Hey! My first introduction to software engineering was via HyperCard in an advanced elementary school math class in the Texas public school system in the early 90s. I have made a nearly 30 year career out of the passion my teacher and a volunteer parent sparked in that class.
Proto-websites - technically called hypermedia, it was basically a locally stored website, and pioneers were trying things out like putting books and information and functionality in them. In this case, it's the Wintermute trilogy by William Gibson in Hypercard format, so this is also a retro computing discovery.
"The Expanded Books Project was a project by The Voyager Company during 1991, that investigated how a book could be presented on a computer screen in a way that would be both familiar and useful to regular book readers. The project focused on perfecting font choice, font size, line spacing, margin notes, book marks, and other publishing details to work in digital format."
Edit: not sure why I was downvoted, I’m literally attempting to provide whatever information you need about this, just not sure what aspect is confusing.
>The Digital Restaurant Guide (DRG) from Digital Lantern is an elaborately layered HyperCard stack that has nearly 3,000 restaurant reviews of San Francisco eateries. The maps are geo-coded – when you type in two street names, the stack goes right to the map of their intersection. Restaurants are denoted on the map as little dots. […]
>In 1993 Mark Richard Beaulieu created the Digital Cities Restaurant Guide, one of the first computer restaurant guides as written of in Wired Magazine. The software featured geocoded and deep content for the 3,200 San Francisco restaurants[8] and eventually all 14,000 restaurants in the SF Bay Area. The interface was designed by Nathan Shedroff. Designed for Powerbooks, the software was sold by Apple Computer and affiliate stores, the content updated every season. The product was widely reviewed in the Bay Area; even Gary Wolf wrote of it in SF Weekly. Terry Winograd asked him to present the salient concepts of his innovative interfaces, predictions for emerging consumer deep personal content at an HCI seminar at Stanford University. For a synopsis of the lecture click here. Some of the Digital Lantern concepts and user interface are seen on Yelp.com.
>In 1996 Mark transferred Digital Cities assets to Vivid Travel Network and worked as their director of product development helping to develop a 25 language web-based international travel guide. Branded as Digital Cities the name was sold to AOL. When VTN dissolved, Beaulieu created the United States Restaurant Guide.
>This guide to over 2000 restaurants in San Francisco and surroundings was developed especially for PowerBooks. Each restaurant is located by its geographic coordinates on the many maps. The product allows users to search for restaurants in a variety of different ways, including geographically, alphabetically, by food type, by rating, and from a list of “Bests.” Users are able to start and edit their own “Bests” lists and make changes to the data for their personal uses. The information includes ratings for overall performance, coffee quality, wine list, ambience, and service. Many menus are included, as well as prices, descriptions, hours, and parking information.
I mused about the idea of a version of Hypercard where you could load cards from network resources, or even just stacks. Ultimately though it would have been an even bigger security nightmare than the original Javascript. Hypercard was developed long before security was even a consideration on consumer hardware. The only thing it had was 5 different access levels, from a view only mode to full developer support.
It's as much of a fantasy as the one where Apple released a version of Hypercard for Windows 3.1 and blew Qbasic out of the water. It's a real shame Apple just chucked one of the most interesting beginner programming environments in the trash just as so many new people were getting interested in programming.
HyperLook was inspired by HyperCard and implemented for the NeWS window system in PostScript, and supported networking. I used it to implement SimCity for Unix.
SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))
HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!
We're finally getting there. The model of web notebooks look a lot like Hypercard stacks in terms of usability; there's only missing someone packing them in and easy-to-use distribution and sharing environment that does not depend on users installing their own web server.
And if that package includes some reasonable local LLM model, creating simple programs by end users could be even easier than it ever was with Hypercard.
And .ain which was even better but now seems to be half lost to time (no Wikipedia, just a few links repeating the same fragments of info like http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/AIN)
Hey! My first introduction to software engineering was via HyperCard in an advanced elementary school math class in the Texas public school system in the early 90s. I have made a nearly 30 year career out of the passion my teacher and a volunteer parent sparked in that class.
The Voyager Company is truly worthy of study if you are at all interested in a vision for hypermedia before the internet.
- Collected media https://the-next.eliterature.org/collections/2
- A catalog introducing this software to a print audience https://archive.org/details/voyager-360-catalog/mode/2upa
The Digital Antiquarian covered Voyager Company on his excellent blog:
https://www.filfre.net/2021/06/bob-stein-and-voyager/
https://www.filfre.net/2021/06/the-best-of-voyager-part-1/
Would anybody be so kind to enlighten me with some context?
