HyperCard Concepts

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia

by Andrew Lih · 5 Jul 2010 · 398pp · 86,023 words

30 The Nupedia Idea 32 Nupedia’s Rules 36 The Nupedians 37 Chapter 3_WIKI ORIGINS 43 Ward’s Start 45 HyperCard’s Inspirations 51 A Web Browser 53 Viola 54 HyperCard Revisited 55 Chapter 4_WIKI INTRODUCED 61 Slashdotting 67 Contributing the Meaning of Everything 70 The GFDL 72 v _Contents

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issue at Tektronix, Cunningham would finally discover a tool to help realize it. He happened across a brand-new software product from Apple Computer called HyperCard, which was given away for free with every Macintosh computer sold in 1987. Very quickly, people started to recognize it was something special

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. HyperCard was a revolutionary piece of software—it was the first easy way to make free-form hyperlinked content, allowing people to click on items on

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ahead of his time on the implications of linking together information seamlessly. As a tool to accomplish this memex function of linking and organizing data, HyperCard had a cult following, as it was easy to use, yet powerful. People could create an interlinked series of documents at the touch of a

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mouse. This was many years before the first Web browser was even conceived. Fortunately, Cunningham had early access to HyperCard through a former Tektronix employee named Kent Beck, with whom he had worked. Beck had left to work for Apple Computer and happened to be

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in Oregon on a visit, and gave his old friend Ward something to see. “Kent Beck showed me HyperCard, which he first got his hands on after joining Apple. It was called WildCard then. I was blown away.”14 In

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HyperCard, Cunningham saw a tool that could help him with his knowledge-sharing project. “I wanted something kind of irregular, something that 48_The_Wikipedia_Revolution

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didn’t fit in rows and columns.” HyperCard used the idea of a “stack” of virtual index cards, in which the user could easily create new cards, create links between them, and place

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the screen. You could also put virtual buttons on cards that could respond to clicks and other commands. The brainchild of Apple programmer Bill Atkinson, HyperCard was originally given away for free in 1987 and became incredibly popular with seasoned computer programmers, novice users, and educational institutions. It was easy to

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. No programming experience was necessary, and even kids were getting into the action, creating their own “stacks” of fun content. Ward got his hands on HyperCard and started a simple database of cards to store written text and diagrams. He started to see the “stack” grow with information about personnel, their

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experiences, and descriptions of their projects. It became a multimedia scrapbook of company practices. But there was something Ward didn’t like about HyperCard. It was too cumbersome to create new cards and link to them. In the middle of his thinking process, the technical clicks and keystrokes of

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getting ideas organized in HyperCard got in the way. To make links between cards, you would bring up the first card, then go to the destination card and tell

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HyperCard to make a button leading there, then go back to the original card and drop the new button in place. “In those three simple steps

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thinking and writing. Cunningham wanted a solution that was transparent and quick—something that wouldn’t disrupt his stream of thought. Wiki_Origins_49 Because HyperCard was also programmable, he could write new computer code that could extend the functionality of the “stack” of cards beyond what Apple provided. Cunningham decided

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? A card could be created automatically simply by pressing and holding down the mouse button. This lingering “click-and-hold” action was programmed to tell HyperCard to create a new card automatically. “And the effect was, it was just fun to do. You say ‘I know something about that,’ and you

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hallways of Tektronix, people started to hear about Ward’s fun hyperlinked experiment. He got more and more visitors. “I heard you had that cool HyperCard thing,” a colleague would say, appearing at Cunningham’s office doorway. Coworkers would sit in front of his boxy Macintosh II computer and wade through

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a few missing links and go fix them too. The stack was captivating. We were often late for lunch.”16 As Cunningham worked more with HyperCard, it became clear that he had come up with a fast and easy way of organizing this interlinked information. He described his creation as “densely

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would become commonplace, and the Internet would not become widespread for another few years. It also did not help that the Macintosh, and by extension HyperCard, was an unconventional choice for the workplace in the 1980s. Apple Computer was locked in a bitter struggle for the desktop computer market with the

