The disintermediation of Torquemada the Inquisitor: Do we dare interrogate ourselves about the future of real estate representation? And: What fate awaits all dinosaurs?

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In 1991, I was approached by Garry Fairbairn (he must have been a beautiful baby) of the Western Producer in Saskatoon (or maybe it was Regina), Saskatchewan, Canada to write a simple batch global search and replace utility that the paper could use to translate American wire service copy to King’s English spellings — color to colour, favor to favour, etc.

That was the birth of Torquemada the Inquisitor. Ultimately it came to be much more powerful, but, in the beginning, it did nothing but search for and replace string literals. I was developing a reputation as a Macintosh software developer who was interested in big text-processing problems. There was a good reason for this: I had big text-processing problems and I wrote software to solve them. Torquemada used the then-new drag-‘n’-drop technology in the Mac OS to permit users to run an unlimited number of pre-saved search sets on an unlimited number of text files. If you could write well-defined, error-trapped searches, you could automate a big chunk of your workflow.

Subsequent versions added wildcard searches, type-casting, wild strings, case-conversion, etc. Torquemada was pattern matching along the lines of the Unix GREP utility, but it was optimized for repetitive tasks common to text-processing, word-processing and typography. It was very useful in the early days of web-page creation, as well.

I named it Torquemada because I had already written a utility called XP8 (expiate, get it?). This was built to correct a huge number of defects common to word processing files in those days. In addition, it would pre-code text to be imported into QuarkXPress — then and now high-end Macintosh desktop publishing software — with many typographic refinements coded into the text on the fly. XP8 would remove the excess white space from around the numeral “1,” for instance, intelligently ignoring the lining figures in tables. It did quote-conversion better than any software before or since.

These two utilities had fairly similar objectives, and both were built expecting to do huge batch jobs by drag-‘n’-drop. XP8 was a brute-force front-end to Quark, though, where Torquemada was a general purpose text revisionist. In practice, for a major publishing job, you would run the text through one or more Torquemada search sets to clean up the text and pre-code for style, then feed that output to XP8 for typographic finessing. Subsequent versions of XP8 actually incorporated the Torquemada code, because it was easier for me to hard-code searches than to rebuild the equivalent functionality in C.

Torquemada the Inquisitor died today, as did XP8 and all the other dozens of Macintosh utilities I built in the 1990s. Apple released OS 10.5 today, OSX Leopard, officially dropping support for all software written for what is called the “Classic” environment — OS 1 through OS 9. The last bit of Mac software I wrote was a tutorial app called Decliner, which tested Latin students on their knowledge of noun and adjective declensions. (When you write application software for studying Latin, your reward is a beanie with two propellers.) In any case, everything I ever wrote for the Macintosh officially died today. I’m still running Tiger (OS 10.4.10) on a PowerPC-based G5 iMac, so my stuff will still run on my machine. But as soon as I trade stripes for spots, that part of my life will be gone forever.

Sad for me, and I’ve had a bunch of weepy mail from long-time users this week. I keep hoping that my son Cameron will get interested in porting the better stuff to Cocoa or XCode. I wrote everything in Think C, so the core functionality should convert out of the box into Objective C. The user interfaces would need to be rewritten, but writing the UI part of a GUI can be a daunting challenge. In any case, for now at least, Torquemada the Inquisitor is dead.

What’s interesting to me is that I’m pretty sure that a whole lot of what I just wrote about is lost on most people. I worked in the typographic arts from modernization through computerization through disintermediation. I started working with typography when I was in the seventh grade, setting type from a California job case, just like Mark Twain did. I’ve played with type equipment and printing presses from all epochs, and, because of that, I made a handsome income brokering print jobs all through school. Camera-ready lithography was just becoming common, so I could beg, borrow or steal type, paste it up myself and get it burned to a plate and printed, taking profits at each step of the process.

I was hugely interested in the editorial part of publishing, too, of course, and in photography — photography more than anything when I was young. But the back end of the world of printing had always paid me the best, and it seemed to offer the most opportunities to learn and grow.

That job case I had set type from had been obsolete since 1880, but the machine that replaced it, the Linotype, had been headed for the museums since the mid-1960s. I started working for money in typography when WYSIWYG — what you see is what you get — was first becoming commercially available. No, not on the Macintosh, but on a huge DEC PDP-11 running software from Bedford Computing Systems. This seems like such an antique to me now, but at the time it was beyond state-of-the-art. Simulated fonts on a glowing green screen, all of it based on the real-time pseudo-composition of an ordinary mark-up system. (For reference, HTML is a (much simpler) mark-up system.)