Proto-websites - technically called hypermedia, it was basically a locally stored website, and pioneers were trying things out like putting books and information and functionality in them. In this case, it's the Wintermute trilogy by William Gibson in Hypercard format, so this is also a retro computing discovery.
"The Expanded Books Project was a project by The Voyager Company during 1991, that investigated how a book could be presented on a computer screen in a way that would be both familiar and useful to regular book readers. The project focused on perfecting font choice, font size, line spacing, margin notes, book marks, and other publishing details to work in digital format."
What exactly are you unclear on?
Edit: not sure why I was downvoted, I’m literally attempting to provide whatever information you need about this, just not sure what aspect is confusing.
Way back:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230307111053/https://macintosh...
7.5.x will run IC ROM after Gibson.dmg mounts to 68K MAC II emulation.
I'd love it if someone could dig up a copy of Digital Lantern's HyperCard based Digital Restaurant Guide (DRG) of San Francisco.
https://www.wired.com/1993/03/digital-guide-done-right/
>The Digital Restaurant Guide (DRG) from Digital Lantern is an elaborately layered HyperCard stack that has nearly 3,000 restaurant reviews of San Francisco eateries. The maps are geo-coded – when you type in two street names, the stack goes right to the map of their intersection. Restaurants are denoted on the map as little dots. […]
http://digitallantern.net/DRG.html
>Brief History of Digital Lantern
>In 1993 Mark Richard Beaulieu created the Digital Cities Restaurant Guide, one of the first computer restaurant guides as written of in Wired Magazine. The software featured geocoded and deep content for the 3,200 San Francisco restaurants[8] and eventually all 14,000 restaurants in the SF Bay Area. The interface was designed by Nathan Shedroff. Designed for Powerbooks, the software was sold by Apple Computer and affiliate stores, the content updated every season. The product was widely reviewed in the Bay Area; even Gary Wolf wrote of it in SF Weekly. Terry Winograd asked him to present the salient concepts of his innovative interfaces, predictions for emerging consumer deep personal content at an HCI seminar at Stanford University. For a synopsis of the lecture click here. Some of the Digital Lantern concepts and user interface are seen on Yelp.com.
>In 1996 Mark transferred Digital Cities assets to Vivid Travel Network and worked as their director of product development helping to develop a 25 language web-based international travel guide. Branded as Digital Cities the name was sold to AOL. When VTN dissolved, Beaulieu created the United States Restaurant Guide.
https://nathan.com/digital-restaurant-guide-application-desi...
>This guide to over 2000 restaurants in San Francisco and surroundings was developed especially for PowerBooks. Each restaurant is located by its geographic coordinates on the many maps. The product allows users to search for restaurants in a variety of different ways, including geographically, alphabetically, by food type, by rating, and from a list of “Bests.” Users are able to start and edit their own “Bests” lists and make changes to the data for their personal uses. The information includes ratings for overall performance, coffee quality, wine list, ambience, and service. Many menus are included, as well as prices, descriptions, hours, and parking information.
Another 1990s go at a commercially-released electronic book was Scott Meyer's Effective C++ CD-ROM https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/520985 https://www.aristeia.com/books.html from 1998.
Imagine if computing had continued down the path laid by systems like HyperCard
Hypercard is really kind of like the first implementation of HTML5. With applescript instead of javascript.
Not quite AppleScript, but its own similar language, HyperTalk. (Some later versions of HyperCard also supported AppleScript, but it was rarely used.)
I mused about the idea of a version of Hypercard where you could load cards from network resources, or even just stacks. Ultimately though it would have been an even bigger security nightmare than the original Javascript. Hypercard was developed long before security was even a consideration on consumer hardware. The only thing it had was 5 different access levels, from a view only mode to full developer support.
It's as much of a fantasy as the one where Apple released a version of Hypercard for Windows 3.1 and blew Qbasic out of the water. It's a real shame Apple just chucked one of the most interesting beginner programming environments in the trash just as so many new people were getting interested in programming.
HyperLook was inspired by HyperCard and implemented for the NeWS window system in PostScript, and supported networking. I used it to implement SimCity for Unix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))
HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...
Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...
We're finally getting there. The model of web notebooks look a lot like Hypercard stacks in terms of usability; there's only missing someone packing them in and easy-to-use distribution and sharing environment that does not depend on users installing their own web server.
And if that package includes some reasonable local LLM model, creating simple programs by end users could be even easier than it ever was with Hypercard.
PWAs could have been so good. redbean/llamafile might be the closest, though.
wow. .sea suffix, haven't thought about that in a long time.
Good old StuffIt. Or well, let's just say old StuffIt.
Once in a while I remember .arj
And .ain which was even better but now seems to be half lost to time (no Wikipedia, just a few links repeating the same fragments of info like http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/AIN)