Before the WorldWideWeb, there was Move!

In 1992, I was in marketing at SGI and there was an internal product developed called Move! It could be used to post information or for presentations. It had a client-server model so you could view content on one computer, but host it elsewhere. It could handle text, images, audio, vector imagery, video, and 3D objects. New data types could be added. It was operating system, network, and hardware independent. It was called Move! (sometimes it was called Showcase).

We didn't really know what to do with Move!. I was one of the early and big users of Move!. I used it for presentations. Some of the engineers that it was the future of computing but I couldn't really see why.

It had an integrated authoring tool which was great.

In retrospect, it was basically the technology for the world wide web which we developed, played with, and then moved on to other more immediate projects. I sometimes think back to Move! and wonder if anyone else remembers it. Surely, the engineers who put it together must think about. I wonder if the technology was robust enough to have gone all the way.

I wrote this post after looking at an article by Alex Vorn which notes today is the tenth anniversary of Mozilla.




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