Background information on Mr. Wei Pei

Interesting exchange of Wei Pei and Mike Doyle from 1995:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/1995JulAug/0446.html

Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 16:09:46 -0700
From: pei@gnn.com (Pei Wei)
Message-Id: <199508212309.QAA22145@ebay>
To: miked@eolas.com
Subject: Re: EOLAS ACQUIRES MILESTONE INTERNET SOFTWARE PATENT
Cc: www-talk@w3.org

miked@eolas.com (Mike Doyle) wrote:
> Pei,
> We've had this discussion before (last September, remember?).  You
admitted
> then that you did NOT release or publish anything like this before the
Eolas
> demonstrations.

Please carefully re-read my letter to you... I said Viola was 
demonstrated in smaller settings, but before your demo. The applets 
stuff was demo'ed to whomever wanted to see it and had visited our 
office at O'Reilly & Associates (where I worked at the time).

This is what I wrote on the VRML list:
> Not that I wish to content on the point of simply who's first :)
> But, let's see... (Wish I had kept better records and wrote papers
> about things as they happened!)
> 
> Definitely by May 8, 1993 we had demonstrated that plotting demo
> (the very one shown in the viola paper) to visitors from a certain
> computer manufacturer... This demo was memorable because someone and I
> at ORA had lost sleep the night before the meeting, in order to cook
up
> that particular plotting demo :)  We had to show something cool.

That date (May 93), at least, predates your demo if I'm not mistaken. 
Then around August 93, it was shown to a bunch of attendees at the 
first Web Conference in Cambridge. So, it was shown, just not with 
lots of publicity and noise.

I'm sure I could find more evidence if I spent/waste the time of digging
thru archives.

If you're talking about any display code transferred over network,
look at a number of predating systems, including say net-transmitted 
postscript (NeWS).

For transmitted interactive applications, even the early Viola
(started around 88, relased 1991) had a viola-app net transfer tool
(the idea is to have something like a Hypercard like environment
on the scale of the net). 

If you're talking about interactive apps *specifically* on the web, ie
applets in-lined into HTML documents etc, and with bi-directional 
communications, then look at ViolaWWW as it existed around late '92 
early '93.


-Pei
 pei@gnn.com
 http://ebay.gnn.com/people/pei/home.html

Received on Sunday, 31 August 2003 14:50:28 UTC