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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

When I gave a demo of Kaleida ScriptX DreamScape at WWDC in 1995, the rule was that if your demo crashed, you had to do push-ups. Is that still the case?

My improvisational demo briefly came off the rails and froze up for a few seconds while I was switching between Netscape, Director, WebStar, BBEdit, and ScriptX, it had an attrotious frame rate, and butt-ugly programmer graphics, my screen fell in at the 6:00 mark, then a butterfly hijacked control of the presentation, and an insane rube-golbergesque robot went out of control, started bouncing around the screen, and broke apart into pieces, but it never actually crashed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM

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This demo brought back memories of being a teenager in the 90s. Wired magazine with the number of people on the Internet written on the spine, people and companies that saw the Internet as an amazing new medium but didn't know how it would work out but still did it anyway. Crazy ideas that might just work, though many didn't. The lingering fear that the government was going to shut down the Ineternet at any point, but the feeling that there was a community that would fight against that.

Thanks for the flashback :)

That demo was pretty cool! I remember the wonder of that era well, and your demo captured well how hard it was to get to those magical ‘wow’ moments, and how worth it that it was, as least the times worth remembering well.

Thank you -- It was an exciting time, working with some amazing people!

Here's something I wrote earlier on HN, in the discussion about Randy Nelson, one of the Flying Karamotzov Brothers, who worked at Kaleida teaching developers ScriptX! He recently retired from his job "teaching leadership-as-jazz to Apple staff worldwide."

Steve Jobs hired a career juggler to teach programming to developers (cake.co)

https://www.cake.co/conversations/w3j7jDp/that-time-steve-jo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18772263

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18776444

>Randy Nelson is awesome and brilliant! He deeply understands programming, teaching, performance and entertainment, and is really great to work with and learn from. I was very lucky that we worked together on ScriptX at Kaleida Labs, where he was in charge of training developers to program ScriptX. Yes, of course, he would actually juggle in class!

Here is one of his few public apperances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXJe8ANws8

>Pixar's Randy Nelson on the Collaborative Age

>The former Dean of Pixar University, Randy Nelson, explains what schools must do to prepare students (and themselves) for new models in the workplace. To learn more about collaboration in education, visit https://www.edutopia.org/integrated-studies

>1. You want to find people with mastery, true depth.

>2. The problem is, that isn’t enough. You need people who had failed and recovered. The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.

>3. Breadth, meaning curiosity about things beyond what you’re deep in.

>4. Collaboration. Not a synonym for cooperation, but the ability to magnify others.

And here's Randy talking about Programming as the fourth "R":

CUE 2012 Closing Keynote - Randy Nelson - Programming as the fourth "R"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx_sYSYJfGg

Here is a white paper I wrote about the underlying dynamic web stuff I developed for ScriptX that's shown in the DreamScape demo:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...

ScriptX and the World Wide Web: "Link Globally, Interact Locally"

Thanks for dropping all this knowledge, experience, and most of all, perspective with your history lesson. You’re a star.

Goodness. Friend of mine worked with him at NeXT.

And I'm pretty sure I was at your WWDC demo. That was a wild summer, everything seemed to be happening at once.

This is why I read HN.

That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen a computer do

Nice demo man. That's inspiring!

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