HyperCard, What Could Have Been

Posted by kdawson on Sunday May 25, 2008 @12:13AM 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."

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My first experience with programming by PhrostyMcByte · 2008-05-25 00:35 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.