The Abyssal Of Great Ideas

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I had a thought [shit happens, I know] this morning about chasing down some of the history surrounding our software development back in the '90s/00s: viz the VBase/InfinitImages days of yore. I then thought, why not chuck some questions at Claude AI and see what comes back? So, mindful of the fact that a carefully formed prompt or question posed to a LLM will elicit more sense than a stupid question, I simply stated the following: 'In the 1990s there was a Photoshop plugin called FotoPage which has disappeared from sale - can you research this for me?'. What followed was very interesting, as the AI came up with exactly correct details about both the product and our development of it, and found an archived, compressed version of one of the range on the Tucows archive. It correctly returned the chronology of the software's development, up to and including its year of demise. It then went on to accurately analyse the two principal technical reasons why the product(s) eventually failed, and then went on to note that 'the developer [us] vanished', and gave a pretty much accurate description of the difficulties for a small software developer facing up to the industry giants back in the day.

So far, pretty damned impressive, but it gets better: it then, unprompted, asked me if there was any particular reason I was researching it. I answered that the FotoPage concept was actually mine [pictured, a shitty screencap of some Internet Archive mention of it], and that we tried to exploit it commercially in order to fund a far more wide-ranging project called FotoFox [Mozilla's 'Fox' was far in the future at this point]. With FotoPage [blog posts passim], we produced a simple to use software that speeded up by several orders of magnitude the [I kid you not, and this had numerous public demonstrations at the time and won plaudits in the Mac-based press from the US to Israel and back] at the time woeful Contact Sheet function native to Photoshop itself, presenting itself as an actually useful pre-press tool for professional photographers.

All well and good, and I've written about this particular era in my life before now; but I went on to say that the ultimate aim of FotoFox was to offer '...a standalone application for the rapid storage and retrieval of very large numbers of images. The concept involved unique individual image addressing along the lines of IPv6...' I remember full well being poo-poohed at the time over this notion of unique addressability by a software developer and 'expert' of our acquaintance, who obviously had not been reading the latest literature on the subject of network addressing. As Claude AI pointed out, IPv6 had only just been formalised at the time (1998), and so the ideas that we were coalescing then were literally at the bleeding edge of current technology.

Today, a quarter of a century on, our genuinely far-sighted notions are now routinely commonplace, and the online world is entirely run on those very foundations that we knew existed and that were about to emerge onto the world stage as the foundations of modern, networked life. As Claude AI - too damn right! - pointed out in my dialogue with it today, we were too far advanced, too early, and subject to the blind commercial whims of corporate capitalists with little imagination beyond their own profit and loss accounts. What I do take away from this experience, however, is the satisfaction that we were there first and they [the banks and the business funders] were wrong and we were right. Just ask Claude. I will bring you more of this interesting interaction in the coming weeks as it has prompted me to start writing up in more detail the history and methodologies of those exciting few years of my life, the people involved and the achievements we made...

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