Tuesday, March 31, 2015

And it is Still Alive and Kicking

About a year ago, it was reported to me that all the kiosks that we help develop for the Take Flight exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in 1995 were removed and replaced with newer kiosks. I was very sadden to hear this.  We developed three different types of kiosks, two outside the 727 and one inside the plane and installed into the back of each seat in the plane.


My colleague, Robert Burton developed a compiler using C and assembly that was originally used for developing our Lotus cc:Mail training courses for version 1.0 all the way up to version 2.  The compiler and development kit allowed us to create very dynamic graphics for the DOS platform.  At least it was very dynamic in 1995.  Each of the 20 so kiosks ran on a Gateway 486 with 64M of memory.  Wow!!  Startup and shutdown of these kiosks was done by turning the power on and off.  I wonder what would happen to Windows if that happened.

Since we are members of MSI, I decide to make a visit to MSI yesterday to see what they replaced our stuff with. The newer kiosks were bigger and had more graphics, but I still liked better the graphics found in our application. They are more vibrant and fun.

However, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that there was still one kiosk that was not replaced. So our work that we did 20 years ago lives on!!! Being turned on and off every single day, entertaining visitors (millions of them) and will be continuing to do so for many, many years or until the Gateway 486 craps out.  Just like Lotus Notes, our app was built to last and yes Gateway built good computers those days.

Of course we bumped into fellow ICS community member, Andrew Barickman and his family at the MSI.


 
 
 

 

Monday, March 2, 2015

Sponsorship for MWLUG 2015 is Now Open

Sponsorship for MWLUG 2015 is now open.  We are very excited about this year's conference at the Ritz-Carlton-Downtown Atlanta, GA.  If you are a previous sponsor of MWLUG or have already contacted me about sponsoring this year, you will be receiving a sponsorship kit this week. If you are interested in sponsoring, please send me a note as soon as possible.  We have a limited number of slots for sponsorship.

Fortunately, the ballroom is large enough this year that we are going back to our normal sponsor showcase format that we could not do last year. It is big enough to allow us to add another activity for this year.

The MWLUG 2015 Committee is hard at work.  The web site development team including Mike McGarel and Sam Bridegroom is getting the new site ready to be launched in a few weeks.

Lisa Duke our boots-on-the-ground has said that this is one of the most beautiful hotels in Atlanta.

Abstract submission for MWLUG 2015 starts on April 1, 2015 so get your abstract ready.

So get ready for another exciting adventure in Atlanta.

http://www.mwlug.com

 
 
 
 

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