HSC 1995 Video

During my unfruitful search for the original KPT Bryce 1.0 software, I came across this video from 1995 that features Kai Krause at his home (at the time) in Santa Barbara as well as the HSC headquarters located in nearby Carpinteria, CA.

I was fortunate enough to visit the building after the company was renamed to MetaCreations but I never got past the front lobby (I was on a sales call from my previous company and spent about an hour there chatting with one of the employees).

Unfortunately, the video is all in German and the closed captioning feature did a horrible job so that even Google Translate couldn't make a lot of sense of what was being said.  Linguistic issues aside, it was nice to hear Kai speak his native tongue and to learn how to say Krause with the proper German pronunciation.

HSC Digital MORPH

I recently have been experimenting with the original KPT Bryce 1.0 application and discovered the CD-ROM that came bundled with the superb "The KPT Bryce Book" by Susan A. Kitchens.  One of the files on the CD was called "Order HSC Products!" which contained a list of available (at the time) products that could be directly ordered from HSC Software by phone or fax (internet sales was not a thing at this time).  What I found interesting was a product listed that I never heard of called HSC Digital MORPH (spelled DigitalMorph in the text file) that retailed for $149.

After some researching, I discovered it was indeed an early product published by HSC Software but apparently developed by Ed Chmiel at Pacific Coast Software. I'm guessing it must have been an acquisition since it was only available for Windows 3.1 and not for the Macintosh as was typically the norm for early HSC products.

I was able to find someone on eBay selling the software on the original 3.5" floppy disks, but I was able to download it from the bundled Creative Power Graphics CD-ROM image.

The installation went smooth however the user interface was vanilla Windows 3.1 and could have used a fresh makeover from Kai Krause.  I had to resort to the online help feature to figure out what to do but as you can see my initial test morph leaves much to be desired.

I could use more practice...

I've seen that butterfly icon before...

The splash screen

Remember floppy disks?

I was able to find a review of the product from PC Magazine back in October 1993 which gave it middling marks.  As far as I could tell it never received any updates but later HSC would revisit morphing software under its new company name, MetaTools with the much more capable and better received Kai's Power Goo.