[mclide]

Apple invited me to present at WWDC97 as a young independent developer with a startup making software for "webmasters" on the Apple internet platform; "What cool sites use" according to Apple's marketing back then. Little did I know what a turning point it would be for Apple, although I had already placed my eggs firmly placed in their basket.

I got to demo my Common Lisp based social web application server and showcase how to extend it with dynamic, hot-loaded components. Apple said I could talk about pretty much whatever I wanted within the scope of the conference, so I included an introduction to how it used what I labeled Light Weight SGML, soon better known as XML.

It was a blast from the past seeing my presentation again 20 years later. I had prepared the slides to be displayed in a web browser, generated from extensible markup using my WebSlides tool, but my handler at Apple insisted on converting them to PowerPoint. They weren't all sold on the web eating the world yet.

Despite having a complementary ticket for the conference, I had no time to stick around, flying straight back home the day after to prepare the next product release. The following years were quite a ride, like having a tiger by the tail. Then came 2001.

[mrpippy]

Very cool! You're the last one here? http://s3.bslabs.net/wwdc/1997/401%20Web%20Server%20Programm...

[mclide]

Correct, that's me attempting to spread the gospel of Common Lisp web server programming to what seemed like an endless mass of Apple developers at WWDC 97.