There’s nothing like a birthday to make you reflect and realize just how quickly time passes. Twenty five years… In the blink of an eye.

On January 24, 1984 Apple Computer released the very first Macintosh. I didn’t hear about it until I received the very first issue of Macworld magazine in March, I think it was.

Being the packrat I am, I saved and preserved that issue. That’s a scan of the cover on the left. If you click it you can see a larger version.

I had to have the Macintosh. I’d been lusting after an Apple IIe for quite a while, and couldn’t afford the ten grand for a Lisa, but this Macintosh thing was a whole new ballgame.

I went down to my local computer store… Compuware, I think it was, and happily plunked down $3300. For that princely sum I got the original Macintosh (with a whopping 128K !), an Imagewriter II dot matrix printer, and the only three, (count ‘em, THREE!), entire programs that ran on it at the time; MacWrite, MacPaint, and Multiplan(a spreadsheet program). That was it.

I still have that Macintosh and the Imagewriter and every piece of software I ever bought for it. And you know what? It still works. I never use it though. I keep it here on a shelf in my studio as a memento and a personal trophy.

I was one of the first people in Texas to own a Macintosh.

Here’s what it looked like the day I bought it on May 19th, 1984, and it’s on my original Unistation prototype workstation.

I justified the purchase of the Mac by using it to produce marketing materials to help get a government contract for my line of Unistation workstations (which I was awarded a year later and had to refuse, but that’s another story).

In the early days I designed, built, and sold solid oak furniture for the Macintosh. Below is a shot of some of those items. I sold a bunch of these tower stands, and rolltop disc storage boxes to the very first CompUSA store, when it opened on Beltway Rd, off Beltline Rd in far North Dallas. I was about to spend a big chunk of money (for me, anyway) on magazine ads to ramp up the business, but right before I did, a company overseas started advertising very similar units at about half the price I could make them. So that ended that. Better to find out early than late!

I use Macs to this very day, although I started switching over primarily to the dark side [*grin*] back in 1996 when Newtek came out with the first version of Lightwave 3D for the PC.

Eventually it got too expensive to keep software updated for both Mac and PC, and I gradually migrated all my production apps to the PC. I still love my Macs, though. I’m platform agnostic. Use the tool you’re most comfortable using and be happy.

I did all the media integration and programming for the in-store kiosks in the very first ESPN The Store in the Glendale Galleria in Glendale, Ca. There are a total of four kiosks in the store.

This was another very interesting and challenging project. I did this one for Disney/ESPN thru Baker Audio at the behest of CEO Kieth Hicks. Interface design was done by Lance Barclay when he was at Eagle River Interactive (now he’s with my good friends at Valiant Media).

This one does a little bit of everything. You can watch live ESPN television, you can surf ESPN’s site, you can play and listen to audio CDs, and you can watch previews of videos and advertisements of various products. Fun project to bring to life. And it only took me 192 hours in two weeks. Yep, very little sleep on this one. But we made deadline! (grin) Thanks Keith, Erik, and Lance!

You could watch All Three ESPN Channels live from within the interface. The video is playing through the computer, (delivered through the Director presentation I developed), from 3 small satellite dishes on the roof of the store.

You can watch ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN News coming in live at the touch of an onscreen button. Erik Bozzard of Baker Audio in Atlanta worked with me on this one. I sent AMX controller codes out the serial port and he picked them up and routed them to a switcher in the backroom.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. (grin) It worked really well.

You could also surf the ESPN Website. Working with some fine people in Brazil that I found on the internet, a company called Tabuleiro da Baiana Prod. E Ed. Ltda., I used an Xtra, (like a plugin), for Director to let me allow the customers to surf ESPN’s website and also a sports-related travel site.

The only challenge was keeping the customers on the site and not letting little Johnny stand there in the store and ‘accidently’ fall into a big pile of porno. The people at Tabuleiro da Baiana worked with me and created a custom version of their software that would only allow the customers to surf where we wanted them to. Those features I asked for made their way into future releases of the WebXtra software. Internet collaboration is a wonderful thing.

You could also listen Sports CDs. From this interface the customers can listen to and control lots of ESPN Sports CDs.

The CDs are in changers behind the cash wrap and are controlled by infrared that’s relayed via the AMX codes sent from the interface. Pretty slick and it worked well.

You can watch video previews and product ads. With this interface the customers could watch digital video previews of many ESPN VHS videos for sale in the store. There was also an interface that would let the customer watch commercials for different products that the store featured. The videos were all playing off the hard drive of the computers.

This was an extremely interesting project to produce and it was done in an insanely short amount of time.

This is the most complex and interesting project I did for Sony. It’s the Sony MediaServer System at the Metreon in San Francisco. We took the listening station concept we had in the SonyStyle store in Manhattan and pumped it full of steroids. This thing is awesome, if I do say so myself.

We produced a custom version of the MediaServer for a company called Hear Music, an eclectic and innovative music retailer (owned by Starbucks now), with a store inside the Sony Metreon entertainment complex in San Francisco.

