Scribe (word processing)
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Scribe was a markup language and word processing system, developed by Brian Reid, and the subject of his 1980 doctoral dissertation, for which he received the Association for Computing Machinery's Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1982. Scribe was a pioneer in the use of descriptive markup. Reid presented a paper describing Scribe in the same conference session in 1981 in which Charles Goldfarb presented GML, the immediate predecessor of SGML.
The Scribe language was revolutionary when it was proposed, because it involved for the first time a clean separation of structure and format .
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[edit] History
[edit] Beginnings
Scribe was first designed and developed by Brian Reid, when he was at Carnegie Mellon University.
[edit] Scribe sold to Unilogic
In 1979, at the end of his graduate-student career, Reid sold Scribe to a Pittsburgh-area software company called Unilogic, founded by Michael I. Shamos, another Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, to market the program. Reid said he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on developers that would keep it from going into the public domain.
Michael Shamos was embroiled in a dispute with Carnegie Mellon administrators over the intellectual-property rights to Scribe. The dispute with the administration was settled out of court, and the university conceded it had no claim to Scribe [1].
[edit] Time-bomb
Reid agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.
Richard Stallman, saw this as a betrayal of the programmer ethos. Instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, Reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access (see Decline of MIT's hacker culture) [2].
[edit] Using Scribe Word Processor
Using Scribe involved a two phase process :
- Typing a manuscript file using any text editor, conforming to the Scribe markup.
- Processing this file through the Scribe compiler to generate an associated document file, which can be printed.
The Scribe markup language defined the words, lines, pages, spacing, headings, footings, footnotes, numbering, tables of contents, etc, in a way similar to nowadays HTML. The Scribe compiler used a data base of Styles (containing document format definitions), which defined the rules for formatting a document in a particular style.
Because of the clean separation between the content (structure) of the document, and its style (format), writers needed not to concern themselves with the details of formatting.
