HyperCard
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Created by BillAtkinson
Inspired the original wiki : https://wiki.c2.com/?HyperCard
Open HyperCard files: https://github.com/uliwitness/stackimport/
AlanKay's history / analysis of Hypercard is, of course, fascinating :
Take home messages for me :
- programming through event handlers makes things intuitive
John Scully (https://web.archive.org/web/20041012004300/http://news.com.com/2008-7351-5085423.html)
As I look back on things that I wished we would have done differently when I was at Apple, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities, and it was on my watch, so I feel responsible and disappointed that we didn't do more with it, was Hypercard. It was created back in 1987 by Bill Atkinson, Apple's first software programmer. We could never figure out exactly what it was. We thought it was a prototyping tool. We thought it was a database tool. It was actually used by people as a front-end communications device for TCP/IP to connect the Internet to large Cray computers.
We weren't insightful enough to recognize that what we had inside of Hypercard, essentially, was everything that later was developed so successfully by TimBernersLee with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). We didn't call it that. But essentially, we had all that hypertext, radio buttons and linking capability architected in the original Hypercard. In hindsight, I wish Apple had recognized that we had a huge opportunity to go take our user interface culture, and our know-how, and applied it to the Internet. I think we would have had a very different story for Apple during the 1990s. But that, of course, is hindsight.
On further thought, it is another InformationCard application, that kind of inspires CardiganBay