Director/Codenames
Here are all of the known code names, related back stories and release dates for Director and related software.. Comes from Declassified codenames
| Software
Product |
Code
Name |
Release
Date |
The Story Behind
The Code Name and Release |
| Precursors to Director | |||
| MusicWorks | SoundVision | October, 1984 | MusicWorks was a subset of SoundVision which was created
specifically for Hayden Software. SoundVision was a four voice music editor combined with a real-time animation editor designed for the 128K Macintosh. |
| VideoWorks | ? | June, 1985 | The precursor to Director. |
| GraphicWorks / ComicWorks | ? | circa 1985/86 | Originally created (along with ComicWorks) by Macromind
for Mindscape Software. Both of these products were essentially identical in function, but differed in artwork and fonts. ComicWorks contain a cool outerspace theme. |
| VideoWorks II | ? | 8/1/1987 | A color version of VideoWorks combined with a very capable paint program. Trivia Note: Parts of Star Trek V was storyboarded using animations created by Lynda Weinman in VideoWorks II. |
| Releases of Director Player for Windows
(DPW) | |||
DPW 0.9-1.0 (also released as part of Microsoft's Multimedia Extensions [MME] for Windows 3.x) |
DPW | ~1990 | Related note: "Gaffer" was
the codename for a Macintosh application used to convert Director movies created on the Macintosh into a format which could be used on Windows. After much discussion, the file name of the application became "MacroMind Gaffer." |
| DPW 1.2 | Whoopi | ~1992 | Researching... |
| Releases of Director Portable Player
Technology | |||
| DPW 1.2 libraries ported to SGI Indigo | Windex | ? | Windows -> X-Windows |
| DPW 1.2 (for Windows and IRIX) |
Whoopi | ? | ??? - Input is appreciated. |
| 3D0 Player | 3D0 Player | ? | The name by itself was cool enough. |
| Director player (for Fujitsu FM-Towns) |
? | ? | Researching... |
| Director player (for TI Digital Wristwatch) |
?!?! | ? | Researching...We only know about this because of ancient
technote on the Macromedia website listed unsupported products which included this player version! |
| Director 5 portable player (used to make a UNIX version of Shockwave compatible with Director 5) |
JackHammer | ? | A play on the related codename "Spike" used
for Director 5. |
| Director 6 portable player (for DAVID - OS/9 settop box) |
? | ? | Researching... |
| Director 6 portable player (for IBM PS/2) |
? | ? | Researching... |
| Director 6 portable player (for Netscape Communicator 4) |
Chopper | April 27, 1997 | A play on the earlier codename "Hopper" used for Director 6 - C(ommunicator)Hopper. Chopper was also chosen by the engineering team to represent the violence with which Macromedia management was perceived to have chopped up the team's carefully laid-out development plans of the Portable Player and Stone. |
| Java wrapper for Director 6 portable player (for Netscape Communicator 4) |
Fireworks | Never...? | This codename has a storied history at Macromedia. First,
it was used as the name for one of the three modules for Macromind Three-D. Then it was used as the codename for an unreleased effects and compositing tool. Next, it was used to describe this Java wrapper code. Finally, it is now the official name of a Macromedia product. |
| Releases of Macromind/Macromedia
Director | |||
| Director 1 | VideoWorks Interactive | ? | VideoWorks Interactive was created and used internally at Macromind to create guided tour training disks (the ones bundled with every Macintosh), presentations, kiosks and even a few television commercials.The code name was being considered as the official name for the product. Anyone know who came up with the idea to call it "Director" instead?Our research causes us to believe that the original interactive scripting language inside VideoWorks Interactive was actually based on Jamie (nee Jay) Fenton's work creating the Bally BASIC cartridge. See <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://pages.infinit.net/slydc/faq/Astrocad.txt" target="_blank">the Bally/Astrocade FAQ</a> for more details. |
| Director 2.0 | Director Interactive Toolkit | ? | Originally, Director was going to be
split into separate tools - one for interactive development and one for animation only. |
| Director 3.0 | Stuntman | 6/30/1991 | Named after the movie "Stuntman" in which Peter O'Toole plays a movie director. Note: A proposed version of Director for Windows was to be code named "O'Toole". Sadly, such a version of Director wasn't released until years later. |
| Director 3.1 | ? | ? | Researching... |
| Director 3.1.1 | ? | ? | Researching... |
| Director 3.1.3 | ? | ? | Researching... |
| Director 4.0 | Tofu | "Trout" was in fact the original code
