The first was to represent FrameMaker documents in a relatively simple ASCII-based format, which can be produced or understood by other software systems and also by human operators.

The prototype caught the eye of salesmen at the fledgling Sun Microsystems, which lacked commercial applications to showcase the graphics capabilities of their workstations.

Kirsch and Blakeslee were founding members of Mouse Systems, where they brought on Murray as Director of Application Software Development.

[9] Originally written for SunOS (a variant of UNIX) on Sun machines, FrameMaker was a popular technical writing tool, and the company was profitable early on.

In the early 1990s, a wave of UNIX workstation vendors—Apollo, Data General, MIPS, Motorola and Sony—provided funding to Frame Technology for an OEM version for their platforms.

At this point, FrameMaker was considered an extraordinary product for its day, not only enabling authors to produce highly structured documents with relative ease, but also giving users a great deal of typographical control in a reasonably intuitive and totally WYSIWYG way.

Up to this point, FrameMaker had been targeting a professional market for highly technical publications, such as the maintenance manuals for the Boeing 777 project, and licensed each copy for $2,500.

A tool designed for a 1,000-page manual was too cumbersome and difficult for an average home user to type a one-page letter.

Today, Adobe FrameMaker is still a widely used publication tool for technical writers, although no version has been released for the Mac OS X operating system, limiting use of the product.

The decision to cancel FrameMaker for OS X caused considerable friction between Adobe and Mac users, including Apple itself, which relied on it for creating documentation.

Several formats, including DocBook XML, target authors of technical documents about computer hardware and software.