My story is a very small one compared to most peoples - a few hours of work on the side, spanning a couple of weeks - but it think it sets a pretty high bar for pointlessnes:
This was back when:
- the internet was new and exciting, rather than just part of the background of our lives
- people used video tape recorders
- "multimedia" was a field of its own, and people made a fuss about it
I got a contract to write a program in Macromedia Director (which was what ruled the multimedia roost before an upstart program called "Flash" came along) which would take a number of still pictures and emit them as a short Quicktime movie, with each picture only on screen for a couple of frames. Definitely not the hardest bit of work I've ever done.
What was it for? Someone had had the idea that the best way of getting real estate ads in front of people was to make a 15 or 20 second movie consisting of dozens of static real estate ads, which would be broadcast on TV at the end of... what? Some news or current affairs show I think. Potential homebuyers would tape this on their VCRs and the go through it frame by frame, carefully reading each ad.
As you can imagine, this was before people had much bandwidth, and long before real estate moved online.
By some miracle this actually got aired a couple of times before the idea sunk into oblivion.
This was back when:
- the internet was new and exciting, rather than just part of the background of our lives
- people used video tape recorders
- "multimedia" was a field of its own, and people made a fuss about it
I got a contract to write a program in Macromedia Director (which was what ruled the multimedia roost before an upstart program called "Flash" came along) which would take a number of still pictures and emit them as a short Quicktime movie, with each picture only on screen for a couple of frames. Definitely not the hardest bit of work I've ever done.
What was it for? Someone had had the idea that the best way of getting real estate ads in front of people was to make a 15 or 20 second movie consisting of dozens of static real estate ads, which would be broadcast on TV at the end of... what? Some news or current affairs show I think. Potential homebuyers would tape this on their VCRs and the go through it frame by frame, carefully reading each ad.
As you can imagine, this was before people had much bandwidth, and long before real estate moved online.
By some miracle this actually got aired a couple of times before the idea sunk into oblivion.