name for the 4.0 release. It was so named because of a plastic fish that used to hang from the ceiling in the Director engineering row of cubes. It was decided there was too much work to do in Trout once it was scheduled along with the Windows port, so it was re-spec'd and the new 4.0 effort was named Tofu. (Named as such because there was a request for an appropriately lighter, vegetarian code name at this point.) | |
| Director 4.0.1 | Soba (PPC update only) |
Udon and Soba followed in this pseudo
veggie asian food genre. (Three of the key engineers of these releases were vegetarians...) | |
| Director 4.0.2 | Udon (French, German and Japanese releases) |
Actually UDON was all the international
releases including French, German, and Japanese. | |
| Director 4.0.3 | Purple (Windows release only) |
Purple was so named because the engineering team happened to be using a purple marker on the white board in the meeting at which it was first conceived.Purple then became the project to port Tofu to Windows simultaneously with its development on Mac. | |
| Director 4.0.4 | Rayon | 12/16/1994 | It is believed that this code name was
chosen because after all of the previous "organic" names (Trout / Tofu / Udon / Soba), something blatantly synthetic was needed as a healthy contrast. |
| Director 5.0 | Spike | 3/15/1996 | Named after the movie director, Spike Lee. The original code name for Director 5 was going to be "better than gum" because of a Dilbert comic that appeared that the engineering team all thought was hysterical:
Ergo, the joke was that the marketing slogan would be "Director 5: Better Than Gum". See the <a href="/web/20010625231521/http://www.director8.com/declassified/easterEggs/">EasterEggs</a> page for an egg related to this phrase.Note: Attempts to locate a digital copy of this comic are ongoing. Assistance is appreciated. Resistance is futile. Another engineer writes: Now that is funny! But totally incorrect. Spike was Spike long before the infamous "better than gum" line that Mike Seery came up with became popular.Director 5 was plagued with delays in schedule. Frantic and quite heroic efforts were required of the engineering teams to make up the difference. It shipped on time but when I handed the CD's to the courier, I had been up for three days! The whole project was like that. |
| Director 5.0.1 | Buttonfly | 8/7/1996 | Given its name because a local SF company,
Levi Strauss, makes the 501 ButtonFly jeans. |
| Director 6.0 | Hopper | 5/23/1997 | Named after Dennis Hopper |
| Director 6.0.1 | Velcro | 9/28/1997 | An engineer from the team writes: What could be cooler than buttonfly's other than velcro? And that stuff was pretty sticky I tell you. It was released two months late and we still didn't get it right until 6.02 (which we refused to name, well, actually it had a name but I can't mention it out of decency.)Sidenote: Velcro was recently used as the codename for Dreamweaver UltraDev (you'd think that they could come up with their *own* codenames... <g>) |
| Director 6.0.2 | None | 12/15/1997 | Researching... |
| Director 6.5 | Él Níño | 5/11/1998 | This release of Director bundled in
a number of Xtras which had been developed separately. Some of these Xtras had their own code names: "MovieStar" - QuickTime 3 Asset Xtra, "PowerLine" - PowerPoint Import Xtra, "Flash Flood" - Flash Asset Xtra |
| Director 7.0 | Stone, Waters, Kubrick, D7 | 12/7/1998 | Originally, the code name was "Stone", named after the movie director Oliver Stone. However, before Director 7 was in full-blown development, the Stone code name was abandoned. As a result of laziness, the code name became "D7" instead.The sub-project within D7 to get Director's user interface code running on the new portable player (see Shockwave 6.0.1 aka Roswell) was called Waters, after the movie director John Waters.An engineer tells more: Actually Director 7 had several names due to the large amount of work involved. Originally named "Stone" during its development during Director 5 (Director 6 was supposed to be Director 5.5), it was primarily portable player work that was the foundation to D7. Porting the player to the Macintosh and updating its functionality to be Director 5 & 6 compliant were also part of the tasks.The port of Director's user interface to the portable player was codenamed "Waters". New feature development in D7 was called "Kubrick." Once all this work started to gel, we felt that "Stone" was too dated (we had been living with it for 2 years by then.) And since we ended up using three great Director names in the process, we decided to call it D7. Not out of lazyness but really out of our pride for pulling off one of the most difficult engineering projects here at Macromedia and doing it in such a smooth way that most users didn't even know that Director was running on an entirely new engine. |
| Director 7.0.1 | None (Japanese, French, German releases only) |
3/15/1999 | No known codename. |
| Director 7.0.2 | None | 5/24/1999 | No known codename. Sad, so sad. |
