Hermes is an unusual system in that it combines modern multi-edition pagination and true WYSIWYG editing with embedded typeset coding. One particular requirement, insisted upon by the WSJ News Desk, was that all coding be invisible to users, and that all formatting be done with one or two simple keystrokes. RAR satisfied this requirement completely.
The pagination project was an unqualified success, with The Seybold Report reporting, under the headline "WSJ Implements a Modern System in Record Time", that "Less than one year after the contract was placed, all sections of the daily newspaper were being produced on the Unisys system."
On September 11, 2001 RAR and the entire WSJ staff had to evacuate the World Financial Center and produce the Journal from a backup location in South Brunswick, New Jersey. (RAR's small contribution was via a dial-up connection from an editor's apartment in Manhattan.) The edition of September 12, which amazingly reached 90% of subscribers, led to the Pulitizer Prize for Breaking News which was shared by the entire journalist and technical staffs.
In early January 2002, while working out of makeshift offices in New Jersey, RAR was handed the prototype of the redesigned Wall Street Journal. This project was the most visible and strategically important for the WSJ in decades. RAR had the responsibility for re-writing every style, tag, template, page and etc., as well as for developing all of the transition plans, including devising the techniques by which, during the critical two weeks before the launch, both the old and the new look WSJ were resident on the same system.
In addition to the sheer volume of work to be done by the April 9 deadline, the redesign project was complicated by these factors:
Despite the many challenges, the project completed on time and at a level of quality that brought mostly rave reviews from pundits and critics around the country.
RAR designed a solution that allowed editors to work in either Word or Quark Xpress, moving effortlessly between them, and with all text edits and typography changes preserved. Text was formatted with easily applied structural tags, and output was supported to both PostScript and ICL devices.
North Atlantic Publishing Systems (NAPS) won the contract to implement RAR's specification by modifying their Macintosh CopyBridge product to run in the Microsoft Windows 95 environment and to supply the additionally needed functionality. The resulting product was named H&J Engine and was introduced at the June 1996 NEXPO convention. It was adopted by CText as an integral part of their Dateline newspaper publishing system. H&J Engine is available from NAPS as an OEM technology and is described in further detail on NAPS' web site, or in the September, 1996 issue of The Seybold Report of Publishing Systems.
The GNMS text composition solution was used between 1997 and 2000 to produce selected portions of The Journal. RAR also built all of the typographic styles to produce The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal Europe.
In January 1999 Dow Jones announced the decision to switch to full pagination, later selecting the Unisys Publishing System. The GNMS project was terminated. Most of the developed software was written off and abandoned, but not the two designed by RAR -- the text composition package, which was used as an interim solution until the new pagination system was ready, and the GGS communications system (described here).
Once again Dow Jones turned to RAR for a solution. RAR performed extensive business analysis to determine the detailed requirements and subsequently produced a technical architecture and individual program specifications.
The resulting system called Global Gateway Services (GGS) provides a general suite of communications services on Sun/Solaris servers to clients running on Win95/98/NT/2000/XP, Sun, Vax, and even PDP11 computers. It is a fully redundant system that provides geographic and protocol independence to its outgoing clients, and a mechanism for catching, storing, routing and forwarding data from its incoming clients. It uses an asynchronous processing model, contains full queuing & error recovery capabilities and provides application-level, end-to-end acknowledgements.
One important capability of GGS is the conversion of text between data formats, while preserving formatting. For this RAR wrote (in C language) table driven filters that convert text between RTF, HTML and a variety of flavors of ASCII. This same mechanism is now used by all WSJ reporters to (transparently) translate their Microsoft Word stories into the UTT language used by the Unisys pagination system. (In 2009 a simple edit to RAR's translation table enabled WSJ reporters to send their stories into the new Methode publishing system.)
When Dow Jones decided to abandon the GNMS system, the Gateway Services package was not part of this announcement. Dow Jones continues to count on GGS as an important part of its strategic communications infrastructure.
This Publishing Planning System allows editors to associate the prospective text book with similar, previously published books and to project book sales over time. They can create alternative designs and packages, and for each they can view projections of pre-press costs, printing costs, revenues and profits.
At the heart of this system is a data base containing historical book sales, effects of design options on costs, and storage for all of the chosen and "what-if" book configurations. RAR performed the systems analysis and the data modeling for this application, wrote the schema and coded dozens of stored procedures that manipulate the underlying data base tables. This work was done in SQL for Sybase.
This work was done as part of a long standing relationship between Simon & Schuster and RAR, which resulted in several information systems that are used by Production, Manufacturing, Inventory Management and Sales departments in addition to Editorial.
In 1999 when Simon & Schuster sold its Prentice Hall division to Pearson Education, the new owners decided to continue using the services of RAR as they work on the tasks of company integration and consolidation.
RAR's project was for news layout, makeup, page assembly, interactive composition and full page output. RAR ran all aspects of this project, specifically he:
The project was a technical success. The July, 1986 edition of The Seybold Report on Publishing Systems wrote "Most impressive of all ... was CSI's Sun Microsystems-based pagination workstation. While all attention has been focused on CSI's artificial intelligence project, the company has quickly and quietly put together a nice page layout terminal."
Unfortunately the project never achieved a corresponding commercial success. When Crosfield Electronics Ltd. bought CSI in 1986, they also bought Hastech, Inc., the company that had pioneered newspaper pagination and which at that time was well into the development of a second generation product. The CSI pagination projects were canceled. The only piece of the RAR development that made it into an actual newspaper was the user interface. Its modular construction enabled it to be easily integrated into CSI's classified pagination workstation, which as of January, 1999 was still running in at least one newspaper.
RAR, who became a CSI employee in late 1974, was named to the development team, and soon became the de facto leader. RAR's role in the development included these tasks; he:
The CSI front-end system was a technical and commercial success. It was generally regarded with Atex and SII as one of the three top news systems in the business, while the classified advertising version, built on the same architecture, was considered the undisputed best. The Seybold Report on Publishing Sytems (vol. 7, no. 16) in a major article gave it an excellent review, including this comment on RAR's approach to news data storage: "One of the real strengths of the 11/70 system is its very comprehensive file management software."
The system was installed in approximately 200 newspapers around the world, including The Wall Street Journal, The Portland Oregonian, The Johannesburg Star, The London Mirror, The Stockholm Dagens Nyeter and O Globo of Brazil.
RAR developed a "LAB" system for use by Bellevue Hospital's emergency room laboratory. The system featured a direct connection for receiving test results from a blood analysis machine. These results arrived in real-time through an A/D converter, while simultaneously lab personnel entered, via teletype, patient identification information, and the system reported results to printers around the hospital.
The most memorable part of the LAB system was its operating system. It performed memory management, disk space management and task swapping. It included device drivers for the A/D converter, disk drive, teletype, printers and a comm line. The application performed data smoothing, peak picking, result conversions, machine calibration, specimen identification, data entry, specimen/patient matching, quality control of the analysis machine and a nightly upload to a larger data base. All of this was done in 8K of twelve bit memory.
This system was accepted by New York University as fulfilling the Masters Degree thesis requirement. And if, by any chance, someone should be wandering the Courant Institute archives and happens upon the documentation, please let me know.