This web site is dedicated to our friend Gary Brickman, who passed away on June 26, 2000. Obit: SMIL Pioneer Gary Brickman Dave Sims, 28 June 2000 Reproduced from O’Reilly.com (see the original) We lost a hard-working Internet visionary this week: Gary Brickman, Internet news editor and SMIL pioneer died in his sleep on Monday. He was 38. In spring 1998, while executive editor of CMP's TechWeb News, Brick saw an early alpha version of Real Networks' G2 system, which uses SMIL to deliver synchronized audio, video and text to web clients. As a former TV news reporter, Brick immediately recognized SMIL's potential to deliver something approaching broadcast news on the technology and a plan to use it to create a show. Brick sold management on the potential for SMIL and led a three-person team in a crash development program that kept them working evening and weekends for several months. They created what I believe was the first daily SMIL presentation, CMP's TechWeb Today. Brick organized and drove the development of the show while Leah Goldberg wrote the code and Ryan Junell designed the interface. Brick, Leah and Ryan created the show even while Real Networks was still writing code to complete its implementation of SMIL in the Real Player. In fact, their on-the-ground implementation helped Real work out some of the kinks. Brick did all this and much more while suffering a cruel disability that kept his body small and kept him in a wheelchair. But from the confines of that chair, he covered the development of the Internet, flew all over the country, attended conferences, drove reporters (drove them nuts, sometimes), interrupted meetings, challenged management, and made lots of friends -- and not a few enemies. He was strong-willed and stubborn, but also clever and a lot of fun. I find it hard to come up with a good tale, but here's something that happened a few times that tells a little about Brick (and me). We'd be out on the street or in a restaurant, arguing as usual over some damn petty thing, and I'd be standing there arguing with him, and people would walk by, look at Gary in his chair, then look at me with daggers, as if to say, "How could you?" I always wanted to say, "If you only knew what this guy was up to! If you only knew! You, too, would forget he was in a chair!" That's one of the big things Gary did: he made you forget he was in the chair. I learned a lot from him, and I really did not want to live the rest of my life without Brick around. — David Sims Gary Brickman, 1997   »home