I did this one with Al Podrasky, then at Sony Development Inc. At that time SDI was an R&D branch of Sony and had a huge number of ex-Disney Imagineers working there. They treated me like family and took great care of me while I was working with them. That’s Al working at the old Hear Music offices in the image to the right.

See those great hulking grey boxes under the table? Those are the two servers (everything was designed and built redundant). And between the monitors is the array of hard disks where we stored the content and music. Believe it or not the servers were Dell 166mhz Pentiums, and the total capacity of ALL the hard drives was only 100Gb. At that time (1999), that was an astronomical amount of storage space. It sounded like a small jet engine when we fired that disc array up the first time. ;o)

This is the MediaServer User Interface for Hear Music. Normally I would have created the front end in something like Macromedia Director, but the folks at Sony had a relationship with Microsoft at that time, so the front end was created as DHTML using Internet Explorer in kiosk mode. You wouldn’t think it possible, especially at that time, but the interface was incredibly responsive and rivaled anything I’ve done with Director or Flash since.

The customers interact thru nice, bright Sony LCD flat screens at each of 11 interactive listening stations in the store. Here the user can explore all the stories and learn the history and significance of each genre and category of music as well as info about the artists.

It’s a very deep system. And the user experience is completely built on the fly from a networked database as the customer uses the system. The user can also swipe the barcode of any CD and that CD will come up onscreen and let the user listen to it. It’s really one of the very best and most entertaining, not to mention educational, ways to both shop for music as well as learn more about musical appreciation. The Hear Music writers filled the database with an incredible amount of interesting information about each artist, group, genre of music, and the many connections between them.

Al and I did pretty much everything on this one, from specifying and setting up all the hardware to all the custom software development, front-end and back-end. Al did the database design and programmed the components that my ContentCreator software used. And we both built and set up all the kiosk CPUs and did the networking to wire them all together.

Here I am up in the server room at the Metreon working out last minute bugs just before the opening in June 1999. I was one exhausted puppy by the end of this one. Sony kept me on the west coast working on R&D projects for most of 2 years. And we worked literally around the clock for the last 2 weeks of the project. Worth it, though.

This is a screenshot of part of the backend system content creation software, called ContentCreator, that we developed to feed and fill the database with all the text, images, and audio. With this software Hear Music was able to collect all the content quickly and easily. 

Like the front-end, I wrote this from scratch as DHTML using Javascript and VBScript to handle the user interaction, database communication, and interfacing with the hardware to do all the scanning and ripping of the cover images and CD tracks using the custom-programmed modules Al wrote.

The program rips and processes audio and places the finished files in specific places on the servers. Al Podrasky and I did everything from set up the hardware and software on the Servers and individual kiosks to physically setting everything up and networking everything in the store and the back room for the Hear Music store.

I learned a tremendous amount about turnkey database driven intranet systems while building this project. The two of us pretty much took the system from concept to completion, front end and backend, and I’m very proud of the way it turned out. The folks at Hear Music are very also very happy with it.

This was a huge interactive kiosk project and I got to work with some amazingly talented people to make it happen.

I, along with Justin Leger, Al Podrasky, Joe Schuch of BakerAudio, Dave Spencer, and many many others at Sony and Eagle River, helped develop and program the interactive software for the listening stations on display and in use at that time in the SonyStyle store on Madison Ave, Manhattan, New York.

The listening stations are 27 kiosks networked together to a central server. The info that the users interact with is fed in from a SQL database. The audio is piped in from a huge bank of Sony CD changers in the back room. The software talks to the changers and lets the users control them remotely. It’s all pretty seamless. Each kiosk can play up to 300 different music CDs while showing information about the selected artist, the cover of the CD, and any other recordings done by that artist, (and which are also just a click away from being played).

The system was pretty smart. We built the front end in Director and Justin Leger and I programmed it to talk to bar code scanners so that people could pick a CD from the rack, scan the barcode and listen to that CD. The scanner would trigger an event via serial cable that our program would pick up and use to query the SQL database to get the data for that CD, and part of that was the tray location for the CD in the physical player. The server would send back the data and our program would update the display for the user and trigger off a little device that would let us send commands to the changers and have them cue up the CD.

I also programmed it so that we could remote in to the server from Sony Development’s Burbank offices and update the software in New York. Pretty slick system, and almost all of it analog. The next one we would build, in San Francisco, would be completely digital.

I can remember spending several late nights in a warehouse in New Jersey, where the kiosks and fixtures for the store were being fabricated, unwrapping hundreds upon hundreds of shrink wrapped CDs and putting them into those CD changers.

We were finishing out the software just before everything went live and had to work on saw horses with boards spanning them.

We did a little bit of everything on this job, from writing the software, to setting up the network, and cloning the physical machines. Interesting experience that I will never forget.

One of the coolest parts of this project was being flown to New York for 3 weeks to help set up the kiosks and get everything up and running. It was my first time in New York and it was an amazing experience. Got my first tastes of excellent dark beers in the historic taverns of New York, and was also introduced to the joys of sushi!

All the people at Sony were great. Took exceptionally good care of all of us. (Thanks for everything Al and Dave!)