d-projects   projects   organizations   people   content   technology   resources   [home | site map]

resources | launhardt & kahn, 1991

Launhardt, J. & Kahn, P. (1991). The Educational Uses of Intermedia. (Tech. Rep. No 91-2) Providence: Brown Univ. Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship.

"Intermedia was intended as a research prototype. The delivery platform was chosen because it provided support for the features we wanted to offer. Beginning in 1985, we assumed a multi-user environment, a multi-tasking operating system, and high-speed connections between machines supporting a general network file system. ...We have made hard choices in order to create a system that demonstrated what could be done on tomorrow's systems while running on today's equipment." (Launhardt & Kahn, 1991, pp. 13-14)
"The news has been both good and bad. The good news has been that this ambitious design has been accomplished without special hardware or operating system software...However, the bad news has been that, despite it general availability since 1988, Apple's UNIX has never been the operating system of choice for most Macintosh users. ... Up through the summer of 1990 Intermedia had been one of the few applications that runs under A/UX and one of only a handful that made use of the Macintosh Toolbox to present a graphical user interface. In the summer of 1990, Apple Computer made changes to A/UX version 2.0 that made it incompatible with Intermedia. By that time, support for further development of Intermedia had ended. To run Intermedia, users have had to maintain or locate a version of A/UX which is no longer supported by Apple."  (Launhardt & Kahn, 1991, pp. 13-14)
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] | MEHopper@TheWorld.com [posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]