I taught myself to use the Bedford system, which astounded the people I was working with. This was the age of training, and no one learned anything without weeks and weeks of tedious drill and practice. I read all the system documents and worked out the pin-outs to punch text directly into the system. This was also the age of word processing systems, also running on giant mini-computers, and the corporations and law firms that had invested in these behemoths wanted to see their investment returned in lower typesetting costs. In fact, type shops were chucking the disks they had no idea how to read and re-keying the text at a discount.

You can connect the dots from there to XP8 and Torquemada, although you should connect them slowly. None of this happened fast, especially not at first. Much of the work I did in those years I did in secret. The meatballs who ran type shops were half stupid and half superstitious — and all greedy. They didn’t want anyone using any technique that everyone else couldn’t memorize. (I got fired from a job for writing bullet-proof USPS bar codes in the Forth-based programming language on the Quadex type system.) And they did not want anyone touching the hardware, since it was all covered by hugely expensive service contracts. Meanwhile, they all wanted a piece of that word processing business that was supposed to be the next big thing.

At that time, there were maybe a few dozen people interested in automation in typography — and we all knew each other through the Desktop Publishing Forum on Compuserve. Some people were lucky enough to have bosses who wanted better systems, or at least were willing to stay out of the way. Some, like me, did our real work after all the bosses went home.

What am I talking about, really? In those days, long before Torquemada was written, using a DOS-based version of XP8, I did the Air Charter Guide, hundreds of pages of heavily formatted tables, in 18 seconds a page. I did a pocket-sized abridgment of the Physician’s Desk Reference in 4 seconds a page. No one had done publishing like that in those days — and no one does it at all now.

And that’s the point. In the mid-1980s I had a job in a Quadex shop on Lexington Avenue in New York, just south of 23rd Street. The company was a new business entity created out of the bankrupt hulk of an old-time, at-one-time-very-big advertising typographer on East 45th Street. There was a time in New York when 45th Street was lined with great type shops, but they were killed one by one by the Typographer’s Union, which by then had killed all but three of what once had been twelve daily newspapers in the city. These great old type houses needed to upgrade their technology, but the union wouldn’t let them.

This I was hired to do, but every day to get to my job I had to walk through a picket line of belligerent Luddites — picketing not their own employer, but an alter ego that had managed to escape their ravenous parasitism. I thought it was funny, at the time. I thought they were bums. I had zero respect for a man who wouldn’t work to feed his family, and I certainly had no intention of letting technological neanderthals dictate my work practices. (I didn’t even let my putative bosses do that!)

And all of that is dead. There is still work for professional typographers, but not much. Between desktop-computer-based word processing software and low-priced desktop publishing software, abetted by laser printers and direct-to-plate process-color printing presses, much of the work is handled in-house. And much more is either no longer done at all or is published dynamically on the web. If you know about type, you spend half your life cringing at the incredible mistakes people make, but, for them, close enough is good enough.

Torquemada the Inquisitor is dead, for now at least, but there is still more than plenty of work out there for regular expression parsing software. I don’t do it on the Macintosh these days, but that’s because it’s much easier to pound out on the server side n PHP.

But what is well and truly dead, long gone and unlamented, is the once fearsome Typographer’s Union. In retrospect, their picket line outside my former employer’s office was doubly comical: They were protesting the loss of jobs that were already gone forever, while young turks like me were figuring out how to engineer every last erg of paid labor out of the type game.

This is disintermediation. The world of typography goes on, not always gracefully, but the middle-men are gone. To work in the graphic arts now, you must either have a talent that ordinary people with desktop computers cannot approach, or you must own hardware that ordinary people want to use but cannot afford to own. These are the two business models that are left in what was once a huge and vibrant industry.

We know that journalism is being disintermediated in much the same way, and we know this best because we are doing it. My steady mantra is to disintermediate the vendors seeking to come between us and our incomes. But the nine-hundred-pound elephant in the room is the fear that we ourselves will be disintermediated.

I can think of good arguments why this should not happen, and, of course, our entire business practice is based on delivering values that no one could provide for himself. But as with all the benefits of fine typography, the end-user has to value those benefits more than the price he must pay to obtain them. Rolling the cost of amateur typesetting into overhead, as opposed to showing expense lines for a better but more expensive product, is easier than actually buying or selling a home on your own. But, even so, everything is a subjective trade-off. Part of our problem is delivering — and selling — perceived value. But the other part is the cacophony of fizzbubbatude, the possibly unwarranted but nevertheless epidemic belief that — watch for it — close enough is good enough.

Sufficient unto the day. Torquemada the Inquisitor is dead, but the ideas that led to the productivity revolution in typography live on — not just in typography but in every manifestation of the work of the mind. And the cocky young man I once was lives on in this aging hulk I have become. Whatever might happen to Realtors, I can’t help but smile when I think of what happened to the Typographer’s Union. This fate — total disintermediation, utter obliteration — awaits the National Association of Realtors and any other gang of bandits who think they can put limits on the illimitable human mind.

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