Revolution and the Web, feedback wanted, Part 1 of 3

[Chipp Walters]

Mikey, and other lurkers.

Here's a quick history on the whole MC vs RR thing. MetaCard originally
owned all the technology. It basically breaks into 2 parts: the engine and
the IDE. Unlike HyperCard and SuperEdit (not SuperCard), the MC IDE was
completely written in Transcript (or at that time MetaTalk).

Scott Raney (the original programmer and owner of MetaCard) decided to let
users create their own add-ons to the brute simple MC IDE. He did this for a
couple of reasons:

1) He knew he wasn't an interface designer and didn't really like to spend
time working on GUI for the IDE when he could be adding functionality to the
engine;

2) He wanted the IDE to be as simple as possible-- and therefore as bug-free
as possible. In fact, Scott claimed he never would ship even a dot upgrade
for MetaCard (engine and IDE) with ANY known bugs. To my knowledge, he
accomplished this.

To this day, the open source version of the MC IDE is still maintained, and
very much alive. Many of the old-timers still use it, including Richard
Gaskin, Ken Ray, Jaque Landman Gay, Klaus Major and Scott Rossi-- to name a
few. Virtually all of them have crafted their own interfaces for it,
inclucding Richard's own devolution:
<http://www.fourthworld.com/products/devolution/index.html>

Along came CrossWorlds from Scotland. Kevin Miller, an ace MetaCard
programmer, created a stunning IDE for it and secured some marketing rights
for the MetaCard engine, bundled it all and called it Revolution. At the
time, many of us owned both MetaCard and Rev. Kevin priced his version
considerably less than MetaCard: $299 vs $999. He sold quite a few and also
did a great job marketing it. He formed Runtime Revolution the company which
sold Revolution the product.

In the years since, RR purchased the IP for the engine from Scott, kept him
on as a consultant and the rest is pretty much history.

If any of this is incorrect, please- anyone- correct me.

best,
Chipp