BSD and HP9K700 standalones . . . ?

[Richard Gaskin]

Lynn Fredricks wrote:

> For those who know what Im talking about - remember.. mTropolis? ;-)

What I remember about mTropolis was that at the trade shows they acted 
like debutantes fresh out of finishing school:  at $5,000 a license, 
they gave a quick look at your watch and your shoes before deciding 
whether you were worth talking to. ;)

That unique customer service approach came back to haunt them later: by 
the time they dropped the price by about 75% the following year, they'd 
already turned off so many people to their company that I knew very few 
who bothered looking at it.

For those unfamiliar with mTropolis, the saga of their demise is 
described in this Salon article:
<http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/06/10feature.html>

They also discovered a common failing of many visual authoring systems, 
as noted in <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTropolis>:

    One criticism of the tool was that the integrated programming
    language, Miniscript, was lacking key features necessary for
    common tasks. Because mTropolis was conceived around a visual
    programming metaphor, mFactory engineers intentionally omitted
    control constructs such as conditional loops.

Bill Appleton ran into the same thing after he made CourseBuilder, which 
was part of his motivation for creating SuperCard.  As he put it in an 
interview I did with him back in '89, "Visual systems are great for 
simple things, but once you get to a certain level of complexity they 
just break down, they're just not as expressive as scripting."

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Rev training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
  revJournal blog: http://revjournal.com/blog.irv