Check out the video in this tweet, a small piece of a larger project covering HyperCard:
https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/993885366217330689
At the time, back in 1990, this was absolutely groundbreaking. Since the internet was still in its infancy, images and data for a project were always stored locally. And images were massive, compared to the relatively tiny hard drives of the time.
The solution? Video discs and computer controlled video disc players. Back then, paper maps were filmed on incredibly precise animation stands (like those used for special effects camera fly-throughs), then cut into frames and stored on video disc. The computer moved along the maps by stepping through frames, each one a picture of a portion of a map at a slight offset from the previous frame.
In this example, the HyperCard stack presents a picture of the heart, and clicking on various buttons or hot points tells the video disc player to jump to an appropriate image or video.
How far we’ve come. Now, all those image can be stored locally, or brought up as needed from the cloud. And using cloud-shared resources means content can be updated as needed.
Fascinating look back. HyperCard was a truly groundbreaking piece of work by Bill Atkinson, one of the members of the original Macintosh team. If you are not familiar with Bill, take a look at his Wikipedia page. We owe him a lot.
Damn, that sweater. Miss the 80s, er, 90s
There’s handful of programmers I think of as legends. John Carmack, Ward Cunningham, Margaret Hamilton, etc. I would put Bill Atkinson in any list of the greats.
Let’s not forget Dan Winkler who wrote much of the HyperTalk language along with Atkinson.
I was in the audience at Boston Macworld when Atkinson introduced HyperCard and I got the beta disk set right after the demo. It felt like one of the most amazing and important things I’d ever witnessed, it was incredible.
A year later I was working in the Apple booth at Boston Macworld demoing HyperCard with Atkinson looking over my shoulder (and making me nervous). I’ve still got my HyperCard lobster t-shirt they gave away at the one year birthday party.
And there’s my first computer, briefly framing the left foreground of the opening shot. Hello, old buddy.
I remember noodling around with HyperCard, impressed by its ability to index and pursue multiple branches of inspection in a document. It seemed pretty brilliant.
And I loved the idea of Laserdiscs when they appeared. Dove into the format without a thought of the possibility that there could, following relatively quickly, ever be such a thing as DVDs or Blu-Rays.
I was especially fascinated by the ability to access individual frames (on the lower-capacity CAV discs, at least), having destroyed at least one VCR’s playback heads with too many attempted freeze-frames. And it seemed to me that these discs might last a bit longer than magnetic tape. sigh