Came for Hypercard and was treated to a surprisingly cogent argument against existential nihilism in the first few paragraphs.
Nihilism posits that our lives are intrinsically meaningless, because on a cosmic scale there is no such thing as meaning; it's a human construction, local to us, just something we made up.
To my knowledge, few or none of the major philosophers ever really attacked the nihilist insight directly, they mostly accepted it and talked about different ways to cope.
Bill Atkinson (while tripping on acid) posits that if life and consciousness are recurrent phenomena throughout the universe, our lives are quite meaningful in the sense that we are part of the progressive ordering of the universe (the apex of it based on our current understanding, in fact). Stars are a more ordered form of matter than the plasma which came into existence at the big bang, they give rise to solar systems, planets give rise to biospheres, biospheres give rise to consciousness, and consciousness gives rise to further forms of order...
And if you believe in aliens :) it's all happening on a cosmic scale.
It is an unfathomably large anti-entropic drama playing out across all of existence. Bit players we may be, but we are most certainly players who spend our lives either adding or removing order from the cosmos.
If that's all true I find the nihilist insight far less believable. It would mean we are participating in the main thing the universe has been busying itself with since the start, which appears to be some kind of ordering and complexifying of itself...
Thanks 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 files to one file. I couldn’t hear them before rendering, so it was mostly a visual waveform editing process.
I would then get the rendered audio files into a master HyperCard stack’s resource fork using ResEdit, and sequence songs and albums through HyperTalk scripting. Albums would be a page of buttons that played individual songs, with graphics, and then a script to play songs in sequence that I could record to cassette tapes easily.
I would press the album’s “Make Tape Side 1” HyperTalk script button and record on the tape deck at the same time, then flip the tape and press “Side 2” when the tape hit the end, after hearing that old helpful mechanical button pop sound. Boom, production.
Good times, part of the foundation of my entire life. Making music that way made me some of the realest friends you can have. HyperCard ruled
The Hypercard > SuperCard > Macromedia Director > Flash > Air (side shout out to proce55ing) method of letting kids make art and learn code seems like it's become a dead branch on the evolutionary tree whose trunk is now web standards and (bewilderingly) javascript. It's gotten fragmented to the point where to do these kinds of things you need to get a ton of separate packages and knowledge of code. It's amazing that a 9 year old could do this back in 1989 or so.
What's really needed is a VM or just a compiler to web standards that gives this kind of open-ended creativity and focuses on the user experience for a broad spectrum from kids to creative professionals. And one that's open source, finally, and not locked to a hardware platform or a creative cloud subscription.
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...
SuperCard was awesome too (color came so late!) but I guess a little too little for the times. Once the web started really heating up, it was all about trying to get into places that had NIX or WinNT boxes. And by '96 I was old-enough looking to get snuck into the lab with a couple of SGIs at Parsons… ;)
I ended up at a “startup” in '97 called onlinetv.com and our boxes were originally in the data center next to the NYSE and it wasn’t ludicrously expensive yet. The founder, an extraordinary Boomer who got us thrown out of the Film Center on 17th for smoking pot, moved us into the basement of a bar in the East Village called the Spiral.
Where we streamed the bands playing upstairs in potato quality and sold Troma videocassettes, because the boss had been given the rights to them. Bell Atlantic put some kind of huge hub in the basement at our request that I can’t remember the details of anymore, but we got speed
Speaking of drug-inspired ideas (though it was just boring old weed), I recently had the idea that AI is the ultimate medium that will finally enable effective many-to-many communication that the Internet promised but hasn't quite delivered.
The best existing example is machine translation between languages with voice recognition and speech synthesis. While you could have a human translator, that doesn't scale. However, this is mostly just one-to-one communication.
In the last couple years, we've seen high-quality AI image generation that allows people without much artistic talent to express themselves visually. We should also see high-quality text-to-video, text-to-3D, and music before too long. ChatGPT allows poor writers to write error-free, with a defined tone (e.g. formally), clearly, and quickly. You could have the AI take your facial expressions or body language into account, or in the more distant future, directly read brain waves.
But the next revolution will be personalized AI assistants that understand each person, their interests, and how they express themselves better than they do themselves (some people already had this reaction to TikTok's algorithm). With these assistants, anybody can create a customized message that would be most effective.
The third part is the AI routing algorithm that enables each person to reach as many other interested parties as possible, which is currently at a very primitive stage (e.g. following somebody on Twitter or Facebook interest groups). Among other things there should urgency/reach/importance/mood preference.
If we put these together, any person should be able to express themselves and have their ideas reach the right people in the most effective format. It would be fun to create an experimental social network that works towards this goal, but as usual, there would be the chicken-and-egg problem of getting enough users.
We have bits of our lives that are AI influenced, but I think people will have a relationship with their personal AI and use and trust it for running their lives.
For those lamenting the passing of Hypercard, there's still SuperCard, LiveCode, and Decker.
SuperCard is Mac-only, fairly true to HyperCard, but with color and additional widgets built-in.
LiveCode is Mac, Windows, and Unix, and deploys for Android and iOS (and web I think, although I don't know how capable that is as I haven't tried it much). It starts from HyperCard, but has grown significantly from there, with many additional UI and language features.
Decker is mostly true to HyperCard from a UI standpoint -- it barely has color as far as I can see. But its language is not at all HyperTalk. And it runs entirely on the web, and nicely so.
