FastCo Design:
From 1986 to 1997, isolated from the fray at One Infinite Loop, (Advanced Technology Group) engineers and scientists crafted breakthrough technologies like HyperCard, QuickTime, QuickTime VR, and Apple Data Detectors. These inventions–even if they don’t exist today in their original form–shaped how computers, smartphones, and even the web itself works today.
There was a very real concern after Jobs killed the ATG that the company would lose its edge. Happily, those of us who thought that were wrong.
Ah HyperCard… I loved it and built a load of stuff with it, some of which Atkinson enjoyed messing around with (his then young daughter loved my stack: Ziggy Gets Out).
What I didn’t know and learned from reading that piece is that HyperTalk was a model for Javascript and that HyperCard “links” gave Tim Berners-Lee ideas for how browsers might work over TCP/IP.
I was blown away by QuickTime VR back in the day. Really a shame it didn’t take off at the time. Those Apple folks back then really cranked out some amazing stuff.
Because of my podcast, I was very involved with the QT team back in the day. Those guys did some great stuff but were hamstrung by management who didn’t know what to do with them.
That group also did Apple’s handwriting recognition (Newton Print Recognizer, Mac OS X Inkwell), which to this day is still considered the gold standard and is still used in iOS and macOS. (Don’t mistake it for Newton’s original engine, which was licensed from a Russian firm.) Today, A.I. and Neural Networks are industry buzzwords, but Apple’s been working in the field for many, many years. The iOS Gesture Recognizer is based off the same engine.
The speech synthesis and voice recognition engine (PlainTalk) used in early Mac OS Voice commands, which is actually similar to Siri’s Shortcuts. Tying a voice command to a script or action. (Macs have been capable of this for 25 years now – very few people know about this because it’s an Accessibility feature.)
I made many educational (and personal) stacks back “in the day”. HyperCard was the greatest piece software Apple let languish and die.
Hyperlinks or Hypertext was an old concept, but HyperCard was one model he based the “web” on. In fact, if Apple had made HyperCard network friendly, it may have gone on to mass adoption.
What is ATG?
Look again at the excerpted paragraph above.
I probably couldn’t have come up with a useful HyperCard stack if you’d held a gun to my head, but I sure did enjoy exploring them. They almost seemed to me as though they were presenting a more genuine look at how a computer functioned internally.
Why not read the linked article?
Ah.. yes, not sure how I miss that..
I read it, but seems to completely miss it.