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HyperCard, What Could Have Been

Posted by kdawson on from the wild-cards dept.

bobwrit sends us to Wired for a look back by the author of HyperCard, Bill Atkinson. Quoting: "HyperCard is a programming environment that can create applications as diverse as utilities and games by linking 'cards' arranged into 'stacks.' Commands are executed through a natural-language scripting language called HyperTalk... The software has been phenomenally successful and highly influential. But Atkinson feels that if only he'd realized separate cards and stacks could be linked on different people's machines through the Net — instead of cards and stacks on a particular machine — he would have created the first Internet browser."

7 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah yeah yeah by Bastard+of+Subhumani · · Score: 3, Funny

    Cudda shudda wudda.

    --
    Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
    1. Re:Yeah yeah yeah by deniable · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yep, instead he got beat by gopher.

    2. Re:Yeah yeah yeah by WK2 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I've been considering making a Firefox extension, or a greasemonkey script, to do just that. Although I wanted to filter attention whore articles, such as those about Jack Thompson, Uwe Boll, John Dvorak, or those submitted by Roland. Filtering kdawson would be good too. Unfortunately, I have no experience writing extensions or greasemonkey scripts for Firefox.

      On the other hand, if we filtered all of the stories that we complain about on Slashdot, there would be nothing left. Then where would we waste our time?

      --
      Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
    3. Re:Yeah yeah yeah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      > Then where would we waste our time?
      4chan

  2. Re:HyperCard? by FooAtWFU · · Score: 5, Funny

    Bah! You are forgetting LISP, which was not made up, but discovered! Like fractals or the Pythagorean theorem, an artifact of math, no more man's creation than the integers! LISP, the language from which the gods surely wrought the universe!

    ... actually, I too mostly hack things together with Perl.

    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  3. Re:You really want Slashdot to be... by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 2, Funny

    That would beat the big Yellow Pages it's been turning into lately...

    --
    Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
  4. Poetic by Bastard+of+Subhumani · · Score: 3, Funny

    The genius of HyperCard was that it brought application development to the masses.
    In sharp contrast to its primary failing, which was bringing the masses to application development.
    --
    Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.