The Computer Chronicles
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2020–2025
26:52 · 53K views · Nov 15, 2012
A 1987 episode of The Computer Chronicles on Apple's HyperCard, showing users building their own applications. Gary Kildall appears and Bill Atkinson discusses the program, with credit given to earlier influences.
HN points to it as a period view of HyperCard and a source for its history and influences.
7 comments from Hacker News
I love the artistry and creativity around the HyperCard community. Years ago I stumbled on this (wonderfully dorky) episode of Computer Chronicles, that focuses on HyperCard: this video I love how the used-car salesman created his own application to help potential buyers find the right car. This was truly the “bicycle of the mind” era for computing; the user base was fairly self-selected, and people wanted to take full advantage of this new tool. [1]. The range of HyperCard was pretty amazing — famously, Myst was originally created with it: [LINK] 1: [LINK]
Well, there goes my weekend. Happy to see the Hypercard love is still out there. I think about it a lot. I love the idea of a coffee shop or a bicycle shop that's run on a Hypercard stack on an old Mac. In case you've never seen it: this video
An easy-to-use end-user programming and hypertext system for the 68K Mac, with MacPaint-like visual layout and an English-like (AppleScript-like) scripting language (HyperTalk). [1] Also a cult favorite on HN, as it was an end-user programming system that actually resulted in a million (or so) end users creating their own apps (perhaps foreshadowing the era of people creating their own web sites with html and javascript, or games using Flash and actionscript.) And famously used to create the game Myst. HyperCard came out of a leave of absence that Bill Atkinson took from Apple after Microsoft had forced Apple to kill MacBASIC. Unfortunately the deal he made with Apple to distribute it for free with every Mac was only for two years, and Apple replaced it with a playback-only "HyperCard Player" while the authoring capability was sold as a separate product by Claris - effectively killing in-the-box end-user programming on the Mac. [2] (AppleScript resembled HyperTalk, but didn't include an easy-to-use authoring environment, perhaps to avoid competing with HyperCard). Development stagnated as well; no native PowerPC version was created, and HyperCard never evolved to run over a network, much less the internet (even though HyperCard influenced NCSA Mosaic and Apple was certainly aware of early networked hypertext systems like Intermedia, which ran on the Mac). [1] this video [2] [LINK]
History is full of people who considered themselves geniuses. Some of them really were. Nelson got his ideas out there and other people used them in various ways, often without giving him credit. Bill Atkinson was one ( this video ) and he wasn't the first. at 1:35 in that video, Gary Kildall does give him credit, along with Doug Engelbart.
there's also a video of Bill on "The Computer Chronicles" talking about HyperCard, in 1987 or so. this video I reference this show in The Big Bucks . I went to all kinds of trouble to find out when, exactly the show aired in 1987, and finally gave up.