Dr. Dobb's Digital Publishing: (Way) Before Silverlight

As I've previously mentioned elsewhere (and will likely mention again), we've launched a new digital publishing project based on Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in from Microsoft for developing Rich Internet Applications that utilize text, graphics, audio, and video.

This project revolves around two sites -- Sparkleball, a Silverlight-based game, and Flipbook, a digital magazine with text, graphics, supplemental video and audio files

Putting this new project together led me to recall our first foray into digital publishing when, back in June 1990, we published a special edition of the magazine using HyperWriter, a proprietary format developed by a company called Ntergaid. Scott Johnson, the chief bottle washer of Ntergaid, did most of the heavy lifting with the project. He later sold Ntergaid to Dataware and Ntergard (and HyperWriter) faded away.

Scott wrote an article entitled The DDJ Hypertext Project which described the project. We distributed it via 3.5-inch diskettes and online via CompuServe. If I recall, we produced two versions of the issue. The smaller, bare-bones version was available with the listings disk. The enhanced version was downloaded from the DDJ Forum on CompuServe. The bare-bones version required a monochrome display card and 640K of RAM. The enhanced version required a CGA, EGA, HGA, or VGA system, 640K of memory, and a hard disk. (So when was the last time you even thought about CGA or EGA?)

After a bit of research, I was able to root out one of the versions (that I was even able to probably says more about the state of my office than anything else) and you can download it here. It is a ZIP archive that includes a readme file that gives you instructions. Use at your own risk. And if you have problems, don't bother calling Scott at the phone number in the readme -- he's long since moved elsewhere.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:43 AM  Permalink