Big Trouble in Little China . . .

I've been having real trouble this weekend trying to get a handle on what I'm supposed to do. Firstly I tried starting again from scratch but since I still didn't really understand what I was doing in the first place that led to a day of wasted time. Then with the clock in mind I read some more and started to modify what I already had. I didn't really get too far but below I have posted what I have right now. I've added a couple of starting sections to try to articulate what I want to say (badly) and have tried to begin reworking what I had done earlier to start moving it from a history to eventually a critical analysis (although I'm not sure quite what that means - I know its a strange thing to say but bear with me). Its now 11pm and I'm exhausted and still nowhere. I'm starting to battle against feeling at odds with the MA - something I don't want to feel at all! I guess I just didn't expect an online course called Creative Media Practice to be just about reading and writing - I'd much rather make stuff and experiment and play with things.

anyway, for what its worth (BTW I know the headings are cr*p, they're just temporary):

The Greatest Story Never Sold (NB all references are currently missing awaiting formatting)

Introduction:
There is a persuasive argument and one that sounds so simple to a contemporary society that it almost represents common sense that can be (crudely) summed up as follows:

“We live in a rapidly changing Information Age where computer technology will change all our lives for the better and forever”.

While this is not a new idea by any means it is the argument most likely to be recognized within society at all levels and the one most regarded as being ‘True”.

We live in a technologically deterministic society – socially, economically and politically and while the theory has now undergone a considerable critical review and re-evaluation with a great many revised theories or indeed opposition theories now gaining greater credibility, it remains popular and persuasive – in or out of academic circles.

During the scientific eras of the 18th and 19th centuries the idea of technological determination while not articulated was underpinned by a general belief in the notion of a ‘linear forwardness’ that was articulated as progress. Coupled with an overarching positivism about Man’s place in the world and the Earth we were ‘handed’ to explore and gain full dominion over, it was our duty to extend the reach of Man, to gain mastery over the natural world, the feed our natural inclination towards adventure, invention, risk, acquisition and creativity.

The post second world war era with its atomic weaponry saw pessimism creep into the minds and souls of society as a distrust grew over the power of science to deliver a brave new world and the motivations of the scientific research itself.

The counter culture of the 1960s coincided with the early semiconductor based computer developments around the world and provided a heady mix for the kind of people who would ultimately be identified as key protagonists in the emergence of what would come to be variously trumpeted as the Information Age or the Computer Revolution amongst other headline grabbing titles.

Even today, we are informed that technology will liberate us – or perhaps that should be 'deliver' us? - from evil. All our sins can be absolved and forgiven by the technology that ‘we’ control and choose to make part of our lives.

Technological determinism in its strictest sense operates on a solely linear cause and effect approach where technology develops independently of the society in which it ultimately exists and this view implies the inevitability of technological invention and its subsequent effects on society. Technology is the cause, social change is the effect.

This should mean that all technologies should prosper or at the very least surely the best technologies, he greatest inventions should guarantee success and major positive change within society? Yet ‘history’ is littered with the ghosts of a million ‘inventions’ that failed or were forgotten along with the names attributed to them.

Surely the children of the counter culture, armed with a head full of technical knowledge and a heart full of revolutionary passion could bring forth a technology that once unleashed could bring about a technological utopia?

This text is about the story of one such technology. A technological artefact that if technological determinism was to hold true should have led to a radically different society from the one that allows you to read this today.

This is the story of HyperCard.

It should be stated from the outset that any narrative concerning HyperCard is fraught with difficulties and obstacles from the outset. There is for example a very real danger of relying too much on anecdotal or experiential information owing to the cult, myths, conspiracies and misinformation that has been circulated, written about, analysed and critiqued since 1987 about this product. In my own research I have had to tread a fine line between what I can verify and what I believe I ‘know’ – despite actually being there at that point in history right in the thick of it as it were there is always the danger of romanticisation of events, activities and ‘facts’.
I would also like to state that while my aim is to be persuasive with regards to the story of HyperCard and theories that I have employed in this analysis I recognize the inherent difficulties in ascribing the word ‘Truth’ to any aspect.
For this text, while I shall aim to consider technology in its broadest sense from time to time the word shall be used to consider computer or digital technology within the context of this narrative.

This text is about HyperCard, what it ‘perhaps’ was, what possibly led to its release, what it was used for, what its potential was, what happened to it and what it left behind.

I shall do this with recourse to a discussion centred around the idea of technological determinism and will seek to outline how technological determinism cannot be a valid representation for the creation, development and use of technology within (or without) society. I shall also endeavour to identify some of the key moments in HyperCard’s history, some of the key players and use relevant theories that might explain or frame those events in a meaningful way to shed light on the way technology and society ‘co-exist’.

