Interleaf

» see interleaf.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

David Boucher and Harry George started Interleaf in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1981 and shipped the first commercial document processor that edited text and graphics on the same WYSIWYG page at something close to typeset quality. It demonstrated at the Seybold Seminars in 1984 and the room understood at once what it was looking at.

You could not buy it as software. Interleaf sold the whole apparatus, Sun workstations and a laser printer delivered as one turnkey unit, and the cost of entry ran to roughly $60,000. That price was not an error. The customers were Boeing and the defense and aerospace firms, and what they needed was a system that could hold a document of several thousand pages and not fall over on page 2,400. Nothing on a personal computer could do that for another decade.

It went public in june 1986 on a $24.6 million offering. In the early nineties it added Active Documents, which exposed the document's own structure to LISP so a file could compute and check parts of itself, and in 1992 it shipped Worldview, a portable document viewer that beat Adobe Acrobat to market by a year.

You have probably held Interleaf output. So have I, and neither of us can prove it, because this was software whose entire job was to vanish into a printed page. An aircraft maintenance manual, or the parts catalog that came in the crate with an expensive machine: neither one carries a credit line for the publishing system that set it. That is the bargain a company like this signs when it picks its market. It typesets the documents the physical world runs on and gets its name on none of them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what really happened ~

Desktop publishing came up underneath it. PageMaker, then FrameMaker and eventually Word did steadily more of what Interleaf did on hardware that cost a fraction of a Sun workstation, and being better at ten thousand page documents is a narrower advantage every year as the cheap tools improve. Interleaf moved to selling software instead of systems, then repositioned as a web content company in the late nineties, which is what every company holding a document format was doing at that moment.

BroadVision announced the deal on 26 january 2000 and closed it on 14 april 2000, all in stock, valued at about $851.6 million. That closing date is worth sitting with. 14 april 2000 was the day the Nasdaq dropped close to ten percent, the worst single session of the collapse that had started a month earlier. Interleaf's owners were paid in a currency that was falling apart while the paperwork went through.

~ what replaced it ~

BroadVision renamed the authoring products QuickSilver and kept them alive, slowly. Version 3.0 arrived in 2007 and 3.7 in 2014, which is a release cadence that tells you what kind of product it had become. Aurea Software bought BroadVision in may 2020 and inherited the support obligation. Code from a Cambridge company that sold $60,000 turnkey systems in 1985 is still under maintenance forty years later, four owners along, under a name with no connection to any of it.

What Interleaf demonstrated early was that documents are software. Active Documents put a real language inside the file so the document could generate and validate its own contents, an idea the web then spent twenty years reinventing at considerably lower quality. Worldview was Acrobat before Acrobat and lost regardless, because Adobe gave the reader away for nothing and Interleaf was a company that sold things.

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