Oracle Media Objects, formerly Oracle Card, was a multi-media software development tool for developing multi-media applications, with similar functionality and appearance to Apple Computer' HyperCard.
In the early days of HyperCard at least two alternative tools were created outside of Apple, Spinnaker's Plus and SuperCard. Plus was very much like HyperCard, with the notable distinction of being cross-platform, operating on both Mac OS and Windows. SuperCard was Mac-only at the time, and is still a shipping product.
Plus went on to become more than one product. One variation was WinPlus, which was a Microsoft Windows only version of the program. Another was Oracle Card, distributed by Oracle. First released in 1991, Oracle Card was essentially a redistribution of the Plus runtime engine along with external libraries for establishing connections to RDBMS engines such as Oracle and DB2. As such, Oracle Card stacks could execute queries and associate their results with native variables, making Oracle Card one of the first RDBMS application development environments to support cross-platform development.
A few years later, Oracle acquired the Plus source code from Format Verlag and developed it to become Oracle Media Objects (often referred to by users as OMO). OMO didn't last very long, with development ceasing after version 1.1.2. OMO was used by Oracle to position itself in the video on demand market. At the time, it was thought that the video on demand market was about to become a booming industry, but this never occurred.
Many customers of Oracle that were making large purchases of its core database technology received copies of OMO thrown into the deal. Consequently, an unknown amount of IT development internal to these customers was conducted on the OMO platform. Commercially, there were very few products built using the tool. Amongst these were the "Our Secret Century" series of CD-ROMs published by The Voyager Company (the series was intended to be 12 discs, and 10 did ship before Voyager's CD-ROM line was acquired by another company, leaving the remaining two discs unfinished) and Inside Independence Day made by ACES Entertainment.
Read more about Oracle Media Objects: Unique Features of OMO, Initial Competitive Impact
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