Please carefully re-read my letter to you... I said Viola was
demonstrated in smaller settings, but before your demo. The applets
stuff was demo'ed to whomever wanted to see it and had visited our
office at O'Reilly & Associates (where I worked at the time).
This is what I wrote on the VRML list:
> Not that I wish to content on the point of simply who's first :)
> But, let's see... (Wish I had kept better records and wrote papers
> about things as they happened!)
>
> Definitely by May 8, 1993 we had demonstrated that plotting demo
> (the very one shown in the viola paper) to visitors from a certain
> computer manufacturer... This demo was memorable because someone and I
> at ORA had lost sleep the night before the meeting, in order to cook up
> that particular plotting demo :) We had to show something cool.
That date (May 93), at least, predates your demo if I'm not mistaken.
Then around August 93, it was shown to a bunch of attendees at the
first Web Conference in Cambridge. So, it was shown, just not with
lots of publicity and noise.
I'm sure I could find more evidence if I spent/waste the time of digging
thru archives.
If you're talking about any display code transferred over network,
look at a number of predating systems, including say net-transmitted
postscript (NeWS).
For transmitted interactive applications, even the early Viola
(started around 88, relased 1991) had a viola-app net transfer tool
(the idea is to have something like a Hypercard like environment
on the scale of the net).
If you're talking about interactive apps *specifically* on the web, ie
applets in-lined into HTML documents etc, and with bi-directional
communications, then look at ViolaWWW as it existed around late '92
early '93.
-Pei
pei@gnn.com
http://ebay.gnn.com/people/pei/home.html