Hypercard offered me the perfect opportunity to create an interactive application that controlled the SV7500. My office mate, Craig, and I figured out that I would need something called an "xcmd", a piece of code that allows communication between Hypercard and other devices, in this case over an RS-232 serial connection. After explaining this to John, the engineer for the 7500, he gave me a copy of the commands available to control the device. Then I had, Craig, create the xcmd I needed to insert into Hypercard. Now, I could begin my coding.
The SV7500 Demo stack I wrote had three different modes. The first was a demo of a home real estate database with images (wow, you kinda see those everywhere now). When a home in the database was selected the SV7500 would retrieve the linked image of the house. The second button I called the "Presentation Maker", which reveals the underpinnings of the whole stack. It allowed you to link photos, add text, sounds, create presentations or databases. The third section was a presentation of our products with feature bullets that popped up for each product. All created in the "Presentation Maker". I had some Bach sythesizer music I'd recorded, running as the soundtrack. I knew I didn't need that MFA in interactive design after all.
Not an officially sanctioned project, I did alot of the programming in the evening at home and then would test it once I got to work the next day. Not surprisingly, it was a hit once I demonstrated it to my supervisor, and his managers. I even got a trip to MacWorld San Francisco to demonstrate it at a small 10 x 10 booth at the back of the hall in Jan 1989. (As the Super Bowl was going on down the street.) It was one of the very first interactive devices on the market. I had biz cards from more than 25 Apple engineers interested in what I'd done. Of course, the SV7500 project was killed shortly after I got back to Rochester.
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