My time at Quark, Inc.

[matthew1]

For no reason at all: 30 years ago I started at Quark, May 15, 1996. I was very excited. It was the dawn of the "new" economy... for me that meant no dress code.

It might sound crazy to you if you're reading this and under say 40, but there was a time in between the suit workplace (Victorian England era to 1970s) and today's workplace (2000 to present) when it was "business casual", aka, dress shirts and no jeans or sneakers. That business casual zone was the transition period.

It was probably an earlier shift (~10-20 years I'd guess) for dress code for California businesses.

Whatever the case, Quark let you wear whatever you wanted, even cutoff jeans. That was attractive. So was software. I got a Mac LC on Christmas Day 1991 because I loved computers, and I knew what was coming (Information Age). I didn't like computers because the future would be full of them, I liked 'em because I liked 'em. I had a Comodore 64 in the 1980s and got my feet wet with BASIC.

TLDR: I was jazzed. My starting salary was $24k/year and it didn't go up, sadly. We got two weeks of vacation, but one week was chosen for us and mandatory: Christmas break, the week in between Christmas and New Year's Day. So I had only five days discretionary vacation time. Not good.

My boss and I shared an office room. She didn't like me. She was about 35-40 and I was 25, and she was extremely difficult to me. You know how some people make good workers but bad managers? She was that.

Because she didn't like me, she didn't give me any encouragement or praise, and I never got a raise. When I left I never saw her again. I kept in touch with a couple fellow employees and we've remained friends to this day.

After a couple months the novelty and excitement wore off, and it became a drag.

It was a private business, not public, and the 1/2 owner and guy who ran the place, Farhad "Fred" Ebrahimi, allowed only developers and director-level employees to have access to the Internet. Everyone else, like me, had access to only intra-company email.

The intra-company email was an application I forget the name of, but it allowed its administrator to add a short message to the top of the app, like the old Netscape and Internet Explorer apps said "Netscape" and "Internet Explorer" at the top. Anyway, Quark at that time was developing Quark Immedia, a Flash-like system that would have replaced and supplanted the World Wide Web (HTML). I'm not kidding, they actually tried it. I worked on it. It was a completely seperate, parallel Web.

Anyway, the message that appeared at the top of the email app one day was, literally/not paraphrased: "HTML IS DEAD. LONG LIVE QUARK IMMEDIA." It stayed like that for probably six months until they changed it to something equally as dumb.

I was a localizer, working in the localization department. We turned US English Quark products into French, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, German, and one other I'm forgetting...

I sat down with translators (in-house employees) and we went through each of the text "strings" where English appears in Immedia and Quark's bread-and-butter, XPress. I think XPress had several thousand strings, so I had to know these apps pretty well to be able to show the translators the string in the app, in context.

I left on May 15, 1997, one year to the day I started and I didn't plan it that way. I put in my two weeks when I couldn't take it any longer and it just worked out that way.

[matthew1]

Here's the building in Denver https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7451888 ... FQAw%3D%3D

Oh and that reminds me: they didn't offer free parking to us, we had to pay for it. IIRC, it was $35/month, which doesn't sound like much but try paying that after making peanuts and paying tax on those peanuts! And yes, the parking garage under the building that they charged us for was mostly empty.

The building is now owned by University of Colorado. If memory serves, Quark had 700 employees in 1997, not all of them in Denver.

[volvolugnut]

I started my first after college job in 1979 as an engineer for a large oil field equipment manufacturer. No written dress code, but expectations were no jeans or T shirts. Cord jeans were OK. Supervisors wore ties. Every couple months each group of engineers would have to give a report on their projects. For this meeting all the engineers had to wear ties.
During that time everyone was expected to be at work by 8 AM, have lunch 12 to 1 and not leave before 5 PM. You could work earlier or later and weekends, but unless you were on vacation, you had to still be at work 8 to 5.
volvolugnut

[abscate]

I manage international business for a tech company and one thing of note - dress codes overseas are not casual. I still travel in business slacks , shirt and tie but also suit in many countries.

When you are out prospecting a new opportunity and meet someone overseas in jeans, you aren’t helping your case.

[BlackBart]

That's really Quarky.

When I worked in Pioneer Square in Seattle, in the old brick warehouse buildings converted to nice offices, a little company called Adobe had half the floor below us. I think they grew and became a thing.

The kind of people I worked with never wore ties. Some of them were punkers.

Remember WordPerfect? We loved WordPerfect. And then that new company Micro-something shoved it off the market with their Word thing.

[matthew1]

That's funny you bring up Adobe because that's the company that killed Quark. They put out a competitive product named InDesign that ate XPress' lunch over roughly 10 years and more or less ended Quark. Quark still exists, but it's been sold several times and is a shadow of its former self. I just now looked it up and it was last sold just three months ago. In the 90s it had the lion's share of desktop publishing market. It was the proverbial 900-lb gorilla of its industry.

I blame its downfall on customer service. After paying $699 ($1,485 in 2026 dollars) for a XPress license, you had to pay something like $25/call when you needed phone help. Quark's customer service was hated worldwide.

[Slartibartfast]

My first job was briefly in a factory while I waited for my army application to progress. I had a right old laugh working with the old boys, and was able to keep it light hearted as I knew it was only temporary. Couldn't have hacked it if. I thought id be there the next 45 years.

This was the early eighties, and one old feller had an immaculate Morris Minor and was big into tuning it for economy. On a Friday lunchtime hed go to the pub regular as clockwork, so we'd siphon a couple of gallons of juice out of the pool cars and pour it into the moggie.

Monday morning on the way to work he'd fill up, make a note of the amount that went in, and do the calculations. Suddenly he found he was getting 60+ MPG and was really excited about the latest carburetor mod hed come up with. He really thought hed cracked it and was writing letters to the big car car companies trying to sell his secret, to Tomorrow's World (a TV programme at the time), to anyone he'd think would be interested. Meanwhile we'd all be tittering away behind his back.

Eventually my application went through and I left to join the infantry so I never found out if he discovered the wheeze or what had happened. I expect hed have gone nuts if hed found out, but id habe loved to have been there to see it.

[volvolugnut]

My first job was briefly in a factory while I waited for my army application to progress. I had a right old laugh working with the old boys, and was able to keep it light hearted as I knew it was only temporary. Couldn't have hacked it if. I thought id be there the next 45 years.

This was the early eighties, and one old feller had an immaculate Morris Minor and was big into tuning it for economy. On a Friday lunchtime hed go to the pub regular as clockwork, so we'd siphon a couple of gallons of juice out of the pool cars and pour it into the moggie.

Monday morning on the way to work he'd fill up, make a note of the amount that went in, and do the calculations. Suddenly he found he was getting 60+ MPG and was really excited about the latest carburetor mod hed come up with. He really thought hed cracked it and was writing letters to the big car car companies trying to sell his secret, to Tomorrow's World (a TV programme at the time), to anyone he'd think would be interested. Meanwhile we'd all be tittering away behind his back.

Eventually my application went through and I left to join the infantry so I never found out if he discovered the wheeze or what had happened. I expect hed have gone nuts if hed found out, but id habe loved to have been there to see it.

I have heard of this prank pulled on others. I think it advanced to the vehicle gaining fuel in the tank!
volvolugnut

[Slartibartfast]

We were trying to encourage him to write to the oil companies to see if they would be interested in buying his invention so they could bury it.

[abscate]

Probably how magnets on the fuel line to polarize your fuel molecules got started….