July 16, 1989

HARMONIC CONVERGENCE: In case you hadn’t noticed, the disciplines of technology, entertainment and design have been converging like crazy for the last five years. And in February 1990, their disciples are going to converge as well. Last week I got wind of a conference called TED2 (Technology Entertainment Design) that’s clearly the hottest thing coming.

TED2 will bring together acknowledged gurus from all three fields for three days of show-and-tell with a small (475 people) group of smitten technophiles.

Organized by the creative services firm ROSEGroup of San Pedro, the event boasts a stellar lineup: Nicholas Negroponte, director and co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Herbie Hancock, musician and certified computer hack; Frank O. Gehry, award-winning architect; filmmaker-multimedia developer Robert Abel; Alan Kay, Apple Computer Fellow and futurist … and so on. The lineup of off-the-record attendees, says Bill Rosenzweig, conference director, is equally fascinating.

Aside from the caliber of the participants, TED2 is unusual because “it’s not going to be “talking heads,’ it’ll be a demonstration conference,” says Rosenzweig. He is even planning to use the prodigious talents at hand to produce a spontaneous film of the conference and have Jeff Rona, an acclaimed MIDI composer, compose a sound track on the fly.

And yes, there was a TED1. It was in 1984, hosted by renaissance man Richard Saul Wurman (you know him now as the author of the book Information Anxiety) and Harry Marks, the pioneer of animated broadcast graphics.

Rosenzweig was an enthralled TED1 attendee. He ran into Marks a year ago, and asked what happened. Marks said they never got around to it again. “So I volunteered, and the rest is history,” says Rosenzweig. I don’t want to field all the phone calls on this so if you want info on TED2, call (213) 831-4225.

‘TIS THE SEASON: Peter Alexander and PC industry pioneer Lee Felsenstein, partners in Glav-PC, are ready to roll with their software development “bridge” between Moscow and Berkeley. The project is named Kropotkin, after a 19th century anarchist, and Glav-PC hopes the bridge will help both countries develop both software and markets faster than either could do alone.

On either end of the bridge will be a PC running Unix System V, says Felsenstein. U.S. and Soviet programmers will co-develop applications, either by “Russifying” existing programs, or working together on new code. Participants communicate via phone link using UUCP, the Unix-to-Unix Communication Protocol that is built into the operating system.

“They don’t have any marketing there,” says Felsenstein. “Here we have financial guys and sales heads. Over there, finance and sales comes down to illegal activity, and they have a rather negative reputation.”

But today, Felsenstein says, respected Soviet programmers are the ones defining new products — a marketing function — and he bets they will be the core of the Soviet software industry. “So one of the benefits to participating (in Kropotkin) is they’ll be working with a future marketing heavy in the USSR.”

BEST PRESS RELEASE AWARD … goes this week to WordTech Systems of Orinda. WordTech makes a clone of the dBASE program for the PC sold by Ashton-Tate Corp., and was recently berated as a “carpetbagger and parasite” at an industry conference by A-T President Ed Esber, who is not known for his ability to make considered comments. A-T is also known as particularly litigious. With these two things in mind, let’s just say that WordTech President David Miller saw an open door, and walked on through.

The press release was headlined, “Ashton-Tate Threatens Legal Action Against WordTech for Non-existent Product,” and included a threatening letter from A-T’s corporate counsel, Steven L. Levine. Levine’s letter began, “It has come to my attention that you are marketing a product called dBASE/SQL,” and demanded that WordTech “immediately and permanently cease and desist from any use of Ashton-Tate’s trademark “dBASE’ or any mark similar to dBASE.”

You guessed it, WordTech doesn’t sell a product called dBASE/SQL, and doesn’t plan to. In fact, A-T actually bought some database technology from WordTech, says a company rep. Miller says that Levine was “really surprised” that WordTech put out a press release. Surprised isn’t the word I’d use.

P.S. Miller may be communicating with other extra-terrestrials as well, even as we speak. A 1945 photo of his birth, taken by his father, celebrated Time-Life photographer Wayne Miller, is in the time capsule aboard the Voyager.