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likes of Intel and Microsoft. While HyperCard was incredibly powerful and critically acclaimed, Wiki_Origins_51 it was still considered a toy. There were good reasons for this label

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. HyperCard was designed around the original Macintosh black-and-white nine-inch screen, and was stuck with that small size for many years despite computer displays

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getting bigger and bigger. HyperCard was also an odd product for Apple to manage. Because it was given away, something Apple’s esteemed creator Bill Atkinson demanded, the company made

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became quite popular, it was hard for Apple, primarily a computer hardware company, to justify serious resources to develop it further. The irony is that HyperCard was revolutionary and popular, with entire businesses based on its powerful capabilities, but Apple let it wither on the vine. In the 1980s, Apple was

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struggling to be relevant in a world with more conventional office productivity software from Microsoft, Novell, and Lotus. HyperCard didn’t really fit into the picture. But despite being ahead of its time, HyperCard and its legacy would have a profound impact on the development of the Web and wikis

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. HyperCard’s Inspirations The Internet had been around since the early 1980s, as the TCP/IP networking standard had made it easy

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used a computer that was the Ferrari of the techno-elite back then. And even though the NeXT computer is a faint memory today, like HyperCard, its impact went far beyond the units shipped. The NeXT cube was the “it” machine of that era. And it would play a pivotal role

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interest and skill to write a program to translate the codes to the computer screen. Most everything in HyperCard mapped quite well to HTML—text, italics, bold, images, and sounds. And while Ward Cunningham was finding HyperCard easy to use and to derive a prototype from, someone else was also discovering that

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HyperCard was useful. Viola Shipping HyperCard for free on Macs inspired a whole generation of programmers with the power of hypermedia, even

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if it didn’t generate any significant revenue for Apple. In 1989, University of California at Berkeley student Pei-Yan Wei played around with HyperCard and was impressed

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with Apple’s giveaway tool. “HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked

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running in the X Windows graphical environment. Wei called it Viola, and when released in 1991, it had all the same type of functions as HyperCard—hypertext at first, and eventually hypermedia, clickable pictures, and multimedia elements. The university setting allowed Wei to experience the Internet earlier than most. He of

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later, Wei emerged and announced to the World Wide Web community that he had made ViolaWWW.17 HyperCard was a product ahead of its time. And even though Apple stopped development and support for it, HyperCard’s influence would be much more profound. Its visual interface and hyperlinking were the inspiration for

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the first popular Web browser, and even twenty years later, after a dot-com boom and bust, people are still trying to replicate the simplicity and power of HyperCard. HyperCard Revisited In September

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1987, HyperCard intrigued Cunningham, but his work at Tektronix would lead him to study how people design software, and he started to write about something

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computer science hacker culture to share and distribute expertise. But the mechanisms to do so just were not easy. That’s when Ward remembered his HyperCard project. Even though his “stack” of cards hadn’t gone any further than being a cute experiment on one computer, he remembered how empowering it

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domain, and got to work to put “collaboration” into his easy-to-use tool. In 1994, Ward started to engineer an Internet version of his HyperCard experiment that he worked on at Tektronix. Ward would come to utilize something called Perl to create a prototype. Perl was one of the first

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“Boston molasses disaster” article, 118 Aphaia, 146–47 Brandt, Daniel, 192–94, 200, 210 Apple Computer, 27, 52, 222 Brief History of Hackerdom, A (Raymond), HyperCard, 47–51, 54–56 85 Arabic language, 144, 156, 157 Britannica, see Encyclopedia Britannica ArbCom (Arbitration Committee), 180–81, browsers, 51–55 184, 197, 223

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–4, 6, 38, 75, 98 64–66, 69, 73, 88, 114–15, 131 background of, 45–46 edit histories, 64–65, 71, 82, 91–93 HyperCard and, 47–50, 54, 55, 56 edit wars, 95, 122–31, 136, 146 Index_239 Einstein, Albert, 181 File Transfer Protocol (ftp), 34, 53 “Elephant

