Recent Event Highlights: Apple Quicktime 1 Launched, Bill Atkinson Interviewed about Hypercard's Origins, Michelle Foucault, Ted Nelson: Literary Machines, Mrs Thatcher is Prime Minister, Ted Nelson: Computer Lib/Dream Machines, and 21 more...
Created by spooky on 08/10/2009
Last updated: 18/11/09 at 21:02
The History of HyperCard has no followers yet. Be the first one to follow.
Hypercard is officially withdrawn from Apple's site although the software had been lying in limbo without significant updates or even R&D. In the meantime entire software streams had arisen to usurp it, in particular a whole new genre of web development and editing tools that moved content from the static and local to dynamic and dispersed/global. It also coincided with a general shift in attitudes towards ownership of data/content and the relationship between creator and user
John Sculley gives an interview in which he admits that Hypercard was one of the great missed opportunities at Apple. He also confirms the general view that most people at Apple had no idea what it was for.
http://news.cnet.com/2008-7351-5085423.html
An interview by Leander Kahney which outlines Bill Atkinson's regrets and what he perceives as the missed opportunities for HyperCard
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2002/08/54370
Apple opts to discontinue Claris dissolving all products bar one and renaming the outfit Filemaker Inc.
Compact Discs outsell Vinyl records for the first time in the music Industry - at this stage the concept of direct music downloads was not apparent
HyperCard 3.0 Since so many people were using it to function as a multimedia-authoring tool it made sense to move it into the QuickTime group. The result, under the direction of Kevin Calhoun, was to re-create HYpercard as QTi and include the core of Quicktime's emerging power into the application. QTi extended QuickTime's core multimedia playback features to provide true interactive facilities. HyperCard 3.0 was first presented in 1996 when an alpha-quality version was shown to developers at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Development continued through the late 1990s, with public demos showing many popular features such as color support, internet connectivity, and the ability to play HyperCard stacks (which were now essentially QuickTime movies) in a web browser. Development of HyperCard 3.0 stalled when the QuickTime team was focused away from development of QuickTime interactive to the streaming features of QuickTime 4.0.Finally in 2000 the HyperCard engineering team was reassigned to other tasks after Steve Jobs decided to abandon the product. Calhoun and Crow both left Apple shortly after in 2001.
Bowie releases an interactive CD to accompany his single "jump". unlike Gabriel's Xplora, Jump focusses on video.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,979973-2,00.html
The first global software app.
Peter Gabriel launches an interactive CD that accompanies his music as a promotional tool for his 1992 tour. Along with others such as David Bowie, Prince and Todd Rundgren it signalled the entry of big (old?) music into the interactive media arena.
Marc Andreesen And Eric Bima release Mosaic - the world's first web browser
Apple launched its fledgling multimedia wrapper having teased developers and the public alike in the lead up. The capabilities of this technology were viewed by many as astounding - especially given that Microsoft's competing Video For Windows technology would not be released until 1992 (despite allegedly containing a huge amount of code stolen from Quicktime)
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/
The Gulf war did not take place
Myst, a ground breaking adventure game incorporating stunning graphics and running via a Hypercard Engine is launched by Cyan. The game created by Robyn and Rand Miller is an overnight sensation.
It goes on to become of the biggest selling computer games of all time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst
A fascinating journey into the emerging world of New Media that includes interviews with key figures such as Ted Nelson
Raj Chand creates a simple Hypercard stack to catalogue his music interests (mainly some David Bowie!!)
In this web transcript Bill Atkinson talks about how he came up with HyperCard, his philosophy for it and also his hopes for the application's future
http://www.savetz.com/ku/ku/quick_genius_behind_hypercard_bill_atkinson_the_november_1987.html
Worldwide Stock Market Crash
Mrs Thatcher wins a third general election
Apple Computer Inc. spins out its software division to form a new company called Claris to split the company's hardware efforts from its software development arm (in a precursor of the split into Computing/lifestyle devices). the difference now is that the software underpins both arms.
Bill Atkinson (creator of Quickdraw, MacPaint) and influenced by Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay and Smalltalk created Hypercard starting in 1985 (originally Wildcard) with Dan Winkler supplying the language Hypertalk in 1986. Originally called WildCard during its development, the name was changed to HyperCard (due to copyright issues - the HYper coming from HYPERtalk) before official release due to trademark issues. The HyperCard application and its associated files retain a creator code of WILD, reflecting this period of development. The last sixteen bytes of every HyperCard 2.x stack end with the pascal string "Nu är det slut …" (That is the end … in Swedish) though this is never seen by users. It was initially released in August 1987, with the understanding that Atkinson would give HyperCard to Apple only if they promised to release it for free on all Macs. Apple timed its release to coincide with the MacWorld Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts to guarantee maximum publicity. HyperCard was a huge hit almost instantly. Apple could not define its purpose, place in the product range or even market. The products endless capabilities seemed to potentially cut into the margins for ordinary shrink wrapped products. In its first year, one million copies of HyperCard were sold.
Power flows through institutions
Bill Atkinson creates MacPaint
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Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfield create the 2D graphics library that would drive the MacOS and ultimately result in HyperCard
Ushering in an era of 'business as king", consumerism and the now notorious "There is no such thing as society"
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Regarded by some as opening the debate on Hypertext by talking about what he termed 'readerly' and 'writerly' texts and the relation of the reader to the language of the text being read
Alan Kay puts forward the concept of Dynabook - 2 years before the setting up of Xerox-PARC
"The End of Man is at Hand" - The order of Things
Goffman writes: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in which he talks about human interaction in two distinct ways; Front and Back. Today "front end" is a term used by developers to talk about the actual audio/visual interface for a piece of interactive media such as a web site that is generally created by designers and "Back end" which refers to the core engines that drive the product which are generally not seen by the user/consumer and are usually created by developers.
Bill Atkinson is Born
check out
http://folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Bill%20Atkinson&detail=medium
http://www.savetz.com/ku/ku/quick_genius_behind_hypercard_bill_atkinson_the_november_1987.html
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