http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Canter.html
Marc Canter emerged in the 1980s as an amalgamation of opera singer, rock musician, software programmer, and entrepreneur. He launched his software company, Macromind (now Macromedia) in 1984, when the graphical user interface and its potential for hypermedia applications became widely available. His first product, SoundWorks, introduced multimedia production to the personal computer. In 1988 Canter released the now ubiquitous Director. By the close of the decade, desktop multimedia grew into a global phenomenon, with Canter at the center of the excitement, transforming the studios of artists, architects and designers, reinventing the classroom, and altering the business plans of executives from Silicon Valley to Singapore.
At the core of his approach was a notational system that looks quite similar to a musical score, an intuitive format that could be used easily by the artist. Canter saw the digital artist of the future as a "composer" of all forms of media, orchestrating fragments of graphics, animation, text, and sound, into a single artwork. His predisposition towards theater and music belies Canter's roots in live performance, and reinforces his vision that desktop multimedia would evolve into the digital Gesamtkunstwerk.