Interview with Larry Bohn

Department: Interviews Editor: Dag Spicer, [email protected] Interview With Larry Bohn David Walden Annals Editorial Board & INTERLEAF, INC., WAS founded in 1981 and was was able to actually get a job at Data General, acquired by Broadvision in 2000. Larry Bohn which was just an emerging company in the was with Interleaf in 1986–1993, serving in a vari- area, and I was a software technical writer. I ety of senior management positions. This inter- wrote books about programming computers, view took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that led me to my interest in document on September 24, 2019, at his place of work, Gen- processing because it was really at the very eral Catalyst. birthofwordprocessing,text processing, etc. Walden: Please tell me about your youth and I was at Data General for a couple of years, and education. then I went to Digital Equipment Corporation, Bohn: I grew up in Milton, Mass. I went to where I managed a couple of groups. This was public schools. My dad ran a luncheonette in the time when some fundamental parts of the Boston, and he died when I was 16 years old. He declarative markup language was being devel- had been a World War II pilot, got shot down, oped, called SGML, along with the way in spent a couple of years in a POW camp, so as a which you could develop documents and result of that I actually inherited his GI benefits, structure documents, etc. I became very inter- and so I was able to go to college. I went to ested in that and ultimately went to Apollo UMass, majored in English, came out, went to Computer. Apollo was a workstation company. graduate school at Clark University, and got a It was one of the first companies to integrate master’s degree in English Linguistics while I text and graphics, and so it provided the bene- taught writing. I taught writing for a couple of fit of actually being able to show a document years at junior colleges in the Boston area and in what was called WYSIWYG form, What You realized this was not something that I wanted to See Is What You Get, and it was one of the first do for the rest of my life. platforms at this startup in Cambridge called I had a couple of skills. I was a good writer, Interleaf—actually built its software on it. and I knew a little bit about computers from Walden: At Digital, you said you led a couple taking one Fortran programming course; so, I of groups. Bohn: They were the Operating System Docu- Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAHC.2020.2968141 mentation Group; I led that; and then I had a Date of current version 6 March 2020. small development group that was building January-March 2020 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1058-6180 ß 2020 IEEE 51 Interviews some software to automate the text processing a license deal between Interleaf and Apollo so business. everyone at Apollo could use the Interleaf soft- Walden: Before we move on to Interleaf, I ware. It was a big thing for Interleaf, and it was a read your website where it talks about your big thing for Apollo. unusual path to becoming a venture capitalist: Walden: Early software before any real delivering groceries, driving a taxi, working on a release? farm, being a short-order cook, and managing a Bohn: No, it was just being released, so I pool hall. helped them get Apollo systems. Originally the Bohn: That was before and while I was going software was developed on Sun’s Microsystems, to college. And then, when I went to college I did which was a competitor. I helped fund the effort work on a farm, sadly, in exchange for housing, for them to port the software to Apollo, and then and I managed a pool hall in college. we used that within Apollo. About a year later, I I was sort of the scrappy guy. I had to sort of actually talked to Dave and Harry and joined the find my way early on and help a family whose company as head of product planning at Interleaf. dad had passed away; so I would say I learned to The first job I had there was Vice President of work hard early on, and that has benefited me Product Planning, working with the development throughout my life. group on sort of where the product should go, Walden: So at Apollo you were already seeing how it should be built, what the market was, etc. text and graphics. Walden: What technologies were there from Bohn: Yes. Just to back up: I learned a lot the TeX world that you used? Do you remember about document processing at Digital because it by any chance? was at the beginning of when Donald Knuth, who Bohn: TeX was a very low-level language for was a famous computer scientist, developed document processing, but there was a higher- what was called TeX, and TeX was a program- level version called Scribe, and Scribe was a ming language for documents. I learned a lot more declarative language. I think it might have about that and was very interested in the whole even used TeX. Brian Reid developed it, and it way in which computer markup worked, typeset- became very popular, and it was something that ting, and the interface to typesetting. It was a we started to use at Apollo to do our documenta- very proprietary world that was starting to open tion and to use it so that we could produce both up, and I became very fluent in the technologies high quality copy and online versions. So these that were emerging around document process- were the main sort of developments in document ing. I then went to Apollo. The thing about Apollo processing at the time; and so when I went to was it was the first workstation with a big screen. Interleaf, Interleaf was very different because You could see a document, and Apollo was very Interleaf was a completely interactive system. It interested in moving the whole documentation did not rely on any sort of low-level language. It process online so people could retrieve docu- did not rely on actually putting declarative ments electronically. I actually led a project with markers in a document. It had a user interface a small development group that was in the docu- that allowed you to create what are called com- ment retrieval business, using some underlying ponents, and so it was really in many ways the technologies around TeX to do it. Then, we first interactive structured document editor. found Interleaf, a startup company in Cam- Walden: My understanding is that some of at bridge—very small. It was a handful of people, least the Interleaf prototype came from the probably ten people, but it was building some- Etude project at MIT. thing very, very advanced. I got to know the Bohn: A number of people from the Etude founders. project, which was Mike Hammer’s project. That Walden: This is while you were still at Apollo. was a project in office automation. The docu- Bohn: This is while I am still at Apollo. I met ment processing was one of the central parts of the founders of Interleaf, Dave [Boucher] and that. I would say that was the basis for Interleaf. Harry [George]. I met the development team, The inspiration came largely from Xerox PARC Bob Morris, Steve Pelletier, etc., and I negotiated and the Star document editor. The Etude project 52 IEEE Annals of the History of Computing was sort of the foodstuff of the first Interleaf that was fundamentally enabled by high-perfor- version. mance workstations. Walden: One of the things I have been trying Walden: I have read in one of the Seybold to understand is that while Etude was written in Reports that when Dave Boucher was invited to CLU at MIT, I believe Interleaf’s original project an early Seybold technical publishing meeting, was written in C. Do you know who did that he turned it down because he said, “We’re not a conversion? technical publisher. We’re in the graphic arts Bohn: I cannot say who actually did the business.” And then a year later, he said, conversion. Most of the Interleaf people who “Whoops, we are in the ...” were developers were very strong C develop- Bohn: What happened to the company, ers, and so the original product was written in which is true of a lot of startups, is that they C. Ultimately one of the things that Interleaf basically believed that they were creating a new innovated on was building an interpreter as kind of product that could be a widespread prod- the customization layer. It was an AI language uct basically like a super word processor. Some called Lisp. of the fundamental benefits were: it was WYSI- Walden: So, at the very beginning, the pro- WYG, it was easy to use, it was highly interactive. grammers, as far as I can tell, who were at the But one of the things they failed to realize was company to for instance get the first demo going that the cost of deploying an Interleaf system in 1984 were Bern Niamir ... was so high because it ran on a 32-bit worksta- Bohn: He came from MIT. He was sort of the tion, which cost $80 000. That relegated it to a person who came from the MIT project, but he sort of specialized high-end market.

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