Now I can’t get that horrible song from my childhood out of my head!
Apple’s HyperCard was really the descendant of Xanadu, I think. It was taking off on the Mac in the mid-late 80s -sort of its secret weapon. It eventually became FileMaker, 4th Dimension, SuperCard and AppleScript. In addition to hyperlinking discrete pages of information (albeit contained in the same db), these apps could do almost everything JavaScript could on those pages, way way back in the 1980s —If only we had kept going with SuperCard in the RPC domain, finished the Windows port and have afforded to give it away for free (maybe paid by Apple to bundle it with every Mac). Part of SuperCard (Shockwave) devolved into Flash. But the core wound up in a SPAC with jacked management and is still going sideways. Over at Apple, with the official HyperCard source code and authority to make/break “players”, well that was all on Apple Employee No. 8 (who’s still fucking there!) Problem being, it’s the only job he’s ever known and he didn’t exactly play well with others, so Apple got down to almost going out of business and the world got NetScape, Internet Explorer and eventually JavaScript. SuperCard though, that was yet another boardroom blow it, both before Adobe and after.
Apple’s HyperCard was really the descendant of Xanadu, I think. It was taking off on the Mac in the mid-late 80s -sort of its secret weapon. It eventually became FileMaker, 4th Dimension, SuperCard and AppleScript. In addition to hyperlinking discrete pages of information (albeit contained in the same db), these apps could do almost everything JavaScript could on those pages, way way back in the 1980s —If only we had kept going with SuperCard in the RPC domain, finished the Windows port and have afforded to give it away for free (maybe paid by Apple to bundle it with every Mac). Part of SuperCard (Shockwave) devolved into Flash. But the core wound up in a SPAC with jacked management and is still going sideways. Over at Apple, with the official HyperCard source code and authority to make/break “players”, well that was all on Apple Employee No. 8 (who’s still fucking there!) Problem being, it’s the only job he’s ever known and he didn’t exactly play well with others, so Apple got down to almost going out of business and the world got NetScape, Internet Explorer and eventually JavaScript. SuperCard though, that was yet another boardroom blow it, both before Adobe and after.