Re: Background information on Mr. Wei Pei

At FidoCon 1990 held in New Jersey that year,  I demonstrated 'Gold Xpress'
to a crowd of 3-4 hundred who were at awed at the potential technology.

Gold Xpress was the next step up to our Silver Xpress product line which was
a offline mail reader system.

Gold Xpress combined Silver Xpress with telecommunications and a special
tag-based instruction language that allowed TEXT based terminal to provide
GRAPHICAL display of data.  Plotting histograms, pie charts was used as part
of the demo.

Google "FidoCon"  for more information.

Google a direct search for "FidoCon"  and "New Jersey" and "Hector" and you
will find:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=FidoCon+%22New+Jersey%22+%22hector%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=150%40kumr.UUCP&rnum=1

Silver Xpress was developed in 1983/84.

Gold Xpress was developed in 1989 (and I was not the only one doing this),
but among the first to demonstrate it at a large trade show such as FidoCon.
GX never got of the ground because of the "dependency" of the BBS hosting
system to support it and the dearth of "WYSIWYG" tools.   It looked for
venture, but it never materialized.  The concept was too new and the
bandwidth of communications was still low.   However, the whole POINT of the
system was "off-load storage/caching" of applets and images/data,  which I
recall IBM has a patent on.

(side note, and incidentally,  Platinum Xpress  (get it? silver gold,
platinum) was developed in 1993/94, and had plans for a new product called
TX (Titanium Xpress) when I eventually brought the Wildcat! BBS/Intranet for
Windows product line.  The Xpress line of products were no longer that
important.)

Also,   Gold Xpress was re-demonstrated in One BBSCON 94 in Tampa, Florida.
One BBSCON started in 1992 (maybe 1993?) as an attempt to "professionalized"
and exploit the emerging BBS, communications and networking market.  It was
headed by Jack Richard of BoardWatch.   Many of the big boys attended these
shows, including Microsoft,  IBM, Novell, US Robotics, etc.

Google Gold Xpress and you will find a aug/94 report by wife,  she was one
my first users of Gold Xpress.

What is important here is Galacticomm with their World Group system.  I
believe they demonstrated "remote client applets" capability at these
earlier ONE BBSCON shows (which I did not attend).   So more research here
can probably show pre March 1993 prior art.

Sincerely,

Hector Santos, CTO
Santronics Software, Inc.
http://www.santronics.com
305-431-2846 Cell
305-248-3204 Office



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms@computerbytesman.com>
To: <public-web-plugins@w3.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2003 2:50 PM
Subject: 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 19:57:58 UTC