ver since he got his hands on a beta copy of version 1.0, HyperCard
has been one of the central focuses of Brian Molyneax's professional life.
Brian is probably best known for
his work at Heizer Software. Heizer's "Developer News" newsletter
described him as "HyperMedia Products Manager, Editor-in-Chief of
Developer News, and in-house HyperCard fanatic."
During his near eight-year tenure
at Heizer, Brian had the opportunity to work with many companies and individuals
using and developing HyperCard and HyperCard-like products. Besides HyperCard,
Brian was listed in the SuperCard 1.0 About Box as a Killer Beta Tester,
was Asymetrix ToolBook Developer 000001 (and has the certificate to prove
it :), and beta tested Plus 1.0 when it was being developed by Format GMB
(Plus later became Spinnaker Plus and then ObjectPlus and Oracle Media
Objects).
He also beta tested EchelonDevelopment
Systems WindowCraft (a HyperCard clone for Windows now deceased), was involved
with AppleScript long before it was first released, and worked on many
other projects.
Brian has had a unique vantage point
through Heizer Software to watch the market for end-user scripting tools
evolve and as a result has made many subtle and not-so-subtle contributions
to this genre of software.
After leaving Heizer in 1995, Brian
consulted on LSCI's Scene Slate (a HyperCard standalone authoring tool)
and was Product Manager for Allegiant's Marionet (a script-level interface
to the Internet).
Brian has been a prominent figure
in the HyperCard community for years, and it looks as though HyperCard
3.0 is going to play an important role in his future.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Brian, what was your first experience with computers?
I grew up in Lafayette, California (in the East Bay near Oakland). In about
1973 or '74 I was on a school field trip to the Lawrence Hall of Science
in the hills behind UC Berkeley. They had a bank of Teletype terminals
connected to a timeshare computer somewhere in a back room (we never got
to see the actual computer so I don't know what kind it was). They put
us into groups of four at each terminal and we got to play various games.
I was both impressed and appalled at the same
time with the experience. Impressed because I thought it was cool that
the computer could beat me at some of the games (I wanted to know how the
programs worked right away) but appalled because I made a typo when entering
my name and there was no way to correct the mistake. Every time the computer
listed my name misspelled, it bugged the hell out of me.
I think one of the reasons I've always liked
the Mac is because of the negative aspect of this first experience.
Did you have any computer-related jobs when you were a teenager?
During high school, I had a variety of after-school jobs -- the standard
paper route, assistant baker in a bakery, security guard, and finally with
an engineering firm as a clerical aide in my senior year at High School.
The clerical aide position was the first job I held that allowed me some
access to computers. I graduated from Acalanes High School in '80.
What did you do after high school?
I moved up to the mountains near Quincy, California to attend Feather River
College. Actually, I went there to stay close to a girl friend but I figured
attending college would go over better with my folks <grin>. When
that relationship fell apart, I high-tailed it back to the Bay Area and
got my old job back as a clerical aide with the engineering firm. Once
back in the Bay Area, I also moonlighted as a "Loss Prevention Specialist"
for a department store, sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door, and took a smattering
of classes at Diablo Valley College. College was never really my thing
as I tend to be more of a hands-on type -- I learn best by doing.
The job with the engineering firm (Tetra Tech,
Inc.) is where I really got into computers. I was a pretty low-level part-time
employee but they gave me an account on their Prime 550 minicomputer and
access to the office after hours. Even though I didn't really have any
need to use the computer in my job, my boss at the time encouraged me to
come in on my own time and do my school work on it. I took advantage of
the opportunity.
Part of my job was to was to pick up library
books for the engineers in the office from UC Berkeley and make sure they
got returned on time. The problem was that I often checked out upwards
of 100 books a week and the Berkeley campus had a large number of different
libraries with different return policies (sometimes as little as two hours
or upwards to several months). This quickly became a nightmare to manage
on paper and overdue notices (and fines) started coming in. I suggested
that this would be better managed on the computer and my boss agreed. She
asked the office programmer to write me a little program to manage the
books and soon I had just the program I needed (written in a pretty archaic
version of BASIC).
The problem was that the programmer promptly
got fired and the program didn't work right. Since no one in the office
knew BASIC (they all programmed in Fortran) there was no one to fix my
little library program.
So you used that as an opportunity to learn BASIC?
Yes, I printed it out and got a book on BASIC. I went through the program
line by line (about 300 hundred in all), looking each command up and trying
to understand it's purpose in the program. After about a week, I successfully
fixed the program which got noticed around the office. From then on, the
engineers started tossing little computer projects my way -- mostly grunt
work but great experience.
Somewhere in the early '80s someone gave me
a little Timex-Sinclair computer. This was a tiny little computer with
a chicklet keyboard. A cassette tape recorder was used to store and retrieve
programs. I think it had 16K of RAM. It didn't really have an OS of any
type, just BASIC. While I never did anything serious with it, I used it
to learn BASIC pretty well.
Shortly after that, we got some IBM XTs and
ATs in the office and I kind of became the microcomputer guru. I made custom
cables, wrote shell programs in DOS's batch language, wrote a terminal
program in BASIC, hooked up terminals to the Prime, installed cards, did
charts and such in Lotus 1-2-3, etc.
When did you start using Macs?
In late January of 1984, just after the Mac was first introduced, we got
one in the office. Everyone kind of thought it was cool but nobody wanted
to take the time to learn how to use it. The idea was that it would be
used to do better charts for the many presentations given by the engineers.
I saw the Mac and had this kind of religious experience -- up until that
time, I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my career. When I saw
the Mac, I knew that it was what I wanted to work with; that my career
would involve it.
Within a week, I had my own office, the Mac,
a promotion, and a raise -- talk about getting focused. :) It was my job
to do all the overheads for the presentations we gave using the Mac. I
got really good with MacPaint and later in the year with MacDraw. I also
got into QuickBasic and wrote all kinds of little programs -- the most
interesting was a modification of Dennis Brother's MacTEP (the original
terminal program on the Mac; Dennis went on to write such things as Microphone
and AppleLink). My version of MacTEP would download data from a mainframe
through a 1200 baud modem into a buffer and then as the buffer started
to fill up, blast the buffer out the other port through a 9600 baud direct
connection to our Prime Minicomputer (our Prime didn't have a modem or
communications software).
During that first year I really got hooked
on the Mac. I went to all the San Francisco Mac User Group meetings out
at Fort Mason. I remember when Apple sent the early edition of Inside Mac
to the group to hand out. This was before the "phone book" edition
of Inside Mac. Basically, there were a bunch of boxes, each box contained
photocopies of a section with different colored paper between the copies
-- all loose. We had to go around to each box and grab a section. It was
pandemonium, but at least IM was free :). I read the whole thing even though
I didn't have a Pascal compiler and didn't understand most of it.
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