HyperCard, What Could Have Been

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."

Comments

My first experience with programming

[PhrostyMcByte]

Okay, so calling HyperStudio "programming" is a stretch, but it was definitely a gateway drug for it.

Playing Doom on my uncle's computer may have got me interested in computers, but using HyperStudio in elementary school was my first experience with programming and is probably what started me down that path.

Re:The WWW requires a single world wide network

[Dogtanian]

No such thing existed at that time. In 1985, the networks were fragmented into dozens of incompatible protocols, the environment which could have made Hypercard into the first web browser simply didn't exist and therefore there was no opportunity to make it into such. Since you mention incompatible protocols, there's another related issue. Unlike the WWW, HyperCard was proprietary, and the hypothetical NetHyperCard would likely would have remained so to some extent.

Its open nature was (as far as I am aware) a major benefit of the WWW, and probably helped it take off pretty quickly. Thus, it's *not* a foregone conclusion that a proprietary NetHyperCard with very similar capabilities would have taken off in the same way.

In fact, it's quite probable that had NetHyperCard existed and been released in the mid-to-late 80s, it would have been been Mac only and tied specifically to AppleTalk networks (rather than TCP/IP). This is already partly implied by what you say above; but I also think that NetHyperCard would have *remained* proprietary and Apple-centric- and hence a niche product- until (or *if*) a clearly successful open product persuaded Apple to change their mind. Which likely would have been the WWW anyway!

But by the time it was visibly successful enough to force Apple's hand, the WWW would likely be the established standard. My guess is that- allowing time for the company to action it- Apple would have released a pseudo-open, multi-platform, TCP/IP-friendly version of NetHyperCard circa 1997-99. And since everyone would already be using the WWW, NetHyperCard would still be ignored.

To cut this long story short, even if it had been invented long before the WWW, I still think it's unlikely that we'd be using NetHyperCard instead of the WWW today.

Of course, had NetHyperCard been invented before the WWW, it's quite possible that Apple could have taken legal action against it in some form; but even if successful, I think that this would be more likely to stifle things overall than make NetHyperCard a success on the scale of the web. In that sense, I'm glad that it never came to fruition.

Re:Yeah yeah yeah

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"In your preferences, under "Authors", you can uncheck his name, and his stories should disappear for you."

Everybody knows that. The problem is that the moderation system rewards righteous bitching. It's the idiots with mod points that are keeping these memes alive. "Oh look, somebody's complaining about kdawson. I hate him, too. If I mod him up, instead of rewarding Slashdot with more page views, they'll stop posting kdawson's stories!"

Oh well, back to reading +5 posts about how kdawson sucks, Balmer throws chairs, and nobody wants a cell phone that does anything more than make and receive calls.