Offtopic (#15) - About what we're doing… (#29) - Message List

I got a job working at The Voyager Company writing software in Hypercard, this software toolkit from Apple in 1988. Hypercard was revolutionary. The model was a stack of cards, like index cards. New Card, bamn, had a new card. You could paint on it or put text on it.

A card had a background layer, and anything you put on the background was seen on all cards that shared that background. A stack of cards was made up of backgrounds of cards. Backgrounds could be interspersed.

You could easily drop a button on the page and write a simple script, such as "go next card" or "go to card 1 of background "index""

Hypercard was revolutionary because it allowed non-programmers like my boss the ability to prototype and write software. There was no concept of OOP, so it was more like BASIC in terms of spaghetti mess. However, that didn't matter! Bright, creative non-programmers were *creating content never seen before.*

That was *exciting*

I was brought on to write some C extensions for HyperTalk (the language of HyperCard) to control video disc players. With my extension, a professor at a college could put a field on a background, put videodisc frame numbers in the field (like 30,000 or 12) and then write a simple script:

on openCard

video search, field "framenumber"

end openCard

and immediately they had a simple database that indexed one card per frame of a video disc. On a disc they could store 30 minutes of video, or 54,000 individual frames. The National Gallery of Art had made such a video disc with photos of art work and many close up shots. This was fantastic back then because color computers didn't really exist, but with a video disc player and a mac, you could search for Renoir and find all of his paintings in high resolution video format.

This use of HyperCard wasn't on the whiteboard when the engineers at Apple wrote the software. But HyperCard was so flexible and simple in design that it could do many things Apple never dreamed of.

That is what I am hoping for out of Sophie; It is why I joined the original project and why I committed to Bob to work on 2.0.

After I left Voyager in 1992, I moved from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area. My first weekend there I went to this cool science museum, The Exploratorium, which has all of these awesome experiments you can run to learn about science.

It just so happened that during this weekend a "new age multimedia" show was being held in the Exploratorium. Well ok, I knew a little about new age multimedia having created many of the first titles, so I decided to check it out.

What followed was one of the best moments of my career. Upon entering the exhibit I found two rows of Macs, four in each row, all running software i had written, such a Beethoven's Ninth and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Kids were clicking around, listening to Robert Winter talk about beethoven, listening to the music and playing games.

That moment was when I knew that what I had done for the last 4 years had made an impact.

If we're lucky in life, you'll all have a moment like that too.