They got permission from Corfield to use the prototype as demoware for their computers, and hence, the primitive FrameMaker received plenty of exposure in the Unix workstation arena. The prototype caught the eyes of salesmen at the fledgling Sun Microsystems, which lacked commercial applications to showcase the graphics capabilities of their workstations. After only a few months, Corfield had completed a functional prototype of FrameMaker. Meiry saw an opportunity for a product to compete with Interleaf, enlisted Corfield to program it, and assisted him in acquiring the hardware, software, and technical connections to get him going in his Columbia University dorm room (where Corfield was still finishing his degree).Ĭorfield programmed his algorithms quickly. The only substantial DTP product at the time of FrameMaker's conception was Interleaf, which also ran on Sun workstations in 1981.
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He got the idea from his college roommate at Columbia, Ben Meiry, who went to work at Sun Microsystems as a technical consultant and writer, and saw that there was a market for a powerful and flexible desktop publishing (DTP) product for the professional market.
While working on his master's degree in astrophysics at Columbia University, Charles "Nick" Corfield, a mathematician alumnus of the University of Cambridge, decided to write a WYSIWYG document editor on a Sun-2 workstation. ( April 2013) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This section needs additional citations for verification. All versions of FrameMaker can export documents in MIF, and can also read MIF documents, including documents created by an earlier version or by another program. Any document that can be created interactively in FrameMaker can also be represented, exactly and completely, in MIF (the reverse, however, is not true: a few FrameMaker features are available only through MIF).
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The purpose of MIF is to represent FrameMaker documents in a relatively simple ASCII-based format, which can be produced or understood by other software systems and also by humans. MIF (Maker Interchange Format) is a markup language that functions as a companion to FrameMaker. When a user opens a structured file in unstructured FrameMaker, the structure is lost.