History
The first instance of a collaborative real-time editor was demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart in 1968, in The Mother of All Demos. Actual implementations of the concept took several decades to appear.
Instant Update was released for Mac OS in 1991 from ON Technology. Later, a version for Microsoft Windows was released as well, allowing real-time collaboration across these two operating systems. Instant Update relied on a work group server to coordinate documents updated in real time on multiple clients.
More recently, SubEthaEdit is Mac-based, and leverages the Mac Bonjour communications platform. SubEthaEdit won numerous awards, and was initially offered free of charge. But later it became commercial because there were not enough voluntary donations to keep it free. The Gobby collaborative editor aims to be very similar to SubEthaEdit, and is cross-platform and open source.
The Web 2.0 phenomenon has caused an explosion of interest in browser-based document editing tools. In particular, a product called Writely saw explosive user growth and was bought by Google in March 2006 (now called Google Docs). It provided simultaneous edits on the entirety of a document, though changes from other users were only reflected after the client program polling the server (every half-minute or so). Another early web-based solution was JotSpotLive, in which line-by-line simultaneous editing was available in near-realtime. However, after Google's purchase of parent company JotSpot in November 2006, the site was closed. Google Sites was launched in February 2007 as a refactoring of JotSpot, but it lacks the multi-user real-time abilities of JotLive. The Synchroedit (rich text) and MobWrite (plain text) projects are two, more recent, open-source attempts to fill the in gap real-time browser-based collaborative editing, though still unable to achieve true real-time performance, especially on a large scale architecture. EtherPad was the first web editor to provide a smooth, character-by-character real-time text performance, something that previously was only available in desktop editors.
In 2009, Google started beta testing Google Wave, a real-time collaboration environment which Google hoped would eventually displace email and instant messaging. EtherPad was subsequently acquired by Google, which allocated the EtherPad team to work within the Wave project. However, Google announced in August 2010 on its blog that it had decided to stop developing Wave as a standalone project, due to insufficient user adoption.
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