Bill Tunnicliffe Remembered

An early champion of SGML, Bill Tunnicliffe, passed away recently.

Harvey Bingham brought Bill's death to the attention of the SGML community:

"We remember with thanks one of the founders of SGML. Quoting from Appendix A of The SGML Handbook, Goldfarb, pg 567, on the Generic Coding Concept.

[material copyright 1989, SGML Users Group] 'Historically, electronic manuscripts contained control codes or macros that caused the document to be formatted in a particular way ("specific coding"). In contrast, generic coding, which began in the late 1960s, uses descriptive tags (for example, "heading", rather than "format-17"). Many credit the start of the generic coding movement to a presentation made by William Tunnicliffe, chairman of the Graphic Communications Association (GCA) Composition Committee, during a meeting at the Canadian Government Printing Office in September 1967: his topic -- the separation of information content of documents from their format.'

Sharon Adler presented a tribute to Bill at the GCA's TechDoc meeting in Boston in 1989. I believe that was the last time we thanked him for getting us going."

Joan Smith remembered Bill Tunnicliffe this way:

"He made a great contribution to SGML. The concept he had of divorcing form from content is almost 30 years old. One assumes he thought of it before he delivered the address to the Canadian GPO in 1967. I remember him telling me that he was setting the yellow pages regularly, and thought there must be a better way of doing it. So, the specific formatting codes were added to the content only when needed -- hence generic coding being born. Then the idea was input to ANSI. When he heard of the work Charles was doing on GML at IBM, Bill approached Charles to get him to join the ANSI committee. The role Bill played with the GCA conferences in Europe is also well known; it was he, on behalf of the GCA, who chaired the Oxford ('84) and Heidelberg ('85) conferences. He took over convenorship of the working group within ISO, chairing the first ISO meeting of WG8 in Europe".

My fondest memory of Bill was his 'sundown calls'. Bill had a rule he never violated. When he owed someone a 'thank you', he delivered it before sundown of the same day. This rule typified a gentleman who played a major role in the birth of SGML.

Pam Gennusa