It was used by IBM DisplayWriter 4 and 5 word processors on System/360 and 370 mainframe computers, and OfficeVision/400 to allow transfer of formatted documents to other systems.
[1] RFT has a counterpart Final-Form Text (abbreviated FFT or FFT-DCA), which was not intended to be editable and was output-only.
These architects were responsible for forming IBM consensus for the design of the data streams and to take the work into the international standards arena.
This decision was based in part on the experience gained over the acceptance of GML into an international SGML standard.
[1] The PC world had decided on HTML (believed to be an application of the SGML international standard) and used portions of it for their purposes.
The international standard was set in 2008, with input from the users, who decided to use the products offered in great numbers.
The decision was driven by the need for the product, and the solution found was far more acceptable than the standards committees could design.
Over 10 years of work had not produced an acceptable method, and the PC computing community created what they needed in less time.