4. History

My work thru the years







High School of Music and Art 
or Bronx High School of Science ??


















New York State Youth Opportunity Program












Graduated HS 1977 - on to MIT


Prof. Peter Szolovits


Lisp ( --> Scheme --> JavaScript )

MIT AI Lab




Lisp Machines and the AI bubble
Game Console Bubble

Boston Museum School

Portal Packs

Video Editing

Glimpsed at Apple Lisa bitmap computer

















Post MIT - Hanging out at the Visible Language Workshop and Film Video Section



LCS Telegraphics and IBM PC clone of Macintosh GUI


3D Man





Color Dance



Off to Bay Area California























After Lucas Films

Fish Dance - Mac II video



collaboration with Benjamin Bergery.
High Praise for Jacob’s Dream





Back to East Coast: MacroMind and NYU-ITP





MacroMind --> Macromedia --> merged into Adobe











Director Demo 1

Director Demo 2

















































































DICE 2010 







































play, create, teach, learn



Reflections on Learning







































Archive of John Henry Thompson's interactive art source code. 1980 - 2018

Personal and commercial projects over the years:






1988 Garden of Interactive Delights.

Lucas Film Days

The story of Pixar begins with George Lucas, writes Michael Rubin in his book: 

Video Artifacts 


[John Henry Thompson 199x ARTLIFE HQ ] 55:51 minutes

Presentation made to MIT Media Lab around 1997.
Summary of my art and work on Director authoring tool
and ideas for the future.

[ John Henry Thompson Demo 1988] 8:36 minutes

Demo video of music videos and custom visual effects
create on MIT Visible Language computer,
and MIT Film/Video Section video equipment.
Last section created on computers at the just open MIT Media Lab.

[John Henry Thompson Demo 1985-03-29] 53:20 minutes

Full versions of Color Dance video and other music videos.
Some videos shoot on super 8 and transferred to video.

[ Shani Dance 1984 ] 29:59 minutes

Full version of Shani Strothers Tie-Die dance video,
Audio experiment with processed audio.
Spoken words are from Shani Strothers poem.
Uncut video for Color Dance.


Director Video Clips





Macromind Inc.



What New York Times said about the 2005 acquisition: 

"Macromedia, based in San Francisco, 
had a profit of $41.5 million in 2004, 
on revenue of $370 million. 
The company has about 1,200 workers, 
while Adobe, with annual sales of more than $1.7 billion, 
employs about 3,700."

MacroMind was founded by Marc Canter and his then wife 
Devorah Canter in Chicago in the 1980's.

They moved the company to the SF Bay area in 1989 
with the first round of venture funding.

The Chatter Box interpreter in prior art letter was the conceptual basis 
for the Lingo programming language that I implemented 
for the Adobe/Macromedia Director, a application for multimedia authoring.

Lingo started out as a dialect of BASIC, 
evolved to a dialect of HyperTalk and Smalltalk, 
and ended as a dialect of JavaScript.

Along the way I wrote a Lingo to convertor from Java 
(with type inference) around 1997.

I added JavaScript as an alternative scripting option 
to Adobe Director in 2003.


1989-03-01 Prior Art


When I became a full time employee of MacroMind in 1989 
I had to list all my prior inventions since from then on any 
new inventions were to be property of the company, 
thus the need for this letter.

I think the legal term is prior art.




Lingo Praises


Praise for Lingo received via Facebook 2017 from Minty Hunter.




Praise for Lingo received via Facebook 2017 from Agyenim Wiredu.



Adobe Director Retired

"... Sale of Adobe Director and Contribute will stop on February 1, 2017.   We will also stop ongoing updates and support for Adobe Shockwave on Mac devices on March 14th after the last release of the product. Effective April 9, 2019, Adobe Shockwave will be discontinued and the Shockwave player for Windows will no longer be available for download. ..."

Subpages (2):ArtifactsLingo: Birth, Evolution, Demise.