[ALLY] Re: REBOL Announcement...
From: tchang::8inc::com at: 9-May-2001 12:33
Hi Petr:
Petr Krenzelok wrote:
> Carl Sassenrath wrote:
>
> > Check http://www.rebol.com for announcement of
> >
> > REBOL Consulting, LLC.
> >
> > a partnership with Eight, Inc. These guys are
> > great. Tom Chang has actually been using REBOL
> > for almost 10 years.
>
> Do you mean AmigaOS? Has BAY video-editing system anything in common
> with Amiga?
Having worked on BAY, I can tell you that the relationship
between BAY and the Amiga was simply the fact that BAY ran
on top of AmigaOS. The reason for this was that that back
then it was the only hardware/OS out there (short of
$100,000 custom graphical workstations) that could handle
this sort of application. REBOL actually started a few years
before BAY.
In the very early 90's, I worked for Carl at a company
called AMI. AMI created multimedia corporate training
CD-ROMs for CDTV. After evaluating all the development
tools out there, we decided that everything basically
sucked. So Carl being Carl created his own scripting
language (we called in MIME) that was very much an early
prototype of REBOL. In fact, some of those early scripts
would probably be quite familiar to the folks on Ally.
So back in the days of Quicktime 1.0, Director 1.0, and
AmigaVision, we had the ability to easily build
graphically rich interactive GUI's w/ TV quality motion
video. Unfortunately, as many of you know, Commodore
decided to go belly up about this time, and with it CDTV
and AMI.
Fast forward a year, and I'm working for Carl again at
VideoStream. This was a time before the web when
interactive TV was the hot new technology that was going
to revolutionize the world. With bandwidth being what it
was in those days, having a distributed application
framework was absolutely essential to having something useful.
Of course with MIME we already had a multimedia
development environment years ahead of anything out there,
and so by making it network aware (and some other clever
things besides), we had essentially the father (or maybe
bastard brother) of REBOL/View. So back in the early 90's,
we had a distributed multimedia application platform
capable of building interactive TV networks that some of
the 'cutting-edge' web based sites are just now approaching.
In fact the Starfestival Network system that we just
recently helped MIT build reminded me of nothing so much
as the work I had done with Carl back in the early 90s.
Unfortunately those years with Carl and MIME ruined me for
any other programming language. Though I slummed around
with Java, C, VB, Lingo, and even Scheme for a bit, I
was continuously disappointed that I couldn't do in a
thousand lines of code some of the things that had taken
half a page in MIME.
Well sorry for the essay, but let this be a warning to
you all in asking questions that are connected to me in
even the slightest way!
Yours truly,
Tom Chang
Managing Director
REBOL Consulting, LLC
University Park at MIT
129 Franklin St. #211
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 494-5507 voice
(617) 494-0985 fax
