jht-site
4. History - John Henry Thompson - Invent Your Future
4. History
My work thru the years
Subpage Listing
Joey deVilla: an-homage-to-john-henry-thompson – 2020-06
Distributed Instruments for Computed Expression – 2017
Digital Instrument for Computed Expression – 2000
Chatter Box Interpreter 1980’s
Archive of John Henry Thompson’s interactive art source code.
https://github.com/jht1493/DICE-AGE
**Personal and commercial projects over the years:
**
200x Collaboration with Professor John Fray
200x Video Library: Yoga, Yale African American Courses, …
200x WebDB - W.E.B. Du Bois’s Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition
2017Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director) Retired.
1987 - 2004 Adobe/Macromedia Director
1988 Garden of Interactive Delights.
###
Video Artifacts
###
[John Henry Thompson 199x ARTLIFE HQ ] 55:51 minutes
Presentation made to MIT Media Lab around 1997.
Summary of my art and work on Director authoring tool
and ideas for the future.
[ John Henry Thompson Demo 1988] 8:36 minutes
Demo video of music videos and custom visual effects
create on MIT Visible Language computer,
and MIT Film/Video Section video equipment.
Last section created on computers at the just open MIT Media Lab.
[John Henry Thompson Demo 1985-03-29] 53:20 minutes
Full versions of Color Dance video and other music videos.
Some videos shoot on super 8 and transferred to video.
[ Shani Dance 1984 ] 29:59 minutes
Full version of Shani Strothers Tie-Die dance video,
Audio experiment with processed audio.
Spoken words are from Shani Strothers poem.
Uncut video for Color Dance.
Director Video Clips
Macromind Inc.
MacroMind became Macromedia and then was acquired by Adobe in 2005.
What New York Times said about the 2005 acquisition:
“Macromedia, based in San Francisco,
had a profit of $41.5 million in 2004,
on revenue of $370 million.
The company has about 1,200 workers,
while Adobe, with annual sales of more than $1.7 billion,
employs about 3,700.”
MacroMind was founded by Marc Canter and his then wife
Devorah Canter in Chicago in the 1980’s.
They moved the company to the SF Bay area in 1989
with the first round of venture funding.
The Chatter Box interpreter in prior art letter was the conceptual basis
for the Lingo programming language that I implemented
for the Adobe/Macromedia Director, a application for multimedia authoring.
Lingo started out as a dialect of BASIC,
evolved to a dialect of HyperTalk and Smalltalk,
and ended as a dialect of JavaScript.
Along the way I wrote a Lingo to convertor fromJava
(with type inference) around 1997.
I added JavaScript as an alternative scripting option
to Adobe Director in 2003.
Director History as a public git repo
Prior art
When I became a full time employee of MacroMind in 1989
I had to list all my prior inventions since from then on any
new inventions were to be property of the company,
thus the need for this letter.
I think the legal term is prior art.
Lingo Praises
Praise for Lingo received via Facebook 2017 from Minty Hunter.
Praise for Lingo received via Facebook 2017 from Agyenim Wiredu.
Adobe Director Retired
Adobe announces Director retirement
“… Sale of Adobe Director and Contribute will stop on February 1, 2017. We will also stop ongoing updates and support for Adobe Shockwave on Mac devices on March 14th after the last release of the product.Effective April 9, 2019, Adobe Shockwave will be discontinued and the Shockwave player for Windows will no longer be available for download. …”
Subpages (2): Artifacts Lingo: Birth, Evolution, Demise.