Publish and Subscribe was a document linking model introduced by
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
in
System 7
System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple Co ...
. Named the Edition Manager in developer documentation, it extended the existing
cut and paste
In human–computer interaction and user interface design, cut, copy, and paste are related commands that offer an interprocess communication technique for transferring data through a computer's user interface. The ''cut'' command removes the ...
editing model with a notification system; "subscribers" could include parts of "published" documents within themselves, and changes to the original published document would be noticed and updated by the subscribers. To the user the system was very similar to cut and paste in concept; material would be selected from the source document and published, creating an ''edition file'', then placed into the subscriber by selecting that clipping file and positioning it inside the document.
In general terms the concept was very similar to
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
's
Object Linking and Embedding
Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) is a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control Extension (OCX), a way to develop and use custom user i ...
1.0 system. Unlike OLE, the Edition Manager was comparatively complex from a programming standpoint. Suffering from
second system effect, it included features intended to make it better than OLE, including support for non-rectangular areas, network notifications and an extensive
user interface
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...
. A result of this complexity was poor uptake among developers, and applications providing Publish and Subscribe were few and far between. One of the few products to use it effectively was
Claris
Claris International Inc., formerly FileMaker Inc., is a computer software development company formed as a subsidiary company of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) in 1987. It was given the source code and copyrights to several programs that were ...
's suite of software, including
ClarisWorks
AppleWorks was an integrated office suite containing a word processor, database, and spreadsheet. It was developed by Rupert Lissner for Apple Computer, originally for the Apple II platform and launched in 1984, and was later reworked for the Ma ...
which had already built a system somewhat similar in concept, but required extensive changes to make its own system work with
OpenDoc
OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). It is one of Apple's ear ...
.
At the time many in the industry felt that the Publish and Subscribe concept was the "next big thing". Apple and Microsoft were not the only two companies trying to introduce such a system; most major software vendors attempted to introduce similar systems, and
NeXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprieta ...
included a version. However users did not find the system useful. Further it was sometimes confusing to use; if the document included live links it was no longer possible to simply copy it to a
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
(for instance), the clipping file had to be copied as well. In addition, opening their applications to new component developers who would compete to provide the best editors was not attractive to large corporations such as Microsoft and Adobe.
See also
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References
External links
Internet Archive: Details: Macintosh System 7.0Mac OS 7.0 upgrade kit ad
{{DEFAULTSORT:Publish And Subscribe
User interface techniques
Macintosh operating systems