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http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), 53 httpd (http daemon), 56 Kapor, Mitch, 8 Huntsville, Ala., 18 Karsai, Istvan, 82 Hust, Christoph, 40 Kazakh Wikipedia, 155–57 HyperCard, 47–51, 54–56 Keegan, Brian, 65 hyperlinks (hypertext), 47, 48, 50, 54–55, Kennedy, John F., 10, 191 115 Kennedy, Robert F., 10, 191

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All Directories RMS Linux on the Scene Remember DMOZ The Nupedia Idea Nupedia�s Rules The Nupedians Chapter Three Ward�s Start HyperCard�s Inspirations A Web Browser Viola HyperCard Revisited Chapter Four Slashdotting Contributing the Meaning of Everything The GFDL UseMod Grows Give Me More Space Server Load Chapter Five Usenet

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All Directories RMS Linux on the Scene Remember DMOZ The Nupedia Idea Nupedia’s Rules The Nupedians Chapter 3 Ward’s Start HyperCard’s Inspirations A Web Browser Viola HyperCard Revisited Chapter 4 Slashdotting Contributing the Meaning of Everything The GFDL UseMod Grows Give Me More Space Server Load Chapter 5 Usenet

Snow Crash

by Neal Stephenson · 15 Jul 2003 · 550pp · 160,356 words

don't have to wait for no mail. You can have it now." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard. It looks like a business card. The hypercard is an avatar of sorts. It is used in the Metaverse to represent a chunk of data. It might be text

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any other information that can be represented digitally. Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete biography, read by the player himself, in

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a complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you look up the numbers you want. A hypercard can carry a virtually infinite amount of information. For all Hiro knows, this hypercard might contain all the books in the Library of Congress, or every episode of Hawaii Five-O that was

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recordings of Jimi Hendrix, or the 1950 Census. Or—more likely—a wide variety of nasty computer viruses. If Hiro reaches out and takes the hypercard, then the data it represents will be transferred from this guy's system into Hiro's computer. Hiro, naturally, wouldn't touch it under any

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a free syringe from a stranger in Times Square and jab it into your neck. And it doesn't make sense anyway. "That's a hypercard. I thought you said Snow Crash was a drug," Hiro says, now totally nonplussed. "It is," the guy says. "Try it." "Does it fuck up

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with what you're talking about?" Juanita thinks for a while, eyeing him. Then she pulls a hypercard out of her pocket. "Here. Take this." As Hiro pulls it from her hand, the hypercard changes from a jittery two-dimensional figment into a realistic, cream-colored, finely textured piece of stationery. Printed

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. Clearly, his computer has just taken a major hit; all of its circuits are busy processing a huge bolus of data—the contents of the hypercard—and don't have time to redraw the image of The Black Sun in its full, breathtaking fidelity. "Holy shit!" he says, when The Black

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give her drop-dead looks, and the hackers purse their lips and stare reverently. Hiro orbits back around to the Hacker Quadrant. Da5id's shuffling hypercards around on his table—business stats on The Black Sun, film and video clips, hunks of software, scrawled telephone numbers. "There's a little blip

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to find him," Da5id says. "He's right outside the door. I got this from him." Da5id scans the table, picks up one of the hypercards, and shows it to Hiro. SNOW CRASH tear this card in half to release your free sample "Da5id," Hiro says, "I can't believe you

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took a hypercard from a black-and-white person." Da5id laughs. "This is not the old days, my friend. I've got so much antiviral medicine in my

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all the hackers who come through here, it's like working in a plague ward. So I'm not afraid of whatever's in this hypercard." "Well, in that case, I'm curious," Hiro says. "Yeah. Me, too." Da5id laughs. "It's probably something very disappointing." "Probably an animercial," Da5id agrees

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day if you want to," Da5id says, "but it's not every day you find one that can't hurt you." He picks up the hypercard and tears it in half. For a second, nothing happens. "I'm waiting," Da5id says. An avatar materializes on the table in front of Da5id

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up. Earth swings down and out of his field of view and there is the Librarian, standing in front of the desk, holding out a hypercard. Like any librarian in Reality, this daemon can move around without audible footfalls. "Can you make a little more noise when you walk? I'm

