MacHack 2001: Keynote Announced: And The There Were Six

MacHack: The Annual Conference for Leading Edge Developers
http://www.machack.com/

Contact: Carol Lynn
mailto:info@machack.com
c/o Expotech
1264 Bedford Road
Grosse Point Park, MI 48230

April 10, 2001-Dearborn, MI-MacHack: The Annual Conference for Leading Edge Developers is pleased to announce the addition of Donn Denman to the 2001 conference keynote. Already gathered for this one-of-a-kind Macintosh engineering reunion are five key players from the original Macintosh development project: Andy Hertzfeld, Guy “Bud” Tribble, Caroline Rose, Bruce Horn and Jef Raskin.

Denman joined the early Macintosh team at Apple in 82(?) when there were about 20 people working on the project. He was tasked with building a BASIC programming language interpreter for the new machine. Along with Bryan Stearns, MacBASIC was coded from scratch but was put on hold as the ship date for Macintosh 1.0 approached. Denman joined the programming effort for the System and wrote the original Notepad as well as part of the Calculator and Alarm Clock desk accessories.

After the Macintosh shipped, Denman brought MacBASIC to beta, but changing market conditions as well as the appearance of a BASIC interpreter from Microsoft caused the product to disappear without ever reaching release. According to Denman, “MacBASIC was the first IDE for BASIC (as far as I know), and supported multiple edit and execution environments running on the original 128K Mac.”

After the demise of MacBASIC, he continued to work at Apple for several years and even became a key contributor to early versions of Applescript. Denman now works for PowerTV <http://www.powertv.com/> helping to bring the Internet to cable set top boxes.

MacHack 2001 will take place June 21-23, 2001, in Dearborn, Michigan. This unprecedented keynote panel will convene at the traditional 12:01 AM on June 21 to kick off the 72-hour marathon conference. More information is available on the Web from <http://www.machack.com/>.

For attendees, discounted registration is available for early response. Full attendees can register for $475 online, a savings of $50 of the regular registration rate, this price is good until April 15, 2001. Students can register for $50, which includes all-access to the conference as well as a special meal package. Total attendance is limited to 400. Student attendance is limited to 50. More details are available on the conference website.

MacHack is a registered trademark of Expotech, Inc. MacHack is not affiliated with The MacHax Group, although we've all been enjoying the Hack Contest together each year! Apple, Macintosh, and MacOS are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective holders.