Adobe FrameMaker was a word or document processor for large or complex documents, including structured documents. It was originally developed by Frame Technology Corporation, which was bought by Adobe in October 1995.

Charles "Nick" Corfield, a mathematician decided to write a What You See Is What You Get WYSIWYG document editor on a Sun-2 workstation while doing his Master's degree at Columbia University. The idea came from his roommate, Ben Meiry, who went to work at Sun Microsystems. They saw that there was a market for a powerful and flexible desktop publishing (DTP) product for the professional market, as the only current substantial DTP product  was Interleaf, which ran on Sun workstations in 1981.

Meiry acquiring the hardware, software, and technical connections to get Corfield started while he was still finishing his degree.

Corfield worked quickly so that after only a few months, Corfield had completed a prototype of FrameMaker which was liked by salesmen at the fledgling Sun Microsystems, which needed commercial applications to showcase their workstations  graphics. They used the prototype demonstrations so that FrameMaker got plenty of exposure in the Unix workstation arena.

Steve Kirsch saw the demo and used the money he earned from Mouse Systems to fund Frame Technology Corp., to commercialize the software.

Originally written for SunOS (a variant of UNIX) on Sun machines, FrameMaker was a popular technical writing tool, and the company was profitable early on. Because of the flourishing desktop publishing market on the Apple Macintosh, the software was ported to the Mac as its second platform.

In the early 1990s, UNIX workstation vendors—Apollo, Data General, MIPS, Motorola and Sony—funded an OEM version for their platforms. Eventually, FrameMaker ran on more than thirteen UNIX platforms, including NeXT's NeXTSTEP  operating system.

FrameMaker has two ways of approaching documents: structured and unstructured.

• Structured FrameMaker is used to achieve consistency in documentation within industries such as aerospace, where several models of the same complex product exist, or pharmaceuticals, where translation and standardization are important requirements in communications about products. Structured FrameMaker uses SGML and XML concepts. 
• Unstructured FrameMaker uses tagged paragraphs without any imposed logical structure, except that expressed by the author’s concept, topic organization, and the formatting supplied by paragraph tags.

FrameMaker 2.0 was the second major version of the FrameMaker document processor that was released by Frame Technology.

A pre-alpha demo version of FrameMaker 2.0 was included with NeXTSTEP 0.9 in April 1989. The Macintosh version became available in May 1990. Version 2.1 added international support, such European paper sizes, metric measurements, and localization for the Japanese market.

Platform: NeXTcube or NeXTstation

               NeXTSTEP 2.0

Application Software (AS:) Desk Top Publishing (DTP)

Version: 2.0 1991

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