For more than thirty years, Data Conversion Laboratory has been preeminent in the field of conversion services. From modest beginnings of moving text from one medium to another to the well-reputed corporation it is today, DCL continues to proudly provide quality services to any company or individual looking to convert data, across America and other parts of the world.
Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL), a privately held company, was founded in 1981 by Mark and Judy Gross during the early emergence of PCs. During their initial years, Mark and Judy used their home as their office, assisting companies looking to convert their data from one software medium to another.
In 1982, the company found a new interest: converting documents from word processors, such as 11 and Wordstar, to WordPerfect. Filters were established to directly convert a specific source to a specific target. As the demand for conversion grew to include multiple formats, DCL was forced to leave the direct one to one filtering approach behind them.
In 1985, DCL introduced a central format which contained multiple source filtered flowing into a conversion software hub, as well as target filters flowing out of the hub. This creation, which would later be a superset of SGML, allowed DCL to considerably reduce the number of filters needed to be built. Its software development efforts from that moment on would be focused on enriching the conversion capabilities contained in the hub.
Desktop Publishing Packages was introduced to the market later that year. DCL shifted its attention from solely word processing to incorporate desktop publishing formats. three years later, in 1988, Charles Goldfarb introduced the concept of SGML to the Market. DCL took an immediate interest in SGML, understanding the utility and value it offered, and was one of the twenty companies to attend the first SGML user conference in Chicago that year.
Electronic publishing was now a reality in the world and in 1987, the internet and intranet publishing would be as well. It was during this time that DCL would refocus its attention and conversions to SGML would become the focus of DCL's business.
In 1999, nearly a decade later, the arrival of XML gave DCL another opportunity to establish itself as a leader in the world of document conversion. DCL's president, Mark Gross, authored the chapter on legacy conversion in Charles Goldfarb's book on XML.
To date, we have converted over 1 billion pages of paper and electronic documents.
