield was the "engineer" who wrote the first version of FrameMaker -- he needed something better than other available tools for doing his dissertation, and that was the gestation of Frame. He got together with David Murray (who actually was a music major) and Steve Kirsch (who founded Mouse Systems and had a few million hanging around after cashing out of Mouse) and the company was founded, along with (Ronnie?) Blakeley who had been with Steve at Mouse systems.
The market was so hungry for an *affordable* alternative to Interleaf that Frame was able to sell lots of licenses at approx. $1,500 each for over a year for the pre-1.0 beta version, with the promise of a free upgrade to the shipping production version. (Interleaf was selling turnkey systems for around $30K at the time, and wanted the same bucks for software only.)
Frame got *real* big with FedGovCo, which appreciated it as an unbundled software package (as opposed to Interleaf, which wanted to sell only turnkey hardware/software combinations at the time), and also because Interleaf had PO'ed Sun by using a deal Interleaf had with Sun for hardware to undercut Sun's own prices for the same hardware. Sun jumped on the chance to use FrameMaker as a "Friend of Sun" and gave Frame lots of marketing support.
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