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easily startled," Hiro says. "It is done, sir. My apologies." Hiro reaches out for the hypercard. The Librarian takes half a step forward and leans toward him. This time, his foot makes a soft noise on the tatami mat, and Hiro

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can hear the white noise of his trousers sliding over his leg. Hiro takes the hypercard and looks at it. The front is labeled Results of Library Search on: Rife, Lawrence Robert He flips the card over. The back is divided

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happen spontaneously, or what?" "You tell me," she says. "You were there last night. Did anything happen after I left?" "He had a Snow Crash hypercard that he got from Raven outside The Black Sun." "Shit. That bastard." "Who's the bastard? Raven or Da5id?" "Da5id. I tried to warn him

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-high obelisk, also covered with cuneiform, with a bas-relief figure chiseled into the top. The room is filled with a three-dimensional constellation of hypercards, hanging weightlessly in the air. It looks like a highspeed photograph of a blizzard in progress. In some places, the

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hypercards are placed in precise geometric patterns, like atoms in a crystal. In other places, whole stacks of them are clumped together. Drifts of them have

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accumulated in the corners, as though Lagos tossed them away when he was finished. Hiro finds that his avatar can walk right through the hypercards without disturbing the arrangement. It is, in fact, the three-dimensional counterpart of a messy desktop, all the trash still remaining wherever Lagos left it

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. The cloud of hypercards extends to every corner of the 50-by-50-foot space, and from floor level all the way up to about eight feet, which is

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about as high as Lagos's avatar could reach. "How many hypercards in here?" "Ten thousand, four hundred and sixty-three," the Librarian says. "I don't really have time to go through them," Hiro says. "Can

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rest." "In that case, you are in possession of some very valuable intel," Uncle Enzo says. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a hypercard and hands it toward Hiro. It says TWENTY-FIVE MILLION HONG KONG DOLLARS Hiro reaches out and takes the card. Somewhere on earth, two computers

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puzzles. So he goggles into his office, uses the computer to take an electronic snapshot of the fragments, and calls the Librarian. "Yes, sir?" "This hypercard contains a picture of a shattered clay tablet. Do you know of some software that would be good at piecing it back together?" "One moment

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, sir," the Librarian says. Then a hypercard appears in his hand. He gives it to Hiro. It contains a picture of an assembled tablet. "That's how it looks, sir." "Can you

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything

by Steven Levy · 2 Feb 1994 · 244pp · 66,599 words

created your shapes you could copy them, alter them, or store them. In 1977, Ted Nelson (whom we will meet when our story turns to HyperCard) gushed about Sutherland's wonder-"The Most Important Computer Program Ever Written," he called it-in his book The Home Computer Revolution .. . . working on a

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often happens in the computer industry, the proposed product name had been claimed by a previous company, and the program came to be known as HyperCard. (After observing the trademark battles in the computer industry for some years, I now envision the English language as a lexical Oklahoma Territory, each word

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waiting for a homesteader to stake a claim on it.) HyperCard was meant to occupy a central place in the world of Macintosh, a node from which would tumble all the weird facts, semiremembered appointments, and

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of the libraries of Alexandria, all accessible from a familiar "home" card that automatically appeared when you opened the program. As was the Macintosh itself, HyperCard was a tool that could affect the way you viewed information. By its quick and painless linking process, one could easily see how all sorts

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activity was an idea-that information could easily migrate across the boundaries of text, graphics, video, and sound. HyperCard was a primer for the digital age. So if I wanted to make a HyperCard "stack" of personal information, I might have a "home card" reading, ME. On it would be an array

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even be a RESPONSE button that would yield any letter I wrote commenting upon the review. As Vannevar Bush had hoped for his memex machine, HyperCard was even capable of charting the sorts of connections an individual mentally mapped out all the time. Your own personal web of links could be

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seen as a fingerprint of your interests. HyperCard, in effect, taught you about your own brain, the leaps of logic and inference it took. No wonder that when the product was finally released

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. But he was reluctant to show it to anyone at Apple. He doubted whether the company would pledge sufficient commitment to fulfill the promise of HyperCard. In addition to the psychic pain of the Magic Slate rejection, Atkinson was smarting from Apple's haphazard support of MacPaint. Though Apple had serially

