#CD-I / CD-XA
4 messages in this thread
I work on contract for Eduquest, the IBM educational products company, doing
work related to the development and marketing of LinkWay, LinkWay Live!, and
LinkWay for Windows, and multimedia products for education which are based on
these development systems.
I have been involved in development of many Eduquest demos for trade shows,
etc. and developed a new LinkWay accessory CD called "LinkWay Picture Gallery"
which Eduquest is now selling. It contains 908 photos from around the world of
a variety of different topics. Each Photo is provided in MCGA, VGA-8, and SVGA
LinkWay formats, plus a GIF format (640X480X256) version of each photo is
provided. The CD includes a runtime version of LinkWay Live! with a LinkWay
folder providing simple database access to each of the images for preview and
copying to diskette or hard drive. I think it is being sold for $39.95.
Larry
Larry,
That sounds like an awfully good deal for $40. I first saw some demos of
LinkWay in 1990, at an AAAI conference, but at that time there wasn't much to
interest me, at least not that IBM was showing in public. (I was more
interested in the "link" aspect, which wasn't very evident then.)
Thanks for the description!
Kathy Cochrane
[GO ONEOFF]
I think the CD is a great deal. The images are varied lot, and it may be
difficult to find a specific image of interest at any given time, but there a
lot of pictures for $40.
I've heard many people say similar things about LinkWay after seeing a demo at
some conference or another. I guess there must be a lot of people doing a
lousy job of demoing the product and its capabilities. I have used LinkWay for
several years for some pretty sophisticated applications. You may or may not
be aware of some of the applications on CD which have been created using
LinkWay: National Geographics Mammals, Presidents, Picture Atlas of the World,
Compact Publishing's Time Almanac, CNN Newsroom, ABC News Interactive CD-ROM
titles, Storyteller, Honeybee, and others.
LinkWay is so named because of its capabilities to connect information of
various types and its ability to run other applications from LinkWay. There
are several ways to extend LinkWay's capabilities and to Link to other apps.
LinkWay can run any DOS application from a script, either in memory available
after LinkWay is running ( about 80-100K ) or by "rolling out" LinkWay from
memory, freeing all but about 5K used for an image of the LinkWay session.
After running the application, LinkWay will restore itsself to its original
state. In addition, LinkWay scripts can call and run assembly language
subroutines, and compiled language "externs", programs written in C,
QuickBasic, Pascal, etc. which are used to provide specific features which are
not in the LinkWay system, similar in many ways to XCMD's for Hypercard.
Larry
Larry,
As you say, some of the reps have been less than sparkling. I even asked
specifically to be shown some linking capabilities, only to be told they didn't
exist! Less than impressive. (Or maybe at that time they really didn't exist
— but why drag it to an exhibit hall if so?) Anyway, I have a couple of the
discs you mentioned, although early versions. I'll have to look at them again
with the presentation program in mind instead of content.
Thanks for your detailed explanation!
Kathy Cochrane