Interleaf

I worked at Interleaf from from 1989 through 1994. We built a high end structured document editor and publishing system, initially on workstations (Sun, HP, Apollo) and then later on PCs and Macs. An example customer was Boeing, who used Interleaf with hundreds of Boeing technical writers to document everything about their aircraft.

My main influencers were Joe Mahoney, Kimbo Mundy, Ethan Jacobson, Bill O'Donnell, Mark Dionne, Tom Polucci, Raman Tenneti, Deborah Landsman, Steve Pelletier, and Larry Bohn. It was at Interleaf that I learned how to run software teams, and how to do UI design and usability testing.

I started as a programmer in the "prodvlp" group, which was a team of about a dozen really strong engineers building the core product. The thing I most enjoyed working on was rebuilding the user interface in Lisp so that people could build document-based applications, and on helping create "active documents" where third-parties could build app and embed code inside of documents. At one point I become SVP Engineering, and then my last year there, I become SVP Product Management and Marketing.

• Interleaf Wikipedia
• An extensible, object-oriented system for active documents, Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing, 1990, pp. 263-276.
• Inteleaf Active Documents, Electronic Publishing, vol. 7(2), pp. 75-87 (June 1994).
• Interleaf IEEE (March 2020)
• Larry Bohn Interview (March, 2020)