GenCode
The idea of using markup languages in computer text processing was probably first publicly presented by publishing executive William W. Tunnicliffe at a conference in 1967, although he preferred to call it “generic coding.” It can be seen as a response to the emergence of programs such as RUNOFF that each used their own control notations, often specific to the target typesetting device. In the 1970s, Tunnicliffe led the development of a standard called GenCode for the publishing industry and later was the first chair of theInternational Organization for Standardization committee that created SGML, the first standard descriptive markup language. Book designer Stanley Rice published speculation along similar lines in 1970. [5] Brian Reid, in his 1980 dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University, developed the theory and a working implementation of descriptive markup in actual use.
However, IBM researcher Charles Goldfarb is more commonly seen today as the “father” of markup languages. Goldfarb hit upon the basic idea while working on a primitive document management system intended for law firms in 1969, and helped inventIBM GML later that same year. GML was first publicly disclosed in 1973.
In 1975, Goldfarb moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Silicon Valley and became a product planner at the IBM Almaden Research Center. There, he convinced IBM’s executives to deploy GML commercially in 1978 as part of IBM’s Document Composition Facility product, and it was widely used in business within a few years.
Development informally began in 1978 on what ultimately became the SGML standard, which was based on both GML and GenCode; Goldfarb eventually became chair of the SGML committee. SGML was first and released by ISO as the ISO 8879 standard in October 1986.
Some early examples of computer markup languages available outside the publishing industry can be found in typesetting tools on Unix systems such as troff and nroff. In these systems, formatting commands were inserted into the document text so that typesetting software could format the text according to the editor’s specifications. It was atrial and error iterative process to get a document printed correctly. Availability of WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) publishing software supplanted much use of these languages among casual users, though serious publishing work still uses markup to specify the non-visual structure of texts, and WYSIWYG editors now usually save documents in a markup-language-based format.