At some point after the second edition of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh had
come out, Hayden was contacted by Harry Wiland of Wiland Productions, an Emmy-award
winning director and producer. Harry wanted to do a video based on Internet Starter
Kit for Macintosh, and he wanted me to be in it. Fascinated by the possibilities,
I agreed and spent several days in and around Los Angeles shooting the video.
Our goal was to talk to real people about how they could use the Internet in their
everyday lives and jobs, showing them Internet resources live on the tape. We spoke
with some doctors, a lawyer, a policeman, a class of students, a businessman, a hearing-impaired
woman, and various other people. It was an absolute hoot, and I enjoyed it rather
a lot (although the shooting schedule was incredibly tiring).
Then it all started to fall apart. The first problem was technical. Video cameras
aren't good at filming computer screens - the screens tend to roll on videotape.
You can get special cameras that compensate, but we hadn't done that (or, rather,
I think we tried, but it didn't work in the field). So, Harry had to rent one of
the special cameras and come up and film the screens at my house, which took a full
day.
After all the raw footage had been assembled came the editing. Harry put together
a rough and sent it to me and to Hayden. I liked it well enough for a rough, but
Hayden flipped. They'd thought that Harry was creating a "how-to" video,
not the look at how the Internet could be used in everyday life. Big problem, lots
of long phone calls.
Eventually, I had to go back down to Los Angeles for more filming to get some of
the "how-to" elements into the video. Unfortunately, back then, the Internet
was hard enough that the video was nowhere near long enough to do it justice (I complained
bitterly about this at the time, because here I was trying to condense a huge book
into a short video, and it just didn't work).
Harry finally edited together a version of the video that included enough "how-to"
information to satisfy Hayden, and it was sold directly by Hayden, but only half-heartedly.
Hayden had thought Harry was going to find distributors for it as well, and that
never happened, so the video languished. In the end, a fair number of copies of it
were made and sold, solely because it was included with a box version of the book,
Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh 2.0 and Internet
Starter Kit for Windows 2.0.
I felt bad about the Internet Starter Kit Video, because I think if we'd stuck to
Harry's original plan, we might have had a chance of getting wider distribution via
PBS or something like that. It was one of the first Internet videos, and could easily
have made far more of a splash.