• Megavision Proposal
• Digital Camera Proposal
• Illustrator 1.0 Introduced
• Powerpoint Introduced
• Digital Audio Visual Presentation Device Proposal
• Quark Xpress Introduced
• HyperCard object oriented programming Introduced
• FrameServer Proposal

The Macintosh II

The year 1987 marked a new era for Apple computer. The first color and easily expandable Mac, the Macintosh II, was announced at the January MacWorld event. This new Mac would feature a powerful new generation of Motorola Processor, the 68020 and an expandable bus architecture with six expansion slots. Open for development.

The new architecture, based on the "Nubus" standard, would allow the addition of specialized cards for expanded capabilities For example, true 24-bit monitor/display boards, image compression/manipulation, communications, and possibly much more. Now there was a color computer potentially capable of displaying 24 bit color images (without having to shell out nearly $8K for the ATT Targa board which was only a semi solution).

I say potentially, because the new Mac II was only available with a 13" monitor and a 640 x 480 pixel 8 bit (or 256 color) display card from Apple. Apple apparently was leaving it up to 3rd party developers to provide more advanced viewing capabilities. Companies like Radius and Supermac would step up to the challenge before the year was out. I would try to get Kodak to build a 24 bit display board for the Mac as well.

To refresh your memory the devices Kodak's EPD was developing in 1987 were: the SV7500, an image storage device based on the still video floppy; the SV9600, a video resolution compression/transmission device; the SV6500, a small format video printer; there were also a video camera based, image capture copy stand and a concept for a SVF camera. Each device was based on a different microprocessor and a custom designed circuit board (each requiring a different programming language), a powersupply and a costly (memory was very expensive back then) framestore/graphics card. See Still Video System diagram below.

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There were plans already being developed for future generations of these as yet unsold devices. No where in those product plans of 1987 was there any mention of digital or computers. I began to express my concern that they were overlooking the many potential opportunities to use computers to control our devices, even store and edit images and a number of other photographic use scenarios. For several months the previous year I had been tasked with drawing up hundreds of scenarious for controling our video devices with computers mostly using the serial port on several of our devices. Unfortunately at the time there were no plans to develop any drivers or software. The serial ports were there primarily for our device software developers. Together with one of the lead software programmers of the SV7500 who shared my concerns we set up a meeting with sales, marketing and product planning to sort of lay out the whole concept of connecting our devices to computers and what was needed. Not something they had ever even considered, few had ever used computers at the time. There was much heated discussion because we were asking for money to develop just the drivers so that 3rd party developers could write software applications. Marketing did not want to add any additional costs to the development of these products I guess to keep the price as low as possible. There was a belief that developers would pay for the opportunity and they would later actually consider charging developers for the opportunity to write software for our devices. Other manufacturers get away with the practice today but they make devices that people already want. This total lack of understanding of these new markets would lead to some costly decisions for years to come.

Digital Imaging Peripherals Proposal

To the right is a scan (couldn't convert the original text format) of a proposal that I wrote in March of 1987 suggesting that Kodak should be developing products for computers like the new Mac II. I tried to convey that this was where imaging was headed, not towards consumer video. When I didn't get much response I began developing a more complete solution. This would evolve into the propsal below of an entire imaging workstation concept.

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Megavision Workstation Concept

The Mac II was the computer I had been anxiously waiting for, when I finally saw the specs I began envisioning creating an image editing workstation based around the current imaging technologies available from both the Apple Macintosh universe and our Kodak research labs. Instead of a separate box for each step in the image chain, (the path Kodak was currently on) I wanted a modular workstation that could be expanded. The functionally of each step in the image chain could simply be added using separate Nubus cards and utilizing the microprocessor, display card, memory of this singular modular Mac. Even more importantly, it would have a standardized User Interface (and programming language) integrating all of these functions so they would work seamlessly for the end user.

I titled my Imaging Workstation concept Megavision, capitalizing on the recently announced Megapixel image sensor and the intended 1024 x 1024 resolution of all the various devices. We had recently been given previews of a new Flat Tension Mask hi-res monitor from Zenith that I would incorporate into the design.

There was quite a bit of resistance to this proposal, as was to be expected. I was for all intents and purposes suggesting that the teams scrap most of what they had been working on for the past few years and move in an entirely new direction. I tried to explain that I was quite convinced that Still Video Floppy was destined to be a bust due to it's inherent limitations. My image print quality test the previous year had proved that, to me at least. I feared these analog SVF based devices would be irrelavent before we ever shipped them.

Publishing was converting to digital technology and it seemed to me that image capture and editing were heading that way as well. My few experiences with digital scanners (like the Thunderscan and the Sharp Flatbed, really two ends of the spectrum) and some new B&W image editing software programs (like Thunderpaint and the 8 bit grayscale Imagestudio) I'd been playing with, clearly indicated to me what the future might be like.

