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In Memoriam: Instant Update

In the early nineties, On Technologies released a wonderful product, called Instant Update, which allowed multiple workers to view and edit a shared rich text document. Many authors could edit the document at once, changes to separate paragraphs were resolved automatically, and a simple dialog box let you choose how to resolve each conflict. Each paragraph was marked as to who last modified it when.

Unlike Microsoft Word, which now does some of this (but didn’t then), publishing your changes was as simple as pressing the “Update” button.

At Apple Cambridge, we used this to collaborate on design discussions within the office, and between Cambridge and California. (Larry Tesler was a frequent contributor from there.)

I’ve missed this tool for a long time. Lately, at Laszlo we’ve been using a wiki for technical and planning discussions. This seems to be the fad in engineering organizations, and justly so.

A wiki is just Instant Update without the wysiwyg interface, without the line-by-line conflict resolution, but implemented as a web application, so that it can be universally deployed.

This was written by Oliver. Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2003, at 9:05 pm. Filed under Technology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

5 Comments

  1. Ed Hardebeck wrote:

    Oliver,

    Thanks for remembering. Kleiner Perkins was one of our investors and liked it too, I made a special version once with page breaking just for John Doerr. Stewart Alsop praised it once. It seems like almost nobody else ever used it.

    Too bad. It was very elegant.

    Ed Hardebeck
    (One of the three developers of Instant Update long ago).

    Monday, November 24, 2003 at 1:22 am | Permalink
  2. Gary Burd wrote:

    Thanks Oliver. It’s good to hear that Instant Update had a following somewhere.

    Gary Burd
    (Another of the three developers of Instant Update)

    Monday, January 19, 2004 at 9:45 pm | Permalink
  3. Mark Krasno wrote:

    Is there any way to still get (purchase)copies of Instant update or common knowledge to setup the server and client setup. I once talked to On Technology and no one seemed to know about it?
    thanks for any help, i loved IU

    Mark Krasno

    Thursday, March 11, 2004 at 2:44 pm | Permalink
  4. Landon Dyer wrote:

    We used Instant Update on the Newton team to author and comment on our design documents. I haven’t seen IU’s equal since, and my current team could sure use it.

    Nice work, thanks guys.

    Friday, March 12, 2004 at 4:36 am | Permalink
  5. White Boards wrote:

    I was going to mention that most rich text editors these days such as Word have these abilities now and actually work very well. Unfortunately, these tools were not available back then!

    Monday, April 28, 2008 at 12:20 pm | Permalink