Hello John,
What a trip down memory lane your article sparked. My story is that my first job out of college was with Brightbill-Roberts in Syracuse NY who developed a presentation package called Show Partner. My role as a 20 year old was tech support, alpha testing and the setup and running of a BBS. This was back in the CompuServe days and I was part of the GO PICS forum that developed the GIF format which I think is where I first came across you John. I’d heard about Grasp from a couple of users and decided to do a competitive analysis. I fell in love with Grasp because it allowed me to do things that Show Partner couldn’t even begin to touch. Within about two months I left Syracuse and started working with a guy in Los Gatos CA who had a contract with Lotus. Over a nine month period I coded and mastered the following demo diskettes and kiosks * Adobe Illustrator for Windows v1.0 * Lotus 1-2-3 * Lotus Symphony * Computer Associates SuperCalc5 * And my favorite being the Intel Comdex demo for the Intel Inboard 386 featuring Joe Turner the hacker monk. He was up against it having to translate the entire Tibetan book of the Dead. Intel had people in costumes dancing around to large crowds on the show floor dancing to the soundtrack. We used stereo separation with tones on one track that I could read via a device driver to see where I was. The key was loading images or DFFs only when people were reading what was on the screen. For this intel job I was running off a hard drive so read time wasn’t and issue. On the demo diskettes above it certainly was. They made over a million copies of that Lotus 1-2-3 diskette so it was a big deal. So I had a falling out with the guys in Los Gatos, fell in love with an English girl and moved to London back in Dec 1989. Jason Gibbs was a friend. We went on a ski trip together. I never made the full switch from Grasp to GLPro or AfterGrasp I think because I decided to focus more on business and employed people with Macromedia skillsets. But John, I have to credit you and Doug with helping me get my start in computing. The skills I had with Grasp were extremely rare in the UK in 1990 and I cake walked the work permit. It was such a different world. There was so much optimism in London in the 1990s. It was a great time to be in business. Who was the guy in Chicago that came up with how to use Brief as an editor for Grasp? That was the major breakthrough for me as a coder. There’s no way I could have turned out all those projects using the Grasp IDE. I’m curious who else is on this list and whether there are any contributors to my Hot Stuff of Walkthroughs and Flybys CD collections. Best way to contact me is X where I am @phil_shatz. You made my day John… thx for sharing. Phil Shatz Scottsdale AZ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of John Bridges Sent: 11 July 2025 12:39 To: [email protected] Subject: Interview I did on early PC work, PCPaint GLPRO and so on Unsure if the old AfterGRASP list still works, but since I thought this might interest some old GLPRO users.... A few months ago I saw an article about examining the source code for the original Mac Paint, and it talked about PC Paint (which I wrote). I sent the author a few small corrections, and he asked me to do an interview on the early days of PC graphics programming, and my experiences/life. It ended up taking a while to research and finish this interview. Here it is! https://ztoz.blog/posts/interview-john-bridges/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "aftergrasp" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> . To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/aftergrasp/CAJ8DDcOAK6-oN3vhMcZrghk-avLjdCMJkaDUGyL7SFg94CBX%2BQ%40mail.gmail.com <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/aftergrasp/CAJ8DDcOAK6-oN3vhMcZrghk-avLjdCMJkaDUGyL7SFg94CBX%2BQ%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "aftergrasp" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/aftergrasp/004c01dbf2a1%2475640ff0%24602c2fd0%24%40gmail.com.
