What is Merlin doing on our skyBuilders home page?
We thought you might like to know that the team behind skyBuilders includes the people who brought you Merlin in the 1970's and MacPublisher, the first desktop publishing program, in the 1980's. We also built the iXO Telecomputer, which was years ahead of its time as a networking device in 1982.
Many thirty-somethings had their first computer interactions with Parker Brothers' Merlin, the Electronic Wizard. Although more than 5 million Merlins were sold worldwide, they are hard to find today. So we programmed a Merlin simulation in JavaScript and put it on the web for all the Merlin fans out there.
| Check out an online version at theelectronicwizard.com | Merlin gif animation by Internet legend James "Kibo" Parry. | |
skyBuilders developers who would like to help us improve the JavaScript code for Merlin can download it from the skyBuilders developer site, dev.skyBuilders.com
When the graphical windows interface appeared on the Macintosh in 1984, we were the eleventh certified Macintosh developer and wrote MacPublisher, which shipped in 1984 and ran on the 128K Mac. Today you cannot do page layout in HTML like that in Adobe PageMaker or Quark Xpress, but skyPages can give you things that are impossible in desktop publishing, pages that are timeLined onto the web on your own schedule.
The iXO Telecomputer was featured on the cover of Byte magazine in 1982. With its first ever built-in telephone-line-powered modem, it was called the "data equivalent of the telephone." Designed to be used for short online transactions like airline reservations, stock trades, and bill-paying, the Telecomputer was also intended for messaging between the hearing impaired. Today desktop computers and the world-wide-web have achieved everything we dreamed of at iXO twenty years ago and a great deal more, and soon Palm computers even smaller than the Telecomputer will be full web browsers.