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with. "What do you want?" he asked Atkinson. "I want it to ship," said the Apple Fellow. They cut a deal-Apple would either bundle HyperCard with every computer it sold, or grant full ownership of the product to Atkinson, so he could sell it elsewhere. Using his home as a

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development center, Atkinson led a team of several programmers in creating the product. It took almost two years, but by the time it was complete, HyperCard was a brilliant exploitation of the Macintosh's abilities. The program made it abundantly clear that the Mac was the first engine that could vivify

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to Apple. Later, he claimed design credit for many of its capabilities, including its ability to connect to optical media such as CD-ROM disks. HyperCard made quite a stir at the show. The development team, recognizable by their custom-made royal-blue bowling shirts, were accorded celebrity status. If you

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into Atkinson himself-finally accorded the Apple superstar status that he richly deserved-he would slip you a floppy disk with a special set of HyperCard stacks. It seemed in some respects like the dawning of a new era, the age of hypermedia, where the common man would not only have

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writer whom Apple had chosen to write an official handbook to the program, was so inspired by this capability that he immediately wrote a complicated HyperCard stack to organize his life-address book, scheduler, etc.-with everything cross-linked. It was to be an example of this new era, when people

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would actually be able to design sophisticated applications. As it turns out, some of these dreams were overly optimistic. Even though the scripting language for HyperCard, called HyperTalk, was one of the least onerous high-level computer languages yet devised, it was still a programming language. For most people, programming a

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thousands used the program to organize information, most of the millions of people owning HyperCard never bothered with HyperTalk. On the other hand, HyperCard's mere presence on millions of Macintoshes was a subtle yet profound cultural milestone. Before HyperCard, those interested in realizing the dreams of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson had

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way that linguists treat the fervent proponents of Esperanto-cultists who may have a point to make, but whose cause is doomed. The appearance of HyperCard, the product with hypertext as its heart, changed all that. It was as if the Esperanto people had suddenly been presented with an entirely new

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. And there are literally scores of others that purport to be about hypertext that are sprouting up like dandelions." That was the intangible benefit of HyperCard-a hastening of what now seems an inevitable reordering of the way we consume information. On a more basic level

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, HyperCard found several niches, the most prevalent being an easy-to-use control panel, or "front end," for databases, providing easy access for files, pictures, notes,

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

by Claire L. Evans · 6 Mar 2018 · 371pp · 93,570 words

became a vital tool for sharing ideas across disciplines, and its influence flowed beyond PARC’s borders. In 1987, Apple released a NoteCards–like application, HyperCard, which came bundled with Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers and became the most popular hypermedia system ever developed before the advent of the World

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used it to build databases, write branching novels, and create PowerPoint–like presentation slides. Popular games, like the bestselling CD-ROM Myst, were prototyped in HyperCard. Within Apple, it was often used to test out interface design ideas, and some publishers even issued magazines as

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HyperCard “stacks.” Nineteen eighty-seven was a banner year for hypertext, as it happens. Beyond the release of HyperCard, it marked the first academic hypertext conference, Hypertext ’87, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Academic conferences

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across their massive Swiss campus a little easier. To anyone who saw it in 1991, it would have looked something like NoteCards or Apple’s HyperCard: small graphical “pages” connected by links. The major difference was that these pages didn’t all live on the same computer; Berners-Lee and Caillau

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, hypertext and the Web managed an uneasy coexistence. Cathy Marshall proposed that hypertext systems could serve as desktop work spaces for information gathered online, and HyperCard wasn’t pulled from the shelves until 2004. Wendy Hall, who would weather the transition to the Web more successfully than many of her peers

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Whole Earth Review, Mondo 2000, and Newsweek collaged together on-screen as though they’d been xeroxed by hand. Cyber Rag was programmed in Apple HyperCard, with graphics drawn in MacPaint. Along with her animations, she added edgy interactive games (in one, you chase Manuel Noriega around Panama), hacker how-tos

