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.
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.
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