Interview I did on early PC work, PCPaint GLPRO and so on
John Bridges
Dick Trump
Unsure if the old AfterGRASP list still works, but since I thought this might interest some old GLPRO users....
Yes, it still works! I haven't read through yet because I wanted to be the first to respond.
I suspect any work I did for various museums and visitor centers has been retired. But I still have a working app that I wrote for my church about 5 years ago (with a few revisions since). I automatically displays a countdown clock for the streaming service. Works and looks great!
My first job using Grasp was for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Los Angeles.
anglo...@gmail.com
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
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kshipp kellysoftware.com
Thanks John – good to see you still around! Yep, still on this list.
I’ll check out the video when I get a chance.
I miss the fun of creating solutions using GLPro. I haven’t done much with it in a number of years, but a while back I used it for a few quick utilities. I’m sure I still have a dozen screen savers but haven’t used them in a long time. I would be curious how well it performs on Windows 11. 😊
Best wishes – hope all is well.
Thanks,
Kelly
From: after...@googlegroups.com <after...@googlegroups.com>
On Behalf Of John Bridges
Sent: Friday, July 11, 2025 2:39 PM
To: after...@googlegroups.com
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....
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