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, Jaime was at the absolute vanguard of electronic publishing. Nobody had ever produced anything like Cyber Rag or Electronic Hollywood. There had been some interactive HyperCard stacks, downloadable from BBSs, and a few interactive art disks for Commodore Amiga. But Jaime’s disks, packaged on floppy, were accessible to anyone with

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American Totalisator, 60 Analytical Engine, 13, 18–23, 19, 42, 74 Anderson, Laurie, 192 AOL, 153, 209, 211, 216, 217 Apple, 161, 162, 224, 226 HyperCard, 165, 168, 169, 183, 184 Applied Mathematics Panel, 24 Aquanet, 155, 166, 170 Aristotle, 226 Army, U.S., 10, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47, 49

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–21 ARPANET Host Table, 113, 114, 120 domains and, 120–21 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), 154, 196 HyperCard, 165, 168, 169, 183, 184 hypertext, 153–74, 177, 186, 203, 222 conferences on, 165, 167–69 HyperCard and, 165, 168, 169, 183, 184 Microcosm and, 159–61, 160, 164, 167, 168, 170–74

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words

decades before. We all sit on the shoulders of giants. We’re all inspired by these ideas. Bill Atkinson: I viewed what was later called HyperCard as being a software erector set—where you could plug together prefab pieces and make your own software. Kristina Woolsey: It was basically a way

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. You can click on this, click on that. Fundamentally the mouse and linking are the same. Bill Atkinson: Looking back, I sort of see that HyperCard was kind of like the first glimmer of a web browser—but chained to a hard drive. Fabrice Florin: Then immediately after the group discussion

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the program expanded and it even included a person who was not an engineer—Kristina Hooper Woolsey. Kristina Woolsey: I came in ’85 when the HyperCard stuff started. Bill Atkinson spontaneously decided to do the product. He and a small team just popped this thing out. Al Alcorn

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: HyperCard was developed by Bill and two or three guys in Advanced Technology and—it wasn’t supposed to be released. Products are supposed to be

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beach in the south of France, Bill just released it. And when Gassée got back he was furious, but he couldn’t stop it because HyperCard was really well received. It got great press. There are a lot of stories like that. Andy Hertzfeld: But the beginning of General Magic is

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, and he infected Bill Atkinson and some of the other guys with this idea. Andy Hertzfeld: Marc met with Bill Atkinson, who had just finished HyperCard and was kind of looking around for what to do next. And he got Bill really excited about it. So one day right after my

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that Andy was there. They immediately started seeing how to do it, and they signed up. Andy Hertzfeld: Bill created a prototype user interface in HyperCard. I wrote a server that allowed you to send little electronic graphical messages. Michael Stern: There were these beautiful little “tele-cards” with animations and

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them all on a CD-ROM. They all lived in a tiny, six-hundred-megabyte universe. And now, if you could take the principles of HyperCard and interconnect everything, it was like, “Wow, this is amazing. This is going to change everything.” Tiffany Shlain: It was so exciting. Jim Clark: From

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today is, essentially, Anuff’s personality writ large. Bill Atkinson was the software wizard responsible for the Macintosh’s breakthrough look and feel. His program, HyperCard, was the first really successful example of hyperlinked “hypermedia” before the world wide web. Ali Aydar was a twenty-three-year-old programmer and the

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Post story on the first Hackers Conference. Bill Atkinson’s quotes are from an August 2012 Berkeley Cybersalon event on the creation and legacy of Hypercard. Doug Carlson’s, Robert Woodhead’s, and Steve Wozniak’s quotes from the Hackers Conference are as reported in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext

by Belinda Barnet · 14 Jul 2013 · 193pp · 19,478 words

from that period – most obviously NoteCards, Office Workstations Limited’s Guide, KMS, Microcosm, or Apple’s very popular HyperCard program released in 1987. The latter systems were all commercialized in some form, but HyperCard was the most successful, largely because it was bundled free with every Macintosh sold after 1987 (Nielsen 1995

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). HyperCard is the elephant in the pre-Web hypertext room; it popularized hypermedia before the Web and introduced the concept of linking to the general public.

