newbie response

[Rob Cozens]

Troy, et al:

>I am as much a QuickTime evangelist as probably anybody, but Jobs 
>pulled that company back from the dead.

To which I would respond, "That's nice for the shareholders; but it 
didn't do much to advance technology" and "It was in part Claris' 
actions that took Apple to death's door in the first place."

There are two groups of people who were in a better position to know 
HyperCard's potential and the effect of unbundling the HyperCard 
development system from the Player than anyone at Apple:

* Brian Molyneaux, Ray Heizer, and the rest of the folks at Heizer 
software who sold HyperCard software, and

* people like moi, who chaired HyperCard SIGs for local Mac User Groups.

Talk to people from both groups, and you will find that there was a 
constantly growing HyperCard user base and interest in HyperCard from 
the time it was released until Claris made people pay for the 
privilege of learning it.  The interest in HyperCard waned after 
that, and with it went Apple's strategic edge.

>I write this on my powerbook, with a bank of G4 towers rendering 
>interactive QuickTime behind me

That's nice...so you can run Microsoft Office, your web browser, 
Pagemaker, or whatever on a colored box running OSX instead of 
Windows.  What else makes the Apple experience unique from Windows? 
Before MetaCard/RunRev it was HyperCard.

BTW, I don't know what you mean by "interactive QuickTime"; but it 
isn't what Apple promised for QuickTime Interactive by a long shot. 
QTI was to be a version of HyperCard in which stacks were saved in 
QuickTime format.  It would be like being able to save any Revolution 
stack you wrote as a QuickTime movie.  That's what the world lost in 
the Amelio/Jobs exchange.
-- 

Rob Cozens
CCW, Serendipity Software Company
http://www.oenolog.com/who.htm

"And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three;
Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee."

from "The Triple Foole" by John Donne (1572-1631)