Electronic Book Technologies' Dynatext - SGML compiler - Text tools: beyond search and retrieval

RELease 1.0, July 31, 1991

Electronic Book is the first company to implement the simple idea of a broad-based SGML hypertext compiler - no more and no less. To use it, the builder-user must supply an SGML-compliant document including tags (typically built with an SGML editor such as SoftQuad's Author/Editor or Datalogics' WriterStation or Exoterica CheckMark, or translated from some other markup scheme).

It also needs a style sheet (using an interactive graphical style editor and fill-in-the-blanks for rules and commands) to define the document's structure and desired fonts for the various text objects, button styles for the hypertext links. Then DynaText will automatically build a hypertext document for interactive display on your "choice" of platforms, starting with Sun UNIX and Windows soon. Graphics and other non-text objects are represented as icons or displayed in separate windows, while the text remains in its own window wrapping to fit as the window is resized). The user gets a hypertext document that he can't alter or revise, but he can fetch (through executable links) the latest data from external databases; he can also annotate the text and provide parameters to embedded commands. And of course he can browse through the document, search for words, follow links and select views. Electronic Book offers a limited-use license for the compiler of $10,000 for 1000 units (the creation of 1000 documents, with an unlimited number of copies of each). Viewers for the resulting hypertext documents cost $500 per simultaneous viewer or less with quantity discounts. Electronic Book was founded in July 1989 by Lou Reynolds, who learned about the importance of documentation as vp of marketing at Cadre, a leading CASE company in Providence, RI. He learned about hypertext from Andy Van Dam at Brown University, a hotbed of hypertext activity; Van Dam is now on EBT's technical advisory board. EBT's developers are also all from Brown, including DynaText's chief architect Steven DeRose, a computational linguist and co-author of the paper cited on page 10. Reynolds financed the startup with $50,000 of his own (from Cadre stock), and has kept the company to 10 people so far. It delivered its first product early this year and made a profit in the first quarter. Reynolds wants to keep EBT as mostly a development house: The goal is to sell only to experienced customers or through resellers and consultants with SGML expertise who can help their customers prepare SGML documents. Customers at 36 sites worldwide include Westinghouse, Computer Sciences, Grumman, Boeing, Bellcore, Prime, HP, Alcatel and CERN, the Center for European Nuclear Research (the acronym is from the French).