Earlier quoted context omitted.
Novelty is not the only value.
I know my friend, everything is valuable because everything is connected
[deleted]
The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a self taught programmer, mostly for web targets. Granted my attempt to learn HyperCard began earlier and I had less tenacity in my attempt, but I found it utterly impenetrable. I learned to build for the web with View Source. Granted it’s harder to do that these days, with many assets being built and minified. But the documentation is worlds better than it was then, and the APIs are a hell of a lot more accessib…
Mac software requires a different mind set than traditional programming. Programming the Mac completely changed my perspective on programming. I was never the same afterwards.
My experience programming for a Mac:
- I wrote a software half-QWERTY keyboard in ObjC because I literally couldn’t work through an injury otherwise. It crashed a lot, so I wrote a daemon to restart it when it crashed. I was probably experiencing the C parts I didn’t understand as much as the dynamic parts that were unfamiliar.
- AppleScript, which um… I was a seasoned developer by this point and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the language or its documentation. I just gave up.
Both definitely shaped my perspective on programming though!
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#33I posted this about Bill Atkinson and links to other sources in an earlier discussion (but he's since shot down PhotoCard):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302
DonHopkins on Dec 6, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep ...
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs.
The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:
https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...
Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Including polaroids of early Lisa development.
About PhotoCard:
http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html
PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.
With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#34HyperCard was great for making safe delightful virtual LSD for kids:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285844
DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Before Rand and Robyn Miller developed Myst, they created "The Manhole" and "Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel" in HyperCard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole
>The Manhole is a notable computer game because like Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx it has no goal and no end; as a software toy the object is simply to explore and have fun.
>Reception
>Describing The Manhole as "the first children's software to require a hard disk", Macworld in March 1989 stated that its "realistic sounds, the fantasy-filled graphics, and the stack construction are truly impressive". The magazine "highly recommended [the game] for young children[, and] it's hard to imagine a playful soul of any age who wouldn't enjoy exploring the mind-tickling world inside The Manhole".
>The Manhole won a Software Publishers Association Excellence in Software Award in 1989 for Best New Use of a Computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_Bey...
>Cosmic Osmo was created by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who went on to form the company Cyan and develop the best-selling adventure game Myst.
>It was created, and runs, using HyperCard. Animated portions were made using MacroMind VideoWorks, a linear animation program that later became Macromedia Director. A XCMD plug-in enabled VideoWorks animated sprites to be displayed with an alpha mask on top or behind HyperCard's graphic layer.
Cosmic Osmo (Apple Macintosh):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K30UmVsqTn8
I will never forget the fun of watching a friend's little kid delightedly playing around with Cosmic Osmo, excitedly explaining and demonstrating everything to all the bewildered adults!
Navigable games like Myst, Cosmic Osmo, and Manhole are so memorable, thanks to the Method of Loci:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
"What did you expect from a blind mouse playing a piano made of Swiss cheese?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K30UmVsqTn8&t=14m00s
(Then at 14:25: Yo dawg, Cosmic Osmo in Cosmic Osmo!)
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#35A huge difference between HC and the web browser: almost anyone would make a HC stack, creating on the web is largely unavailable for most folks. HC was about creating not browsing.
Speaking about HyperCard, creating web pages, and publishing live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web, I wrote this about LiveCard:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045
DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)! Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783227
>In fact, one of the earliest tools that enabled anyone, even children, to author and publish their own interactive dynamic web applications with graphics, text, and even forms and persistent databases, was actually based on HyperCard and the MacHTTP/WebStar web server on the Mac:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209
>One of the coolest early applications of server side scripting was integrating HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar, such that you could publish live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web! Since it was based on good old HyperCard, it was one of the first scriptable web authoring tools that normal people and even children could actually use!
MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher:
CGI and AppleScript:
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263
MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron...
http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt...
http://tidbits.com/article/6292
>It had an AppleScript / OSA API that let you write handlers for responding to web hits in other languages that supported AppleScript.
I used it to integrate ScriptX with the web:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop...
The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages!
That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web!
Using HyperCard as a CGI application
https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-protei...
https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.co...
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royals...
What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing:
>Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done.
- Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital
----
Also (a historical note about web browsers with editors, not about HyperCard):
NetScape Gold had a built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor window. But it was a unique selling point -- earlier and other versions of browsers didn't support that. Now browsers have official APIs to support WYSIWYG HTML editing via the "contenteditable" attribute, execCommand function, and Selection class, but you have to implement the menus and toolbars of the user interface yourself, and there are a lot of libraries for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Navigator_(v...
>Netscape also released a Gold version of Navigator 3.0 that incorporated WYSIWYG editing with drag and drop between web editor and email components.[49]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_GOLD_Editor_Windo...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att...
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#attr...
https://w3c.github.io/editing/docs/execCommand/#execcommand%...
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is HC? Basilisk II seems to be a mac emulator, but I’m not getting anything for HC.
You both are right. Basilisk II is a macOS emulator. I run macOS 8.1 on it. I still have my original HC disk somewhere and Danny Goodman's great book on HC script. I probably should have said that I run HC on macOS 8.1 in Basilisk II emulation.
What are you creating in hypercard these days?
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#37Thanks for this Xmas present, benbreen. I was reading Mondo2000 in the early 90s as a prepubescent while learning HyperCard. It ended up making me good friends at a particularly insane time of NYC history. I figured out how to produce music with HyperCard, using audio samples, with the 8-bit mono 22khz audio-in on the Macintosh IIsi. Using a program called Soundedit, I could build, chop and render multitrack audio fi…
A Mac IIsi was my own first computer, and I also spent quite a lot of quality time with HyperCard, ResEdit, and SoundEdit. You're going to kill me with nostalgia.
Mine too! With 17mb of ram, which was always a goofy off-by-one feeling.
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#38Thanks for this Xmas present, benbreen. I was reading Mondo2000 in the early 90s as a prepubescent while learning HyperCard. It ended up making me good friends at a particularly insane time of NYC history. I figured out how to produce music with HyperCard, using audio samples, with the 8-bit mono 22khz audio-in on the Macintosh IIsi. Using a program called Soundedit, I could build, chop and render multitrack audio fi…
A Mac IIsi was my own first computer, and I also spent quite a lot of quality time with HyperCard, ResEdit, and SoundEdit. You're going to kill me with nostalgia.
aw man... I also read Mondo as a kid, and MY first mac was a IIsi!!! ResEdit, Hypercard, SuperCard (it was in color! And could compile binaries!) ... plus pirated Infini-D, Stratus, Renderman, Playmation... and a 680xxx? FPU.
Sadly it seems HN love brought this site down. Web admin is probably really gonna enjoy what happened next time they check their traffic stats in a few months or years...
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Mac IIsi was my own first computer, and I also spent quite a lot of quality time with HyperCard, ResEdit, and SoundEdit. You're going to kill me with nostalgia.
Mine too! With 17mb of ram, which was always a goofy off-by-one feeling.
I was working with the 5mb, and it was not enough, Bill Gates’ famed comments notwithstanding
Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, this is amazing! Do you still have any of the music that resulted? Would love to hear!
Had to dig it up, threw some of the tracks up quietly on SoundCloud in 2010. Thanks for reminding me and your interest https://soundcloud.com/filthybysunday/sets/the-lost-flatbush...
Wow, it's great! Thanks for sharing :-)