4D Summit 2000

The 4D Summit 2000 was held in San Diego, California, from 4–7 October 2000. The following information and images are presented by Jeff Hopkins of HPO SOFT in Phoenix, Arizona, who attended and documented the event.

For anyone building a career or a business on the 4D platform, the Summit was more than a conference — it was the annual gathering where the roadmap, the community, and the practical craft of 4D development all converged in one place. This account captures the venue, the logistics, the people, and the sessions that defined that year.

Key Takeaways

• The 4D Summit 2000 ran 4–7 October 2000 in San Diego, drawing a community that was, by every account, overwhelmingly Macintosh-based.
• Apple’s AirPort wireless networking was a genuine novelty at the time, and attendees with iBooks were among the first to roam a conference hotel untethered.
• The headline roadmap item was tighter integration between 4D and Macromedia DreamWeaver — separating development (4D) from design (DreamWeaver).
• The speaker roster spanned 4D, Inc. leadership, third-party developers, and specialist consultants, covering everything from beginner topics to web deployment and eCommerce.
• Practical logistics — trolley passes, hotel choice, and registration location — were as much a part of the experience as the sessions themselves.

Getting There and Staying There: The EZ-8 Motel

The EZ-8 Motel cost $40 per night and sat just eight miles north of the Summit, with easy access via the San Diego Trolley. It was, as the photographs show, neatly snuggled beneath the freeways of San Diego. Accommodations were actually excellent for the price — the pictures look north and south from the property.

For attendees weighing budget against convenience, this is a recurring trade-off at any developer conference:

• Proximity vs. cost. A downtown hotel puts you steps from the venue but at conference rates. A motel eight miles out plus a transit pass can cut the bill dramatically.
• Transit access matters more than distance. Eight miles is trivial if a rail line connects you; it’s miserable if it doesn’t.
• Noise and setting. Freeway-adjacent lodging is cheap for a reason. If you need quiet to review session notes or write code in the evening, factor that in.

The lesson generalizes: at technical conferences, the cheapest room that sits on a direct transit line is often the smartest booking.

The San Diego Trolley

The San Diego Trolley system proved most interesting. Two things stood out.

First, riding the trolley requires tickets. A 3-day unlimited pass cost $10 — very reasonable. But while riding, it was noticeable that no one else seemed to be buying tickets, and no one ever checked whether anyone had one. There is a sign stating you must have a ticket and that failing to do so may result in a citation. This is the classic honor-system transit model: enforcement is sporadic, but the obligation is real, and citations do get issued.

Second, there are two lines — the Orange Line and the Blue Line — yet all trolleys are red. On the first trip back late Wednesday night, the wrong line was boarded by mistake.

It was headed in the right direction, but the ride ended in a trolley parking lot, wondering where everyone went, including the conductor. Riding the trolley was actually quite enjoyable, though it was noticeable that most riders were not of the middle or upper class of the region — a reminder that public transit is a cross-section of a city, not a conference shuttle.

The Old Town Station, shown in the photograph, was just a five-minute walk from the EZ-8 Motel — a genuinely convenient base of operations.

Practical takeaway for conference travel: learn the color-coding and line names before you ride, especially at night. “Right direction, wrong line” is the most common transit mistake, and it usually strands you at a depot rather than a destination.

The Grant Hotel and Downtown San Diego

The Grant Hotel is situated on Broadway in downtown San Diego. Right across the street on Broadway is a Planet Hollywood. The interior of the Grant is nicely done, with wonderful vases situated around the hotel; the lobby photograph captures that character well.

Downtown San Diego in 2000 was in the middle of a long revitalization arc — the Gaslamp Quarter was emerging as a dining and nightlife district, and the convention and hotel corridor along Broadway was the natural anchor for a conference like the Summit. For attendees, staying or spending time downtown meant access to that ecosystem, at a price point well above the EZ-8.

Registration, Connectivity, and the Macintosh Character of the Summit

The information area for the 4D Summit was the first stop. Several attendees waited around early Wednesday morning for information on where to register. No one ever showed up, but someone eventually found that registration was on the second floor.

Registration itself was straightforward once located, and beside it sat a table of iMacs all connected to the Internet. There was also a long table set up with ethernet cables for those with PowerBooks to connect.

The conference appeared to be 99.99% Macintosh. What was really neat was the Apple AirPort system. Many people with iBooks could be seen sitting around the hotel logging onto the Internet wirelessly. One attendee was carrying his iBook around in a used plastic grocery bag — a big contrast to a 50-pound PowerBook case, loaded with books in addition to the G3 PowerBook.

That contrast is worth pausing on, because it captures a genuine inflection point in developer tooling:

Approach	Weight / Portability	Connectivity	Typical User
G3 PowerBook in a loaded case	Very heavy; books and accessories add bulk	Ethernet table at the venue	Power user, desktop replacement
iBook carried in a bag	Light; genuinely portable	Apple AirPort wireless	Early adopter, mobile-first

Apple’s AirPort — introduced in 1999 — was one of the first mainstream consumer Wi-Fi products, based on the IEEE 802.11b standard. Seeing a conference hall full of developers roaming wirelessly in 2000 was genuinely ahead of its time. For 4D developers, whose work increasingly involved web deployment and client-server connectivity, that shift mattered: the machine you carried stopped dictating where you could work.