New desktop publishing applications like Quark Xpress, and Ragtime were appearing to compete with Pagemaker as the desktop publishing market began to rapidly heat up. New graphics software, image editing software, video digitizing devices, the first desktop scanners, new output devices were being announced every week.

Digital Camera Proposal

Several new, compact, digital recording technologies had appeared around this same time. The first was the repurposing of the small 8mm video cartridges, (used in the Kodak 8mm video cameras) for digital audio/data storage. I reasoned if it was small enough to be used in the KMVS (Kodak Motion Video System) video camera it could probably be used to store digital images in a still electronic camera.

I was very disappointed with Kodak's very consumer video oriented digital camera design concepts, especially considering that any 1st generation electronic still camera was going to be pretty expensive initially. I reasoned that a faster path forward would be to take an existing professional film camera, like the Hasselblad, and replace the film back with a module that contained an image sensor, analog to digital converter and an 8mm tape drive. The quality from the analog SVF image would never approach that of a digitally stored image even though there were retrieval issues with digital tape. Hard drives were still mostly of the 5" form factor and pretty heavy. Flash memory devices had been demonstrated but wouldn't begin to be available in minute sizes for another year.

I briefly considered another new digital recording technology, the recordable mini audio CD, that Sony was using in their new digital audio recorders. I rejected that idea because I felt the concept was too far removed from where the current attitudes were. Kodak already owned the tape drive and media technology. I add a small over the shoulder recording device to the concept drawing to at least put forward the idea but still make it somewhat believable. Another unique camera feature I envisioned was a small flat screen display fed by a video feed from the sensor that would replace the standard optical viewing screen. Sony would eventually release a still camera that wrote directly to CD's and now still cameras are replacing traditional optical viewfinders with video fed from the sensor.

My 1987 original digital camera concept was created/designed with my latest illustration tool, the vector based MacDraw. No longer resolution bound by the pixel constraints of MacPaint, MacDraw was resolution independant, meaning it could be scaled to nearly any size without the jaggies. The version displayed below however is at screen resolution, pretty much what you would have seen from an Imagewriter printer. It got much nicer if you had a Laserwriter.

I guess this proposal seemed pretty far fetched at the time for most to grasp immediately. It wasn't widely distribuited as a result and was pretty much ignored back in 1987. After all, I was the brand new technician with no electronics background, other than how to use a Mac. The original DCS camera in 1990 would do something fairly similar using a Nikon film body and attaching a big battery pack, hard drive and monitor for you to lug around on your shoulder. About 10 years later, Kodak finally did create a back for 2.25" cameras as depicted in my 1987 only with compact drives, much more portable.

Adobe Illustrator 1.0

Not shown in this diagram was the SVF camera the SV8300. The SV8300 camera was still in the early prototype stage and the illustration to the right was drawn from a wooden mockup. The camera was to use either a new Kodak video resolution CCD sensor from the research labs and if that didn't pan out the alternative might have been to source an imager from Sony. The analog recording of images on the still video floppy was the real weak link in the system in my opinion.
There was talk of converting to a digital recording but the SVF standard at the time didn't support it yet.

Digital Audio Visual Presentation Device Proposal - links to pdf of entire proposal

Powerpoint for the Mac was introduced in 1987 by Microsoft and Verbatim had announced a new 3.5" optical disk with 65Mb of storage. Which, if I remember correctly, was being developed in another part of Kodak. These were opportunities for Kodak in what I saw as two of the next big desktop computer applications "Desktop Presentations" and "Desktop Video". I put togther my first totally desktop published proposal utilizing Pagemaker, Illustrator and MacDraw. This time I would take the "Megavision" concept a step further and propose a complete solution for "Desktop Presentations" with the new optical disk as a key feature which would allow unprecedented amounts of storage for high quality digital images.

The Digital AV Presentation Device was basically a "tote-able" computer for conference room use. Presentations could be created on any Macintosh or on the device itself (which at it's heart was a Mac II - the circuit boards for which coincindently were being made several buildings away at Elmgrove) a slightly smaller, more compact unit with extendable stereo speakers. It would feature one or more 24 bit video display boards to be built by Kodak and a 3.5" Optical drive in addition to the standard floppy drive and internal hard drive. The video output could be hooked to standard conference room monitors of the time or to one of the new video projecters just beginning to hit the market. This would enable showing Powerpoint or other presentation software to be presented to larger groups. Remember... overhead projectors with printed overhead transparencies, or much more commonly, hand drawn transparencies, were the rule in the business world at the time.

Once I had the proposal completed with title cover, illustrations and typeset copy (I didn't have much clue as to what I was doing but it certainly looked more impressive than handwritten overheads) I called a meeting with the heads of the product development groups, advanced development management and a few key marketing and sales people, put on a tie and handed out about 30 copies of the proposal. I remember the mostly blank stares I got as I sweated through my spiel and then dead silence. They needed time to digest it I guess. A few of them came up after and told me I did a nice job but I'm not sure the significance of what I was trying to say had really sunk in. Momentum is a very powerful corporate force.

