Publish & Subscribe + "InterApplication Communication"

[beachycove]

I came across this in my cyber-travels, which tells us something of what Apple thought was going to be huge back in the early 90s. It is a magazine advert selling the then-new Claris Resolve, recently brought into the Claris fold from a separate company and given an overhaul. The paragraph of interest reads:

Yet perhaps the most shining quality of Claris Resolve is how it exploits System 7's most powerful functionalities — Publish & Subscribe and InterApplication Communication. So you can effortlessly combine the power of Claris Resolve with other applications.

Resolve really was a nice product — which is here said to be overshadowed by something newly introduced in System 7.

Now, here we are, the zealots. Did any of even us really use these "most powerful functionalities" back in those days? And if not, why not?

 

[Scott Baret]

I have had Resolve since 1992 (I believe the original product was called Wingz before Claris bought it) and honestly have never used publish and subscribe. Claris applications did have it, but the other productivity programs I had at the time were pre-System 7 (MacDraw II, MS Works 2, older MacWrite, etc). I finally got something that supported it six years ago in MacWrite Pro, but haven't sat down to work with that feature. Think of it as an odd hybrid of the clipboard, a folder, and a HyperCard stack in terms of how it worked.

 

[Bunsen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

 

[beachycove]

Actually OpenDoc was later, and technologically different, but yes, it was clearly part of the same family of ideas. OpenDoc more or less extended them, obviously in an attempt to compete with Microsoft's monolithic apps and in an effort to woo small developers, in some ways rather like is happening today with the iphone/ipad.

What surprised me about the line quoted in relation to Apple Events and so forth (how Apple clearly thought that this was going to be a really big thing) applies even more to OpenDoc (which was going to be key in Copland). Almost everybody just used standalone software products, yet Apple was determined to promote & work at a different model of software use.

Was it, do you suppose, their version of what increasing reliance on networks might mean? Like a version of "cloud" computing, you would not need the software on your machine in an organization, because it could be running somewhere else in an Appletalk network?

Actually, I think it was a brilliant idea. Shame it didn't work.

 

[Bunsen]

It's the wave of the future }

 

[Charlieman]

Excel 4 and Word 5.x were amongst the first applications to include Publish and Subscribe. They were written in one of those periods when Microsoft stuck to Apple's guidelines so two cracking applications were written. Alas, they weren't scriptable but at the time of release, Apple didn't have a useful version of AppleScript either.

Publish and Subscribe was all very clever and it worked, but it was beyond what most users expected. At its most basic level, P & S allowed users to create compound documents with live content, that updated when the source document was changed. In a networked environment -- and most users were just getting use to the idea when System 7 appeared -- P & S could be used for collaborative working.

Content management and document management systems for desktop PC users are in a similar position today. They are potentially very powerful but companies need to commit developers to use them in their organisations. And companies don't do it because it has an up front cost. Thus they are relegated to specialist divisions (law, medical research, aero engineering etc) where they are required to meet legislation.

And across the world, workers create documents that are stored on a mish mash of servers, passed around in multiple versions as email attachments. The only way that anyone can find anything is by "search", which isn't going to convince any regulatory authority that companies are managing information.