The importance of Scribe was that it introduced semantic markup. Previously, formatters -- at least, all those I ever used or heard of -- had only physical mar

The importance of Scribe was that it introduced semantic markup. Previously, formatters -- at least, all those I ever used or heard of -- had only physical markup commands: change to this font, indent by this much, insert this much vertical space, etc. Semantic markup, in contrast, specifies the intent rather than the details: emphasize this phrase, make a heading, make a numbered or bulleted list, etc. While Scribe itself was never used very widely -- it ran on PDP-10s, as I recall, and was quite slow -- Reid's ideas influenced a number of other designs, most notably those of HTML and LaTeX. (Less notably, but I can't resist mentioning: there was a microcomputer re-implementation of much of Scribe that I did some work on in 1980-1983, that was initially called Scribble, then the FinalWord formatter, and eventually the Borland Sprint formatter [0] [1].) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(markup_language) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)