Writing Workflows

A meander through the evolution of Writing-Publishing tools

I witnessed the evolution of writing tech in watching my father work.

Artifacts from his College days put the workflow in the domain of hand-written documents. E.g. a notebook filled in his distinctive cursive with the script of ‘My Fair Lady’ - a linguist’s favourite.

The journalist era resounded with the heavy clackety-clack of the type-writer and carbon reels, accompanied by a tape recorder as a dictaphone. Aided by an impressive typing speed, which saw him run mail marketing campaigns for the mag.

The author era kicked off with the X 8086 / 8088 - and their clumsy 4 GB hard drives, 5.1/4” floppy drives that constantly developed mis-aligned RW heads and caused corrupted discs.
Early models cost 3K a month to rent.
He’d write chapters, deliver the the copy as text files to the Typesetter, who’d ready the camera ready copy, and deliver laser printed proofs for 600 bucks a proofed page - phenomenally expensive in the day. Typesetting was a niche industry in those times.

Then came Compaq and IBM-PC clones, disrupting the PC market. He got his first desktop.
Mono-chrome grey CRTs. MS Word had line-drawn box windows.
Database packages like dBase-III+ and Visual FoxPro - for mail-merge operations.
MS acquired FoxPro just to snuff it and hand its own inferior MS Access a lifeline.

Typewriters were by now replaced by dot-matrix line printers such as Epson LX-300 with perforated edges for auto line-feeder.

With Windows 3.1 and DTP packages Aldus/Adobe PageMaker + CorelDRAW for vector art – came the end of the road for DTP shops.

work evolution:

  • 2005-06: work involved Struts Java MVC framework for web apps and OpenCms (Java, XML based CMS)
  • 2007: JBoss JBPM for biz. process mgmt - workflow based apps in Java, with pauses and persistence between stages handled by the framework, coupled with an Ajax Web2.0 dashboard, and Perforce - a user friendly CVS. Fun days. Araxis Merge was great for diff’ing and IE FireBug for debugging JS/ CSS. Moved to JSF and Apache Shale (JSF simplified). Used Basecamp, onconfluence and twiki for project management those days.