If you want to play with a modern Hypercard, I recommend John Earnest's Decker[1]. It even has the Mac look. John created Lil, a scripting language from it that is declarative, functional, and vector oriented. He is also the creator of oK[2] an interpreter for a K-type programming language with a web interface and graphics and sound primitives. Amazing and fun stuff!
Once Decker launched, I ate it up, and especially Lil, which is super cool. But man, have you seen the source code style? It’s like minified JS, but it’s straight C. Pretty hard to visually parse.
I haven't looked at it, but I am familiar with it. I program in J and a famous story is how Arthur Whitney visited Ken Iverson and Kiln Farm and wrote an interpreter for J in terse C[1].
John Earnest is definitely a fan of array languages for sure, so I am not surprised.
A 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.
The WorldWideWeb (Tim Berner Lee’s first web browser) was both a browser and editor. Also, most browser precursors that preceded it did not differentiate between consumer and author.
The WorldWideWeb entry in Wikipedia tells us that the first browsers which did not feature editing were known as ‘passive browsers’. Passive indeed.
> The team created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems. Porting to the X Window System was not possible as nobody on the team had experience with the X Window System.
For me, Obsidian has been the first experience of building up my own read/write Web.
After 25 years of passive Web, it has been a very refreshing experience.
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.
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 accessible to humans and vastly more reliably available.
It’s why I recommend anyone wanting to get into web dev start with vanilla everything unless they have very specific interest in certain technologies otherwise. Web dev is eminently learnable!
Maybe I’d feel the same way going back to HyperCard later in life, but it felt like an utter black box to me at the time.
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.
- 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!
... often needlessly and even to the author's own detriment, given the need to configure (and then maintain the configuration of) the shoddy tooling that produces the blobs--and the inability to debug them directly, of course.
Minification is good for users in most ways, it’s fewer bytes on the wire and faster to parse. And I know bad tooling and config is the meme but I will say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how simple it’s been to adopt Vite both in new projects and now a >10 year old one.
Edit: I’m just waking up and missed the point about debugging, but source maps work very well. Perhaps more sites should ship them to production though!
Aside from that, it remains to be shown for most projects that the downsides are outweighed by the upsides (which are often theoretical or aspirational even, rather than actual).
“Directly” is immaterial if every part of the tool chain supports it transparently. Which granted isn’t a given, but it’s more of a given than being able to directly debug two deep into a vanilla JS Promise.then.
As far as what remains to be shown about upsides, smaller JS packages isn’t in question. I don’t even know what resources to link which show this because it’s so fundamental that I wouldn’t know which fundamental to begin with. You’re coming from the perspective of tooling complexity being a large downside (and I agree), but it takes approximately none to minify JS. And for an even meager payload on the wire, I know my users on spotty networks or low power devices aren’t just theoretically benefiting.
> “Directly” is immaterial if every part of the tool chain supports it transparently. Which granted isn’t a given
In other words, it's not immaterial (and even hinting that it might be by introducing the word in the first place is a red herring).
> it takes approximately none to minify JS
Simply untrue.
> And for an even meager payload on the wire, I know my users on spotty networks or low power devices aren’t just theoretically benefiting.
There are two issues here, both of which come down to the fact that the practice of minification doesn't exist in a vacuum:
1. HTTP payload compression is already a thing
2. There's a counterintuitive product of the industry that churns out minified JS bundles, which is that if you look at what people are actually doing, pretty much all these things end up being larger--this is approximately the same as the "low-fat/low-calorie snacks lead to overeating" phenomenon, but there's a fair bit of "lost knowledge/nobody knows how to do this stuff anymore" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko> involved, too
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!
>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:
>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:
>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.
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!
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.
>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]
I don’t recall any instruction on it, and I was definitely creating stacks at age 8 or 9. I recall it being quite straightforward. I made a slide show presentation about subliminal messages for my 7th grade science class (1992 I think)
I admit we had a Mac early on, so I was very familiar with interactions by that point, but I found HyperCard being shockingly intuitive.
some people get the "interconnectedness" experience without any chemical boosters. figure that.
wonderful story from back then when digital tech had not been subjected to the "this is too powerful to leave to the visionaries" treatment.
today we still need visionaries that can create "connect-the-dots" tools, but now having full awareness that those are society-altering journeys, with all the responsibility that this entails
I came across a rumor that the design of some hand-held technology and user interfaces may have been influenced by a small device that was reportedly discovered on a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. This coke-can-sized device was given to Steve Jobs to play with. It is said to have the ability to project a holographic interface directly through a person's neurology when touched.
It is worth noting that this alleged "smart can" is not to be confused with the rumored "Yellow Book," which is said to be a holographic "smart glass" pad containing a comprehensive history of the universe and requiring a lifetime of reading and understanding to fully comprehend via a neurointerface.
> "It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness."
I had much the similar feeling during my first LSD trip, but haven't met too many others who shared this same idea. Life is the means by which the Universe organizes and becomes aware of itself. It's our Darwninistic telos to get off of this rock and colonize the stars.
Yeah, If he'd said that on TV in 1987, would he have been regarded as still a Mac genius, or would he have been shunned?
I think it's a good question. It's not obvious to me that it would have been the end of his career, but I'd probably have done the same as he did back then.
In thinking further, Stewart Cheifet would have scrapped the episode, and he might have gotten invitations to go on other, more sensationalistic shows. Good call.
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." ...
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!
It's lovely how he shifted focus in the latter part of his career to high-resolution nature photography. Some of them are suitably "psychedelic" - though sadly it seems only the thumbnails were archived, so I couldn't view the full-size images.
>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.
>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.
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:
