Babelfish History

About seven years ago, Dave Hecker of Seven Hills came up with an idea: wouldnÕt
it be nice to have an import/export tool available so application developers
wouldnÕt have to keep reinventing the wheel every time they wrote a new
application?

For example, SuperConvert could import a slew of graphic formats, and
GraphicWriterÊIII could import a subset of those formats. WouldnÕt it be nice if
both of those applications could share the same abilities? And if we decided to
add a new graphic format, wouldnÕt it be nice to write the import routine once
instead of over and over again for every application we wanted to add the
capability to?

In November 1991 he discussed his ideas with Steve Stephenson (author of Disk
Access, Disk AccessÊII, Independence, etc.) and over the next few months they
developed and refined specifications for ÒBabelfishÓ. Around May 1992 the
specifications were distributed to the Òbig namesÓ at the time and, after many
months of tweaking, we finally had a solid specification--just around the time
that Steve got hired by Apple.

More months went by, and eventually Seven Hills hired Bill Tudor to write the
core part of Babelfish. Bill began coding in June 1993. Over the next few months
he wrote the core Babelfish code, a testing application, a file conversion NDA,
and several translators.

Once the core Babelfish was done, our next goal was to incorporate support for it
into our products. Unfortunately, about that time sales of our IIGS products were
slowing, and we couldnÕt afford to pay for some of the ÒkeyÓ translators we would
have needed for products like GraphicWriterÊIII. As a result, Babelfish collected
dust for several years now...a great idea that we just couldnÕt afford to
fulfill.

However, Babelfish wouldnÕt go away. Through their contributions, Ian Brumby,
Richard Bennett, and Ewen Wannop breathed life into the project. Ian quietly
added support for importing graphics through Babelfish into SuperConvert v4.0,
and  wrote a pile of graphic translators. Then with the development of Spectrum
Internet Suite (SpectrumÕs web browser written by Ewen Wannop and Geoff Weiss),
Richard saw the need for a utility that could export HTML (HyperText Markup
Language) files, and he decided to write it as a Babelfish translator. Most
recently, Ewen took charge of finalizing the Babelfish source code.

And now you have the result! We hope you enjoy Babelfish.

--Seven Hills