Various organizations hosted some of the meals, breakfasts and lunches included. Blue World Communications was one of the hosts. Sponsor-hosted meals were — and remain — a standard conference practice: they offset attendee costs and give vendors a captive, relevant audience.

The People of the 4D Summit

The community roster was the heart of the event. Among those present:

• Brendan Coveney — President, 4D, Inc.
• Douglas Blew — 4D, Inc.
• Jim Staples — 4D, Inc.
• Karen R. Sabog — host of the list
• Mehboob Alam — host of the list
• Steven Hussey — Alto Stratus LLC
• Walter Nelson — Walt Nelson and Associates / Dimensions Magazine
• William Porter — Polytrope Solutions
• Tommy Brigman — AIM Systems, Alpharetta, GA
• Liz Delgado — Smoking Gun Software
• Renée Cohen — Official Realtime Captioning Associates, Inc. (www.ecaptions.com), who provided realtime captioning for the conference sessions

Mailing lists like 4d-nug and databasics were the connective tissue of the 4D world in 2000 — long before Stack Overflow, Discord, or modern forums. List hosts were genuinely influential figures: they curated the technical conversation that kept working developers unblocked between annual Summits. If you were building 4D applications in a small team or as a solo developer, those lists were your support desk.

Realtime captioning by Renée Cohen was a notable accessibility provision for the sessions — a service that many conferences of that era did not offer at all.

The Presentations

The session lineup covered the platform’s present and its near future:

• 4D 6.7 — Some exciting things to come. 4D would be intertwined with DreamWeaver for easy development (with 4D) and design (with DreamWeaver).
• Liz Delgado, Smoking Gun Software — 4D for Beginners
• Larry White, Pelican Engineering — 4D in Science and Engineering
• William Porter, Polytrope Solutions — Putting 4D on the Web
• Michael Ginsberg, MDG.com — eCommerce with 4D
• Doug Finley, 4D, Inc. — WebSTAR Web Server Configuration

The DreamWeaver integration announcement was the strategic headline. The idea was a clean division of labor: 4D handled the data model, business logic, and application development, while Macromedia DreamWeaver handled the visual design layer. For small teams without a dedicated designer, that separation was attractive — it meant a developer could hand off presentation work, or use DreamWeaver’s tooling without hand-coding every page.

The other sessions map onto the real concerns of a 4D builder in 2000:

• Beginners needed onboarding into 4D’s structure — tables, fields, relations, forms, and value lists.
• Science and engineering users needed numeric precision, data logging, and integration with instruments.
• Web deployment meant understanding how 4D’s web server mode interacted with external servers like WebSTAR, and how to configure them together.
• eCommerce was the emerging frontier — taking a 4D database and putting a storefront on top of it.

If you were choosing sessions at a Summit like this, the practical rule is: attend the roadmap talk first (it tells you what to invest your learning time in), then the deployment and integration sessions (they tell you what will actually break in production), then the domain-specific talks that match your vertical.

Why This Summit Still Matters

The 4D Summit 2000 is a useful snapshot of a platform and a community at a specific moment: Mac-centric, list-driven, transitioning from desktop client-server toward the web, and experimenting with wireless connectivity that would soon become universal.

For today’s 4D developers, citizen developers, and small-team IT builders, the through-line is clear. The concerns that dominated that Summit — separating design from development, deploying databases to the web, connecting 4D to external systems, and leaning on a community for support — are the same concerns that shape modern 4D and low-code work. The tools have changed; the decisions haven’t.

The documentation was compiled by Jeff Hopkins of HPO SOFT on 8 October 2000, and published at www.hposoft.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where was the 4D Summit 2000 held?

The 4D Summit 2000 took place in San Diego, California, from 4–7 October 2000. Attendees stayed at a range of properties, from the budget EZ-8 Motel eight miles north to downtown hotels like the Grant on Broadway.

What was the biggest announcement at the 4D Summit 2000?

The headline roadmap item was 4D 6.7 and its planned integration with Macromedia DreamWeaver. The goal was to let 4D handle development while DreamWeaver handled design, giving small teams a cleaner division of labor between logic and presentation.

Why was Apple AirPort such a big deal at the conference?

Apple AirPort, introduced in 1999 and based on the IEEE 802.11b standard, let attendees with iBooks connect wirelessly around the hotel instead of queuing at an ethernet table. It was one of the first mainstream consumer Wi-Fi products, and seeing it used at scale at a developer conference in 2000 was genuinely novel.

What role did mailing lists play in the 4D community?

Lists were the primary support and discussion channels for 4D developers between conferences. Their hosts, including Karen R. Sabog and Mehboob Alam, were influential community figures who kept working developers connected and unblocked.

What kinds of sessions were on the agenda?

Sessions ranged from 4D for Beginners (Liz Delgado) to 4D in Science and Engineering (Larry White), Putting 4D on the Web (William Porter), eCommerce with 4D (Michael Ginsberg), and WebSTAR Web Server Configuration (Doug Finley). The mix reflected both onboarding needs and the platform’s push toward web deployment.

Who documented the 4D Summit 2000?

The account and photographs were compiled by Jeff Hopkins of HPO SOFT in Phoenix, Arizona, and published on 8 October 2000 at www.hposoft.com. The write-up covers the venue, transit, hotel, attendees, and session lineup.