| Why I'm Here
I bought a Mac in 1984. (As I'd said to my programmer boyfriend, "I'll get a computer when they make one that has black letters on a white background." And I did.)
And I started on the path that led me to my current livelihood when I encountered HyperCard. It was truly programming for the rest of us, and I was thrilled thrilled thrilled. I realized there were few things that I might want to make my computer do that I wouldn't be able to implement myself. Oh, the empowerment! There was also a wonderful community around the software; my first protracted online experiences were in AOL's HyperCard forum in 1991.
In 1997, at the MILIA Conference in Cannes, Apple gave an NDA demo of a new version of HyperCard that was under development. It looked fantastic! I was sooo excited, as were the other people there (some of whom I had met virtually before, which was fun). I waited and waited. It never came out.
For years I held out hope. But the web and its plethora of scripting languages (each of which is much less quickly learned and butt ugly in comparison to the clarity and simplicity of HyperTalk) pretty much put paid to Apple's interest in HyperCard. Sure, there's SuperCard ~ which got to a color version before the kludgey version in HC itself ~ and MetaCard, and all... but in my view the beauty of Bill Atkinson's creation is still unsurpassed.
Wired has a couple of articles on HyperCard: those who still carry the torch, and its creator's regrets. (I once started a project to make a HyperCard web browser, but never finished it.)
1:13:17 PM  |
Write to me!