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In some media accounts, one could be forgiven for thinking there was no hypertext before HyperCard (as New Scientist’s Helen Knight implies in her piece on pre-Web hypertext, ‘The Missing Link’ (2012, 45)). Actually computer-based hypertext had been

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around for twenty years before HyperCard, and the systems we will explore in this book were all built (or imagined) well before its release in 1987. If I had another ten

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Uncle Roger (1986), available on the Web).11 We might also include here John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, which was produced in Hypercard (1992). This also makes use of a navigational ‘map’ and topographic metaphor. Both Malloy’s and McDaid’s work remarkably prefigure the movement in contemporary

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co-chaired the conference with Frank Halasz). Andy van Dam gave his legendary keynote presentation, as we saw in the chapter on HES. Apple presented HyperCard with much pomp and ceremony, but it was met with an undertone of disdain (as Joyce recalls it); the feeling was ‘we all knew systems

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dubbed the ‘second generation’ of hypertext systems from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the contemporaries of Storyspace – FRESS, Intermedia, Smith’s WE, Apple’s Hypercard – are no longer in use. Storyspace, however, has survived for almost 30 years; content is still being written for it, it still being bought and

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WE here, but it was an important system in the history of expository or ‘professional’ writing systems; it was presented at Hypertext ’87 alongside Intermedia, HyperCard, Storyspace and NLS. 24 Joyce now believes it wasn’t a meeting but a conference; ‘If I wrote that in the Markle Report, it is

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–2, 24, 25, 29 human neuronal circuit, MIT model of 24 humans, relationship between tools and 1 INDEX ‘human system’ in capability infrastructure 38–40 Hypercard xxii, 129, 131 hyperfilm 74 Hypergate 133 hypermedia 74, 98, 111 hypermedia theory 67 hypertext: articulating to cultural logic xiv; automated option of 6; Bolter

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension

by Samuel Arbesman · 18 Jul 2016 · 222pp · 53,317 words

even today with the iPad, so slick and pristine that I don’t even know how files in it are stored. However, I had HyperCard for our Mac. HyperCard was this strange combination of programming language and exploratory environment. You could create virtual cards, stitch them together, and add buttons and icons

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fun animations and cool sounds and even connect to other cards. If you’ve ever played the classic game Myst, it was originally developed using HyperCard. HyperCard was like a prototypical series of web pages that all lived on your own computer, but it could also do pretty much anything else you

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. For a kid who was beginning to explore computers, this visual authoring space was the perfect gateway to the machine. One program I built with HyperCard was a rudimentary password generator: it could make a random string you could use as a password, but it also had options to make the

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the long term. It was simple, but definitely ahead of its time, in my unstudied opinion. The computer game designer Chaim Gingold calls gateways like HyperCard “magic crayons.” Like the crayon in the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon that allows the young hero to draw objects that immediately

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medium and build dynamic things.” Even in the Apple world, commonly viewed as sterilized of messy code and computational innards, HyperCard allowed access to the complex powerhouse of the digital domain. HyperCard provided me with the comfort to enter this world, giving me a hint of the possibilities of working under the

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to limits of human comprehension, 155–56 as response to technological complexity, 155–56, 158, 165, 167, 170, 174, 176 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 113, 114 HyperCard, 162–63 IBM, 84, 169 IBM 3083 computer, 37 ideas, interconnectivity of, 142 if-then statements, 80–81 Iliad (Homer), 129–30 infield fly rule

This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir From the Inventor of the World Wide Web

by Tim Berners-Lee · 8 Sep 2025 · 347pp · 100,038 words

computer. In fact, it was Engelbart who coined the term ‘mouse’. Hypertext gained widespread popularity in 1987, when Bill Atkinson, a programmer at Apple, released HyperCard, a ‘stack’ of virtual ‘cards’ that organized text, images and multimedia objects in a manner that resembles a modern web page. The cards weren’t

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jump from one card to any other. (This was the kind of ‘illogical’ conceptual leap that computer programmers sometimes struggled with; Atkinson had conceived of HyperCard while on acid.) HyperCard was a massive hit. Apple bundled it as a default app with Macintosh computers, and a community of

