Folio's "Information Democracy" Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX9lfnyZD9E


I worked at Folio Corporation from 1990-1994, just a few months shy of 5 years. I started work there while I was still going to BYU. Much of my professional career has been influenced by my work at Folio Corp.
We had the slightly audacious slogan "we don't want to change your oil, we want to change the world." This was a play on the Jiffy Lube campaign, at that time, that said the opposite: "We don't want to change the world, we just want to change your oil."
Folio, in the late 1980's and 1990's created information sharing technology that has never been equaled. At that time their products were DOS, Windows, Mac, local network, CD, and floppy disk based. When the internet began to attract its first significant use base, Folio released a very weak attempt to migrate their technology to the web. Folio has been bought and sold several times and has lost all of the passion and spirit that many of us had in the 1990's.
The internet has exceeded Folio's reach and made information readily available to almost anyone world wide. However, there are still significant features that Folio had pioneered ten to twenty years ago that you still can't do and probably never will be able to do on the internet.
The following video was prepared for the 1993 Folio Industry Conference. We would hold these annual events in the early days at Snowbird, Little America, and later at the San Diego Convention center to hold the thousands of participants.
James Earl Jones, the famous African-American actor, narrated the video. He filmed this for us when he was in Utah filming the movie "Sand Lot." Many people know him as the voice of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. He played a significant role in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and is one of my favorite actors. I think that I first saw him as a child in "Roots" the epic African-American genealogy mini-series written by Alex Haley.
At Folio, I shared an office with Kevin Wade. He and Mark Allen where the primary developers of this "Information Democracy" video. It demonstrates the urgency and passion that we all had about making information available to the world.
As the video describes, information tore down the "iron curtain." Information overthrew dictators. Information is the strongest liberating weapon for oppressed people.
This video is 14 years old and yet it still brings tears to my eyes every time I see it.
I had family members who were oppressed and lived behind the iron curtain. When the Berlin Wall was torn down as documented in the video, my relatives came to visit us in America. They thanked us, the US, for our role in freeing and democratizing Eastern Europe.
The video was recently released to former employees at a Folio employee reunion held at Thanksgiving point a couple of years ago. I was thrilled to get a DVD of the video.
I hope that you enjoy the video as much as I do.

I thought of this video as I recently saw the video that Karl Harwood made of Gotha Germany and the interview that he did with Wolfgang Lifferth. Wolfgang described what it was like living in East Germany and behind the "Iron Curtain." He also described the events surrounding the time that the Berlin Wall came down. That event is documented in the "Information Democracy" video.