This is a series of interlocking formal language compilers, which I wrote
in C with yacc and lex (later bison and flex) along with a hardware simulation
in tcl/tk. It was used to produce CD guide books and other products for members
of SONY's navigation systems consortium, often known as NaviKen or NSRA.
SONY's benchmark product for these disks was the NVX-1. About twenty consumer tech
companies used the software presented here.
The tools, which were possibly the most sophisticated content-authoring tools of their day,
and the only ones for navigation systems, were used by anyone willing to adopt the standard.
This was part of SONY's industry-wide collaboration strategy. It was used for
products from 1994 through, I believe, about 2001.
One of the most distinctive aspects of this suite is my use of
many overlapping parsers and languages in a single system. Some were
built to consolidate external data. Some were built to provide
reliable control languages that made sense to humans, based
on what they were trying to do at each stage. Some were explorations
of high-level abstractions for a hyperlinked multimedia system --
with sophisticated templating and structural characterizations,
some of which were re-invented for webapp authoring systems decades later.
My general leap beyond contemporary hypertext systems, was to enable
a dynamic production of millions of formatted pages, whose whole structure and
specific template behavior were driven by the available data. This is still
fertile ground in web-development automation.