Living Videotext

~ the goodbye ~

An outliner is a text editor that knows a document is a tree. Every line carries a level, every line collapses to hide whatever hangs beneath it, and moving a heading moves the branch with it. That sounds like a feature of something else. In 1983 it was a whole category, and Living Videotext was the company that owned the category.

Dave Winer founded it in 1983 and the first product was ThinkTank, which he had written for the Apple II. It came to the IBM PC and then to the Macintosh, and by April 1985 the Mac version had sold thirty thousand copies, which was serious money for a single-purpose tool on a machine barely a year old. There was also Ready, a version that stayed resident in memory on a PC so an outline could be pulled up over whatever else was on the screen, which was a strange and briefly popular way to build software.

MORE arrived in 1986 and it is the one that gets remembered. Winer had started on it at the end of 1984, and the idea was that once a document is a tree, the tree can be drawn. You typed an outline and one command turned it into a chart or a bullet slide, which meant an outliner had quietly become presentation software without anyone deciding to make presentation software. It looked good coming out of a LaserWriter, and people who used it in 1987 were still saying twenty years later that nothing since had matched it.

In February 1987 Winer met Bill Gates, who wrote a letter of intent to buy Living Videotext with Microsoft shares. That deal did not close. Microsoft bought Forethought five months later instead and got PowerPoint. Living Videotext merged into Symantec in September 1987 in a stock transaction, and Winer came out of it with enough money that he never needed a job again.

None of this reached Turkey and none of it reached me. I was three years old, and the Macintosh had close to no presence here at any price for years afterward. Winer's work did arrive eventually, about fifteen years later and in an entirely different shape, as the feed formats sitting under the blogs I read in the 2000s. Finding out much later that the same person had spent the eighties selling Mac outliners rearranged my sense of where that whole generation of software came from.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

Microsoft's near-miss is the good joke here. Gates wanted the outliner company in February 1987 and ended up with the presentation company in July, and MORE was already both of those things at once. Had the Living Videotext letter of intent closed, the standard corporate slide tool of the next forty years might have been an outline that drew itself.

That is a materially different way to stand in front of a room. PowerPoint starts from the slide, and everything you type is typed into a rectangle that already exists. MORE started from the argument and generated the rectangles afterward, which puts the structure of what you are saying first and the decoration second. Two products competing for the same desk in the same year, and the industry picked the one that made the shape of the thought optional.

~ the long tail ~

Symantec kept MORE going to version 3.1 in 1991 and then let it lapse, which is roughly what a utilities and security company does with an outliner it inherited in a merger. The product had no obvious home there and no successor anywhere else, and outlining went back to being a feature inside word processors, where it has stayed and where almost nobody turns it on.

Winer went on to UserLand Software, where Frontier and then Radio UserLand led to the XML formats that carried weblog posts and audio enclosures around the web for the next two decades. Nobody draws the line between the two halves of that career, and it is straight: the man who standardized the feed had spent his twenties on the proposition that a document is a tree you can fold. A feed is a folded document that a machine unfolds on the other end.

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