In a follow-up to my HyperCard post, I finally got my Mac to turn on, and found some pretty cool stuff.
In browsing through the old HyperCard stacks, FileMaker Pro documents, and SuperPaint files I found an interesting 'article' I wrote in 1993 when I was 15 years old. It describes in not-so-technical detail of how to facilitate Mac and IBM PC communication through intermediary hardware. It is really funny reading it now, knowing what I didn't know back then. It's also pretty cool, considering the WWW only came into existence in 1991. Here is the exact text from the document, which is under the pretense of a fictional news report.
It has been said to be impossible. "There is no way it is possible!" said Ian Russell, graduate of Carnegie Mellon. "If it is ever done, it will break the barrier between Macintosh and IBM users forever" another gentleman said. Well, little did they know what was going to evolve from the depths of a small community college in northern Massachusetts? It was late Saturday night about two years ago that the idea was derived, by a Senior, from the book "Possible Computer Advances for the next 50 Years". He then spent the next two years with the head of the computer department working on this project. At the young age of 22, Matthew Russell is the youngest person to create an idea and develop it into major computer advance. In the form of a modem cable, you would hook one end into your computer, the other end would plug into the other computer, the one you would like to have conversations with. In the center of this wire is a little black box. About the size of an A/C adaptor. Inside this little black box are a few wires, and a computer chip which stores about 250 MB of info. It is this little computer chip that does all of the processing between the two machines (Mac to IBM & IBM to Mac). For example, let's say that you were computing an essay from an IBM machine to a Macintosh. The information would travel out the modem port of the IBM, through the cable, and into the little black box. The computer chip then takes the info and computes it. To fully explain this process I have drawn you a VERY rough sketch of a cross section of the box, from the side view.
[ unable to convert image from Mac, but it was pretty poor anyways <g> ]
On the left side is the IBM input, and on the right, the Mac input. The squiggly lines that are running from the inputs to the chip, are the cables that carry the information. The chip is designed in a Mac to IBM format when the info is coming from the Mac. In other words, when the info comes from the Mac, it goes through the chip which changes it into an IBM compatible language. When the info is coming from the IBM it goes through the same process, in reverse to change it into a Mac compatible language. That is all of the info I could get, the rest is still pretty classified, from the public.
Little did I know that the translation processing would not happen in the middle (which would be very impractical), but rather it would take place on the host and client machines in the form of TCP/IP and Ethernet.
I guess I am still trying to work on the interoperability issue. I spent a number of years in my career working on custom middleware applications to connect legacy systems.
BTW, I wish I knew what I had imagined was in the rest of that book!