Not that the technology is aging, just that December 3rd is QuickTime’s birthday! According to Apple Matters, 12/3/1991 was the day QuickTime 1.0 came out. This is one I remeber very well … I was a sophomore psychology major at WVU. The Mountaineers were not heading to a bowl game, so I guess I was paying attention to a whole host of other things. We had a computer store on campus that I would stop in to see the latest from Apple. At the time I had a Mac SE with a giant 20 MB hard drive … but I wanted more! When I saw QT I was amazed at what you could do with it … it took imagination as the movies were really just the size of a postage stamp, but there was real potential.

When QuickTime hit I instantly started talking to a faculty adviser of mine who was a Mac head as well about the thought of capturing the best of Psych lectures on video and embedding them into text documents to share with people after the fact. HTML wasn’t around, so there wasn’t a way to do this as easily as you can now — and you certainly couldn’t just upload stuff to youtube. About a year later, Apple introduced a technology called OpenDoc that allowed you to build experiences from multiple document types … perfect for combining video and text. My SE wouldn’t touch the stuff, but a year and a half later I had an LC III that actually had enough horsepower to pull it off.

I was never able to make my QT/Text study guides work, but a couple of years later I headed off to Bloomsburg University’s Instructional Technology program and got my first real view of media authoring for educational purposes. I was still using QT, but now easily embedding it in Authorware, Director, and other tools to create learning experiences. It just sort of surprises me that back in 1991 I was struck by the power of a postage stamp sized piece of video for educational purposes. Back then I couldn’t have dreamed that I would end up at PSU working to create teaching and learning environments powered by technology. Life is funny.