191–200 of 295 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What other stripe would there be to refer to? I haven't seen anything like that here.
Check the site now. HN has a "flag at half-mast" feature for when tech visionaries are freed by the great GC of the cosmos.
In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not ju…
"In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web..." In yet another alternate timeline, someone thought to add something like URLs with something like GET, PUT, etc. to HyperCard, and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web browser never happened because Hypercard already did it all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so. Reminds me of the story where some company was making a new VGA card, and it was rumored a rival company had implemented a buffer of some sort in their card. When both cards came out the rival had either not actually implemented it or implemented a far simpler solution
An infamous Starcraft example also contains notes of a similar story where they were so humbled by a competitor's demo (and criticism that their own game was simply "Warcraft in space") that they went back and significantly overhauled their game. Former Ion Storm employees later revealed that Dominion’s E3 1996 demo was pre-rendered, with actors pretending to play, not live gameplay.
From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_: > One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of cou…
Bill Atkinson, all smiles as he receives applause from the audience for his work on Mac Paint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhISGtLhPx4
When I was on the ColorSync team at Apple we, the engineers, got an invite to his place-in-the-woods one day. I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever. He was at the time I met him…
Maybe I should show some initiative! See, for a little while now I've wanted to just chat with you about whatever.
At this moment I'm working on a little research project about the advent of color on the Macintosh, specifically the color picker. Would you be interested in a casual convo that touches on that? If so, I can create a BlueSky account and reach out to you over there. :)
Another death from pancreatic cancer. I really hope we can figure out why rates are skyrocketing because it is a silent killer and usually isn’t detected until it’s too late.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would someone mind explaining the technical aspect here? I feel with modern compute and OS paradigms I can’t appreciate this. But even now I know that feeling when you crack it and the thrill of getting the imposible to work. It’s on all of us to keep the history of this field alive and honor the people who made it all possible. So if anyone would nerd out on this, I’d love to be able to remember him that way. (I did…
There were far fewer abstraction layers than today. Today when your desktop application draws something, it gets drawn into a context (a "buffer") which holds the picture of the whole window. Then the window manager / compositor simply paints all the windows on the screen, one on top of the other, in the correct priority (I'm simplifying a lot, but just to get the idea). So when you are programing your application, y…
> Obviously it could have not been a mask of pixels
To be more specific about your explanation of too much memory: many early GUIs were 1 bit-per-pixel, so the bitmask would use the same amount of memory as the window contents.
There was another advantage to the complexity of only drawing regions: the OS could tell the application when a region was exposed, so you only had to redraw a region if it was exposed and needed an update or it was just exposed. Unless you were doing something complex and could justify buffering the results, you were probably re-rendering it. (At least that is my recollections from making a Mandelbrot fractal program for a compact Mac, several decades back.)
That seed crystal of software shaped hundreds of thousands of students that to this day continue to rave about this program (although the last bits of HyperCard retired permanently about 12 years ago, nowadays it's primarily web based tech).
HyperCard's impact on teaching students to program starship simulators, and then telling compelling, interactive, immersive, multi-player dramatic stories in those ships is something enabled by Atkinson's dream in 1985.
May your consciousness journey between infinite pools of light, Bill.
Also, if you've read this far, go donate to Pancreatic Cancer research.[1]
[0]: https://spacecenter.alpineschools.org [1]: https://pancan.org