"Without HyperCard, we might not have the World Wide Web..." ...um no.
DARPA, CERN et al would have created the web, one way or the other and lets not forget that the very first webpages were created on NeXT computers run by the "draconian" Steve Jobs.
Yes, boys and girls. Back in 1991, I was an Apple guy.
1991. Thinking about those days gives me a headache. Back then, I was all Apple, all the time. It was not necessarily a good thing.
I had two roles back then. I was the founder of Hyperpress, one of the first major add-on developers for Apple’s HyperCard. Today, that’d be like being one of the big iPad app developers or Facebook app developers. HyperCard was essentially the first app-building environment, and Hyperpress was one of the key players.
I was also the head of Apple’s Educator HomeCard project, where I had been given the somewhat unusual title of “Godfather”. This was a big project with a number of teams, all working together to essentially create a suite of apps for teachers — tools for managing grading, seating charts, various activities, and so forth.
The idea was Apple was going to distribute Educator HomeCard to schools everywhere, make it easier for teachers to teach and manage the day-to-day minutiae of teaching, and therefore make them want to use Macs to do it all.
At this point in our retrospective, it’s probably a good idea for me to explain HyperCard to you. HyperCard was introduced by Apple in 1987. It shipped for free on all Macs. HyperCard was difficult to explain then, and — to some degree — remains so today.
At its most simple, HyperCard was an interactive MacPaint, with buttons, fields, and scripting.
Written by Bill Atkinson, the guy who wrote the original MacPaint (the forerunner of all “paint” programs including Photoshop), HyperCard was used to build “stacks” of “cards”. Each card had buttons, graphics, and text on it, and you could move between cards to show different types of information.
Sound familiar?
If you substitute “page” for “card” and “site” for “stack”, you get surprisingly close to the modern-day Web site concept.
Except for, well, the network.
HyperCard didn’t know of networks. We didn’t have much of an Internet back then, and — of course — we also didn’t have a Web. Remember, this was the mid-1980s.
When HyperCard was released in 1987, the Mac was only three years old. It had been a tumultuous three years, with the most notable event being Steve Jobs leaving the company for his years in the NeXT wilderness.
By the time HyperCard came out in 1987, John Scully (formerly of Pepsi) was in charge of the company. The Macintosh II was the Apple color machine, and Apple was slowly losing its way. HyperCard was symptomatic of that loss of direction.
Because HyperCard was, at its core, a building environment, many managers within Apple didn’t know what to make of it. Although Apple had made its name by including the BASIC language with the old Apple II machines, by the time the mid-80s rolled around, the middle managers at Apple had pretty much forgotten that end-user development could be a big business driver.
Even so, HyperCard became part of the core Mac OS offering. It was shipped free with every Macintosh, and so Mac users across the world started building stacks using it. It was highly versatile, easy to modify, easy to learn, and reasonably robust. Schools used it, businesses used it, government agencies used it, and plain ol’ users used it.
The breadth of stacks was almost breathtaking. For example, while I ran the Educator HomeCard project building tools for teachers, the guys at Cyan used HyperCard to build the first version of a little program called Myst. Until The Sims unseated it, Myst was the best-selling PC game of all time — and it started as a HyperCard stack.
HyperCard stacks, distributed both on floppy disks and on the new-fangled technology called CD-ROM, made it possible to produce deep multimedia technology including things like encyclopedias, interactive medical charts, and even stacks that helped you understand bird anatomy.