| Director 8.0 | Woo | 2/24/2000 | Named after John Woo, the movie director. |
| Releases of Shockwave | |||
| Shockwave 4 | Shockwave | ? | The code name was so cool that it was selected as the
product name - at the last minute. |
| Shockwave 5 | St. Elmo's Fire, Elmo | Late 1996 | Despite what many think, Elmo wasn't named after the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://www.muppets.com/" target="_blank">Muppet</a> character on <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://www.ctw.org/sesame/" target="_blank">Sesame Street</a>.One of the original Shockwave engineers, Ely Greenfield, writes: "'Tickle-me Elmo' got very big right after we named it that, but it was coincidence (and made it very easy to find Elmo related shwag.)In the days of Shockwave 4/5, Shockwave was a separate team from Director. So when Director 5 was finishing up, it was the job of the Shockwave team to re-fit all of the Shockwave enhancements back into the Director codebase, fix the resulting bugs, and come up with Shockwave 5. Thus the project was 'shocking' Director 5, which was codenamed 'Spike.' So Shockwave 5 was 'shocking spike.'What happens to spikes/poles (like a ship's mast) during a lighting storm? St. Elmo's Fire, the original full codename for Shockwave 5. |
| Shockwave 6 | None | ? | Researching... |
| Shockwave 6.0.1 | Roswell | 11/4/1997 | This version was based on an entirely new portable player
technology which was much smaller and faster (not to mention more portable!) |
| Shockwave 7 | None | 12/23/1998 | One senses a disturbing pattern here... |
| Shockwave 7.0.0r205 | None | 3/8/1999 | This is a privacy-enhanced version of Shockwave. |
| Shockwave 7.0.2 | None | 7/28/1999 | This version of Shockwave included the Shockwave Remote. |
| Shockwave 7.0.2r159 | None | 9/30/1999 | Shockwave 7.0.2r159 specifically addresses developer feedback
about the implementation of the Shockwave Remote's default settings for visibility and floating behavior on existing Shockwave web sites. In addition, Shockwave 7.0.2r159 addresses general stability issues and resource usage on the Macintosh platform. |
| Shockwave 7.0.3d15 | None | 12/17/1999 | This version of Shockwave no longer includes the Shockwave
Remote component and integrates ShockMachine as a free addition. Changes were also made to provide compatibility with AOL users. |
| Shockwave 7.0.3 Standalone Installer | None | In | Currently in beta, the standalone installer can
be downloaded from <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://quixote.macromedia.com/703/" target="_blank">http://quixote.macromedia.com/703/</a>. This version of the installer does not require access to the internet. Full licensing details for redistributing the Shockwave Player installer is available at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://www.macromedia.com/support/shockwave/info/licensing">http://www.macromedia.com/support/shockwave/info/licensing</a> |
| Shockwave 8.0 | None | 3/23/2000 | Released as a separately available installer. The auto-update
feature of Shockwave 7.0.x wasn't turned on until the release of Shockwave 8.0.1. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://www.macromedia.com/support/shockwave/info/licensing"></a> |
| Shockwave 8.0.1d196 | None | 6/13/2000 | Now shipping!<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://www.macromedia.com/support/shockwave/info/licensing"></a> |
| ShockMachine 1.0 | Husky | 7/28/1999 | An engineer writes: Named because of John Ware's (the project manager) love of all things Alaskan. You should have seen all the positive traits he had listed for this name! Pretty scary actually. |
| ShockMachine 1.2 | Freedom | 3/14/2000 | Now shipping! Named because Macromedia decided to make this release of ShockMachine available for free instead of charging $19.95 as before. |
| Releases of Add-ons | |||
| Accelerator 1.0 | None | ? | Accelerator predated QuickTime to deliver a highspeed
(unbeit not portable) playback file format for Director animations. |
| Accelerator 2.0 | None | ~June, 1991 | See above. |
| Java Export for Director | Pete | Integrated into Director 6.5 | A misspelled homage to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010625231521/http://www.peets.com/" target="_blank">Peet's Coffee</a> - which is considered by many (including Macromedians) as the finest homegrown coffee available in California. |
| Shockwave Multiuser Server 1.0 | Mars | 11/28/1998 | Named in honor of the NASA Mars efforts. This version was included with Director 7.0. |
| Shockwave Multiuser Server 1.0.2 | Mars | 6/4/1999 | |
| Shockwave Multiuser Server 2.0 | PathFinder | 11/3/1999 | Named in honor of the NASA Pathfinder Mars mission. |
| Shockwave Multiuser Server 2.1 | PathFinder | 2/23/2000 | This version was included with Director 8.0. |
Copyright © 1994-2000 by Terry R. Schussler