I believe one outcome of that presentation was that it raised enough questions that they ended up hiring a photo industry consulting firm to advise them on whether video or digital was the correct path forward. The verdict, nearly a year and $250K later was, you guessed it, digital!

Control Center Revisited

The diagram to the right was created in Illustrator and was created to demonstrate my Control Center idea of 1986 with complete computer control. Now with a serial interface and a EPD built video card for the PC, switching inputs and outputs could all be done from software on a PC. Made for a nice user friendly video setup but would never see the light of day.

Hypercard Introduced

Hypercard by Bill Atkinson was introduced in 1987. Hypercard was an object oriented programming tool for the masses. A kind of software construction kit that was graphical in nature having the abililty to store images on "cards" that could be hyper-linked to buttons or other images and easy to write little scripts. There was an explosion of new software, databases, reference materials, as teachers, writers, students, and artists began creating specialized software for their own use or to sell to others. This was a foreshadowing of what would later evolve into the internet and even later the App Store.

I quickly caught on to the hang of it and began writing my own stacks playing around with random art generation stacks and later I wrote a random instrument generator and library/editor for my Yamaha DX11 keyboard. Connecting it up via the midi inferace I could randomly or using sliders in my Hypercard stack for just about every editable parameter I was able to deciphter. I still don't know how I did it and doubt I could duplicate it but I quickly got into the zone and zen of writing Hypercard stacks.

FrameServer - A Flexible Gen 2 Design Approach - Links to PDF of enitre proposal

From the beginning my biggest beef with marketing , was the fact that they hadn't a clue who the potential buyers for our products were. It was typical to push out new technologies without really crafting them into a viable product. Kodak already had a reputation for leaving developers and resellers in the lurch by abadoning some film products. They were attending video trade shows like NAB and CES trying to market these video products primarily it seemed to TV broadcasters. This seemed to me a pretty limited audience. When asked what other markets might be interested in these products there was no clear consensus. I admit, I really didn't know either. All I knew is that I wouldn't use them. I wanted exciting new products that would give me complete control over my photographs. The products we had except for maybe the thermal printer had little appeal unfortunately because they fell between below the pro level in quality and above the consumer level in price. Digital options were already out there for storing and transferring images. There were still few options for editing photos on your computer, mostly grayscale.

While some small cost saving could be expected with Gen II versions of the Still Video Products, did it make sense to continue focused solely on this small market? I thought possibly the best way to appeal to a wider audience was to make the products much more flexible in configuration and combine common function into a single expandable imaging workstation. Thus was born the idea for FrameServer. Instead of having several different products each containing a microprocessor and circuit board, powersupply, and an expensive video framestore, I posited that you should have one box with a power supply, microprocessor & circuit board and framestore. This box would also house storage media bays for things like hard drives, floppy drives, flash memory drives, optical disk drives and so on as technologies changed. No longer would we need to further develop the SV7500. The FrameServer case would have several slots for additional cards so that a modem/compander card (replacing the SV9600), digital printer (reducing cost of SV6500) interface or digital camera interface cards could be added as needed. It was just a computer really but since I'd heard the head of marketing detested computers we decided to call it the FrameServer. What I proposed was an imaging workstation built from the ground up for working with images. I envisioned a touch panel interface that interacted with menu overlays on the screen. It could be used for image archiving, image editing, scientific applications, in-house graphic communications, and hundreds more applications just by reconfiguring the available options. The idea went over like a lead balloon with Marketing, and not everyone in the engineering group warmed up to it at first. It was said to be too costly to build that kind of flexability into our products as it would make that initial product purchase much more expensive than anyone of the existing products.

There were no such thing as touch tablets at the time I wrote my proposal but there were hints of the key technologies showing up. Basically I envisioned it pretty much as Apple implemented their laptop Trackpads in that moving your finger across it moved a cursor on the monitor and it had a click function when pressed. Wireless was my first thought but added a wired remote pad because wireless touch control pads were a Star Trek like fantasy at the time and I didn't want the focus to be too much on the interface. The self-configuring touch interface was mostly to inject some fresh thinking and get people to begin to a little more forwardly on the user experience front. I got a bit risky (for Kodak) with the illustrations, layout as well as the front panel design of the products. Still I usually tried to keep my product concepts to a VCR-size box form factor to which most were accustomed. If I tried to get too fancy, reduce the size or form factor too much it would usually stir up even more resistance. Still I wanted to convey a very modern approach.

Of course you know it went nowhere as a product concept itself but within a year there were at least plans for developing a common motherboard design, a common software development platform introducing shared code libraries, one framestore design for all Gen II products and possibly a 24 bit display card for Macintosh's. It was a small step in the right direction.