Through Ken Durso (the guy who certified me to teach Director back in 1995), we hear MacroMind founder Marc Canter is leaving the Bay Area to go to Ohio and once again do something different.
Not having directly been a part of the San Francisco multimedia axis, I didn’t have much contact with Marc, but I do have a couple of stories.
At the big Q&A session at the 1996 Macromedia User Conference, I was just about to step up to the microphone to ask a question whena rather burly gentleman rushed past me to snag the floor. I can’t remember what he asked, but as it happened I never did get a chance to ask whatever I’d been thinking of. That was my first experience with Marc Canter.
The next year, as the Director 6 beta was winding down and people were lamenting the closure of the discussion list (this was at a time when DIRECT-L had several thousand members and the signal to noise ratio was significant), I started up a mailing list for the ex-beta testers. We started planning a get-together at the 1997 UCON, and somehow Marc heard about it and graciously offered to host it at his house (then on Potrero Hill). In those pre-Mapquest days, though, a number of the attendees didn’t realize quite how far that was from Moscone Center, however, and I still get people complaining about it a dozen years later. There’s even some postage stamp-sized video from the era.