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HyperCard enthusiasts grew around it. • So there is your potted history of hypertext – except at the time I was almost totally unaware of these developments! When

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I was conceptualizing the web as an information-wrangling tool, I had never heard of Ted Nelson nor Douglas Engelbart, and I had never used HyperCard. My introduction to hypertext only came while I was drafting a proposal for my document-linking system, when someone – I cannot remember who, but probably

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-Yuan Wei, a computer science student at UC-Berkeley. Pei Wei had independently been thinking along the same lines, looking to use Viola, his own HyperCard-like system, as a platform for networked computing. Then he stumbled across my alt.hypertext Usenet post from August 1991. He recognized the importance of

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, ref2, ref3, ref4 AOL hometown ref1 Apache HTTP servers ref1 Apollo naming system ref1, ref2 Apple anti-trust lawsuits ref1 apps ref1 business model ref1 HyperCard ref1 interoperability ref1 iPhone ref1, ref2, ref3 Jobs leaves ref1 Jobs returns ref1 partnerships ref1 Siri ref1 standards ref1 WHATWG ref1, ref2, ref3 Applied Semantics

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, ref5 HTTPS standard ref1 human first systems ref1 human rights ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 see also civil liberties humans as social animals ref1 HyperCard ref1 hyperlinks ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 hypertext ref1, ref2, ref3 see also HTML Hypertext ‘91 conference ref1 Hypertext ‘93 conference ref1

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words

to CERN. To do this he modified a superb software product developed by one of Apple’s most enchanting innovators, Bill Atkinson. It was called HyperCard, and it allowed users to make their own hyperlinked cards and documents on their computers. Apple had little idea what to do with the software

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it away free with its computers. It was easy to use, and even kids—especially kids—found ways to make HyperCard stacks of linked pictures and games. Cunningham was blown away by HyperCard when he first saw it, but he found it cumbersome. So he created a supersimple way of creating new

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(Hyperion, 2009), 1111. See also Ward Cunningham and Bo Leuf, The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web (Addison-Wesley, 2001); Ward Cunningham, “HyperCard Stacks,” http://c2.com/~ward/HyperCard/; Ward Cunningham, keynote speech, Wikimania, Aug. 1, 2005. 81. Ward Cunningham, “Invitation to the Pattern List,” May 1, 1995, http://c2.com

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, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16 Hush-A-Phone case, ref1 hydrogen bomb, ref1, ref2 HyperCard, ref1 hypertext, ref1, ref2 limitation of, ref1 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), ref1 IAS Machine, ref1 IBM, ref1

Track Changes

by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum · 1 May 2016 · 519pp · 142,646 words

a goose, or a steel pen manufactured in exact and unalterable replication in Manchester,” asked William Dickey, a poet who would experiment with Apple’s HyperCard software late in his life. “Do we feel differently, is the stance and poise of our physical relationship to our work changed, and if it

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,” in the words of one of the form’s most accomplished practitioners, Michael Joyce.66 The most important platforms for this kind of experimentation were HyperCard (first released by Apple in 1987), Storyspace (initially co-designed by Joyce with Bolter and John B. Smith, and developed since 1990 by Eastgate Systems

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, and, as its editors remark at the outset, reflects the journal’s ongoing commitment to engaging “Subjects That Matter” (v). For more on Dickey’s HyperCard poetry, which remains unpublished, see his essay “Poem Descending a Staircase,” in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, eds. Paul Delany and George P. Landow (Cambridge: MIT

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, but here I quote from his Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 32. 67. Works produced with HyperCard and Storyspace have been the subject of numerous scholarly studies over the past twenty-five years or so. For accounts of Storyspace’s technical development

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, Kevin J., 222 Anthony, Piers, 20, 25, 207, 260n38 Anzaldúa, Gloria Evangelina, 22, 262n59 Apple, 43, 114, 127; AppleTalk, 201; BASIC, xi, 105, 106, 107; HyperCard, 10, 24, 257n35, 263n67; Imagewriter, 195; iPad 4, 18, 23, 307n3; Lisa, 142; MacBook Air, 76; Macintosh, xiv, 112, 127, 185, 195–202, 235, 236