FatBits was life altering for me.
Bill Atkinson has died
241–250 of 295 posts
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.
IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.
Wasn't the pointer always a hand in HyperCard?
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.
IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.
JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was pretty sweet.
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#244In 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…
Looking at the HyperTalk syntax [0] it's interesting how we take left hand variable assignment as a given while math typically teaches the exact opposite since you can't really write the answer before you have the question.
Makes you think if lambda expressions would be more consistent with the rest if they were reversed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operatio...
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#245A sad for me.
I spent countless hours building HyperCard stacks and creating artwork in MacPaint, in college. A true legend.
RIP. Fat Bits forever.
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#246"How many man-years did it take to write QuickDraw?", the Byte magazine reporter asked Steve.
Steve turned to look at Bill. "Bill, how long did you spend writing Quickdraw?"
"Well, I worked on it on and off for four years", Bill replied.
Steve paused for a beat and then turned back to the Byte reporter. "Twenty-four man-years. We invested twenty-four man-years in QuickDraw."
Obviously, Steve figured that one Atkinson year equaled six man years, which may have been a modest estimate.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Mythical_Man_Year.txt
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic, which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry in the same way web frameworks do today.
HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic. I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic. Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod. Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could…
A blog post about Tripod/Ruby/VB history - https://retool.com/visual-basic
Cooper's solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987, when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of the bank's employees: highly technical systems administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper recalls the moment of inspiration:
In an instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design problem: it would be a shell construction set—a tool where each user would be able to construct exactly the shell that they needed for their unique mix of applications and training. Instead of me telling the users what the ideal shell was, they could design their own, personalized ideal shell.
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#248[deleted]
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But how was the region implemented? The source code describes it as "an unpacked array of sorted inversion points". If you can read 68k assembly, here's the implementation of PtInRgn: https://github.com/historicalsource/supermario/blob/9dd3c4be...
Yeah those are the horizontal spans I was referring to.
It’s a sorted list of X coordinates (left to right). If you group them in couples, they are begin/end intervals of pixels within region (visibles), but it’s actually more useful to manipulate them as a flat array, as I described.
I studied a bit the code and each scanline is prefixed by the Y coordinates, and uses an out of bounds terminator (32767).
Re: Bill Atkinson has died
#250In 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…
We kind of had that for a time with FileMaker and MS Access. People could build pretty amazing stuff with those apps, even without being a programmer.
I think the reason those apps never became mainstream is that they didn't have a good solution for sharing data. There were some ways you could use them to access database servers, but setting them up was so difficult that they were for all intents and purposes limited to local, single user programs.
HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL had a learning curve, but you could easily make multi-user programs with them. That's why the web won.