Johnson named chief technology officer of vivid studios.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 20, 1996--vivid studios, a leading Internet technology architect, today announced the appointment of Dr. Mark Scott Johnson as Chief Technology Officer.

Formerly, Senior Software Engineering Manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc., Johnson will be responsible for managing vivid's Quality Engineering team and R&D of key technologies.

Johnson has 22 years of software management and development experience. At Sun Microsystems, he founded and served as Acting Director of Java/HotJava, a world-renowned project to design and implement a language-based execution environment for Internet applications on the World Wide Web. Johnson established and led the Java Business Team, which was responsible for the strategy, positioning, licensing and pricing, and legal issues of the original Java project.

Previously at Sun, he founded and lead the Sun C/C++, Sun COBOL, Sun Cross-Compilers, Sun FORTRAN, Sun Modula-2, and Sun Pascal projects. With Microtec Research, a software tools company now a division of Mentor Graphics, Johnson established customer training and consulting programs.

Prior to Sun and Microtec, Johnson worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories as a computer researcher for seven years, where he was an early member of the team that designed and prototyped Hewlett-Packard's Precision Architecture (PA-RISC). He was a professor at San Francisco State University in the late 1970s and is a graduate of the University of British Columbia (Ph.D., 1978) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (B.A., 1973, M.S., 1974).

Johnson is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). An active volunteer within the ACM for over a decade, he currently serves as the Western Regional Representative on ACM Council, oversees several of the major special-interest groups (including SIGGRAPH and SIGDA), and is a member of the ACM Awards Committee.

Formerly, Johnson was Chair of ACM SIGPLAN, the premier professional society for programming languages and systems.

"vivid has attracted one of the stars of the Java community. Mark is a talented and respected computer scientist who has made major contributions to the profession," said Doris Lidtke, Chair of the ACM SIG Board.

Johnson will report directly to vivid's President Henri Poole. "Mark's extensive experience and leadership will bring added vision to vivid's already superb team of web architects," said Poole. "Mark is a visionary at building international alliances and open system technology for the Internet. We are thrilled to have him join us."

vivid studios (http://www.vivid.com) is a leading Internet technology architect of online experiences, tools, and communities. Past projects include: the development and implementation of a website to launch Microsoft's Windows 95 and related net hunt, "Bethany, TX;" "The Rift," a net hunt for Silicon Graphics; "Johnny Mnemonic net.hunt" a net hunt for Sony New Technologies; as well as website development for Bank of America, Sony, Computer Curriculum Corporation, Ketchum Communications, International Data Group, The NAMES Project Foundation, and many others.

vivid also has developed interfaces and novel interaction paradigms for online places including the WELL and Delphi Internet services. vivid's expertise has earned the company a place in I.D. magazine's "1995 Top 40 Design Firms" issue, Internet World magazine's "Best of the Net," as well as "Best of the Web," by c|net online.

CONTACT: vivid studios

Anita Corona, 415/512-7200

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