Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

Rick sent me a link to this story, MacUser: News: HyperCard takes to the Web, about how one company is providing a service so old HyperCard content (or stacks as they were known) can be viewed on the web.

I’m not sure if this is a good idea really, like listening to 1940s AM radio on your iPod, things have moved on and you’d get a headache from the hiss. It’d be useful from a historical perspective of sorts I guess, but who is going to take the time to bother to upload them, tag them etc? Most high quality HyperCard stacks used external code libraries that definitely won’t work.

Whether this initiative will work, is a good idea or not is by the by, what shocked me was that Rick had heard of HyperCard but had no idea what it was. This is exactly the same as when I discover my daughters have never heard of Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd or Joy Division and they roll their eyes and groan, “Oh no, musical education!” as I warm up my iPod.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all misty-eyed and wax lyrical (is there any other way to wax?) but just for Rick here’s a brief explanation…

• It was made by Bill Atkinson who wrote some other great tools that made Apple what it was. What MacDraw did for graphics, and MacWrite did for wordprocessing, HyperCard did for software.
• It was like a database, but not geeky
• Most of the content was “open”… in that you could poke around and find out how they did it
• It was a drawing tool, that you could, if you fancied, program to draw things
• It was a text editor that you never had to “Save” (I’d kill for this now!!!!)
• It was a book (on Vikings, or JFK or NASA), or a hypertext or a set of cards or all of the above
• It was Black & White (hey.. you can’t have everything)
• … which meant it was quick! (maybe you can)
• It was “interactive”!!! You made buttons that did things.
• The programming language was easy (I don’t think this has really ever happened again)
• It was free (for most of the time)
• You could make pretty much ANYTHING with it (and people did)

It’s the last one that’s important.

Today’s exercise… imagine

Imagine to yourself… I have some tasks to do …no seriously… think about your working day today and let the tasks you will do form a cloud of “getting things done”. You might want to plan your tasks, with a calendar or a to-do list. You might want to log details of tasks or write about them in interconnected detail. You might want a wordprocessor that works in very different way to Word.

During your coffee break, you’d like to fiddle with some software you’ve been playing with to help you run your tennis club/geneology research/whatever… but hey… get back to work!

Getting back to work and your tasks you’d realise than in getting it done, you’d done it your way and you’d created a system. In short, you’d made the computer do what you wanted it to do, only in black and white, but remember, these were the olden days.

The first HTML editor I used was written in HyperCard by Sam Deane in 1994/95. We had a collaborative CMS before most people had downloaded Mosaic!

Parallels are often drawn between the “web as we know it” and the stacks you would make with HyperCard… and if we take the example above, yes you can use web sites to create content, make to-do lists, create databases etc.. but the web, for me, is not quite as fluid yet. It’s quite a pain to abitrarily pick elements we’d like to combine (text, images, data, processing/programming, tools) and quickly whip them into something we can use…. but it’s getting there.

• Tools like Dapper.net have the illusory promise of being able to get content (but it never quite works for me).
• Tools like Yahoo pipes very nearly let me do what I want with various RSS feeds.
• Wikis are kissing cousins of HyperCard stacks but also very different in that I can’t drag a button into a wiki page.

… the MAIN thing about HyperCard, is that as you sat down to get on with your broing tasks, you were drawn into world of all-consuming possibilities and creativity. Rather than getting on and “getting things done” you explored how and why you were even doing it.

So I guess the web as we know it really IS like HyperCard, it’s a beautiful waste of time.