Interleaf, Inc. was a company that created computer software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Founded in 1981, its initial product was the first commercial document processor that integrated text and graphics editing, producing WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") output at near-typeset quality. It also had early products in the document management, electronic publishing, and Web publishing spaces. Interleaf's "Active Documents" functionality, integrated into its text and graphics editing products in the early 1990s, was the first to give document creators programmatic access (via LISP) to virtually all of the document's elements, structures, and software capabilities.

Broadvision acquired Interleaf in January 2000, and Aurea Software Inc. acquired Broadvision in May 2020.

Interleaf's headquarters was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and later moved to Waltham, Massachusetts.

History

Interleaf was founded by David Boucher and Harry George in 1981. Boucher served as chief executive officer from 1981 until 1992; George served as chief financial officer. Earlier, both were among the founders of Kurzweil Computer Products. Significant technology came from MIT's Office Automation Group led by Michael Hammer, a member of Interleaf's board of directors; Bahram (Bern) Niamir, who had been in that group, brought many ideas from its Etude system, a pioneering WYSIWYG editor. Other early personnel came from NBI, Inc. and Wang Labs. The company initially produced "turnkey" systems, that is, combinations of hardware and software integrated by the company. It initially ran on workstations from Sun Microsystems and Apollo Computers, but later ported its software to workstations made by Digital Equipment Corporation, HP, IBM and SGI, and later still, to the Apple Macintosh II and the IBM Personal Computer.

Interleaf sold its first products in 1984-5.

In 1990, Interleaf moved from Cambridge to Waltham, MA.

The company was bought by Broadvision in 2000, which renamed its authoring products "Quicksilver". The availability of Quicksilver 3.0 was announced in March 2007. The availability of QuickSilver 3.5 was announced in May 2010. QuickSilver 3.7 was released in July 2014. Quicksilver is currently sold and supported by Aurea Software, Inc. Worldview allowed document sets created with Interleaf's technical publishing tools to be viewed on workstations, Macintoshes, and PCs, retaining page fidelity, and including hyperlinks among the pages

Interleaf WorldView Press

Worldview Press prepared documents for online viewing via Worldview. It imported documents created not only with Interleaf's systems but by the other major document creation and graphic systems of the time, including Microsoft Word, PostScript, TIFF and SGML. Using Interleaf's technical publishing system's ability to reformat documents rapidly, Worldview Press enabled the creation of documents formatted for particular delivery vehicles. For example, the same documents could be formatted for reading on a small laptop screen or for a large workstation's monitor. WorldView Press, developed in Lisp, was conceived and implemented by Jim Giza.

Interleaf Cyberleaf

As the World Wide Web became increasingly adopted as the preferred mechanism for distributing electronic documents, Interleaf added Cyberleaf, a version of the WorldView Press that produced HTML documents.

Bill O'Donnell was the designer and developer of Cyberleaf. Later versions were worked on by Brenda White.

Competitors

In the technical authoring and publishing area, Framemaker and Ventura Publisher became major competitors.

In the document management area, Interleaf competed with Documentum.

In the electronic distribution area, Adobe Acrobat, launched after Interleaf Worldview, became the dominant software.

References

  • QuickSilver official site
  • "Interleaf, Inc.—1981 to 2000", preprint, Mark Dionne and David Walden, 2019. This is "the author’s version of an article that has been published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. Changes were made to this version by the publisher prior to publication. The final version of record is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2020.29681"
  • [http://www.tagwrite.com/interleaf_quicksilver.html] A discussion of how to precisely convert Interleaf/Quicksilver including graphics, tables, equations, styles, etc.