Theory outlines:
This text will make considerable reference to the theories of Brian Winston and in particular the ideas put forward in his book “Media Technology and Society”. I shall endeavour to use Winston’s work to illuminate some aspects of the HyperCard story but where appropriate I shall put forward other more relevant or persuasive theories by a host of academics or by myself.

(This bit sounds so sh*t and I cannot figure out how to write this. I want to briefly explain each of the theories or ideas I want to play with before getting on to the story proper. I don’t know if I’m supposed to do this in advance or introduce each one as they crop up in the main text? So lets for now just list (most of) them).

For Winston specifically there is a renouncement of the Mcluhan-esque approach to technological determinism and his approach can be summarized as follows:

Winston’s model is structured in stages where scientific developments lead to eventual diffusion through prototypes, ideation, and "invention". He takes exception to the long held idea of the “Inventor’ and maintains that societal forces and in particular socio-economic forces impact upon technology and technological change far more than technology changes society – a point that my text will echo to a degree. One of the key ideas that I wish to explore is Winston’s ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential, which he uses to refer to a process whereby there are brakes for the impact of technological development. They prohibit the disruptions of social or corporate status quos.

I also wish to look at some of the pronouncements of McLuhan in terms of technological determinism and in particular the idea that it is not what you do with technology or media that impacts upon society but the fact of its use that initiates social change.

I wish to make a distinction between hard and soft determinism (and will explain them) and argue from a partly soft determinism angle in that my argument is that the way the story began vindicates some of the technological determinism theory but has to give way to the idea of society, politics and economics being key factors by the end.
I will also touch upon technological utopianism, Marxism, technological autonomy, neutrality, Reductionism, mechanistic models, reification (briefly), the technological imperative, technological evolution, economic determinism and hegemony – (and maybe some Gladwell?).

I will argue that HC was born out of a complex and diverse environment of concerns both technological and social with the protagonists that are credited for its invention unfettered in themselves with ideas about potential economic models. Indeed I will make the point that one of HyperCard’s legacies is an awareness of the power and value of economic models of supply, distribution and consumption and their interpretation and implementation that lead to eventual diffusion.
This text will seek to articulate how HyperCard's release was motivated and triggered by technologically deterministic thinking on the part of its creators and owners with a firm belief that the superiority of their technology would in a causal relationship result in the massive diffusion of their products throughout society. Underneath these motivations lay the ideals brewed in the counter culture of liberation, self-determination and freedom. HyperCard’s story is entwined with that of its owner ‘Apple’ and the perpetuation of the Myth of the Information Revolution. The machine was the utopian angel. Its autonomous development and inevitability would result in a new world free of the older inequalities and social ills.

I shall seek to articulate how its early adoption relied on a range of parallel developments both technological and societal and how the stalling of its further adoption led to a crisis in thinking and undermined technological determinism thinking - arguing instead that powerful social and economic forces acted to suppress its diffusion. Those early adopters that took HyperCard to their bosoms illustrated the way in which contrary to the views of its originators and a great many observers and commentators the use to which a technology is actually put cannot necessarily be easily predicted and thus may or may not be inevitable or indeed neutral.

HyperCard is born:
Set against the war between MS and Apple for control of the desktop (the prevailing paradigm in a society that was comfortable with the idea of centralised i.e. local data/information rather than distributed data/information) just prior to the launch of windows 3.1 when the Mac OS was the only viable GUI in town. The Mac had originally been reliant ironically on programs like VisiCalc (spreadsheets) but the growth of the DOS based PC market heralded oblivion (?). The arrival of Aldus PageMaker and the nascent DTP market ‘saved’ the platform (?) but more importantly enshrined it as an artist / designer’s extension. It found a home amongst creatives and educators alike who were more likely to use it in unorthodox ways. Thus it can be argued that the platform already attracted a small but loyal following that were not averse to thinking critically about their use of technology or about the everyday pronouncements from political and economic interests (not to mention a great many social commentators and academics) about the onrushing Computer Revolution. With such a large proportion of its user base within artistic or academic environments it was a fertile space for the adoption of technology that seemed to herald in this new digital future.
Postmodernism entered the public consciousness on the express train of mass consumerism and in the UK the shift in the public sphere is demonstrated by the gradual ineffectiveness of public debate in effecting political change (This lady really wasn’t for turning). The US also sat in a conservative fog under the Reagan administration.
The majority of people had no access personal computers (figures needed) but were increasingly becoming used to their integration ‘behind the scenes’ of transactions and interaction in a capitalist structure. Also, more and more it was becoming possible to come into first hand contact with them at school and work – although at school in the UK it primarily BBC micros which shared more in common with the original games console based machines such as the Ataris, Sinclairs et al. (Explain why here)

Computers were for work. They were expensive, serious tools for the processing of increasingly complex and vast information problems. (Says who? How? Why was This?)
The human genome project / Jurassic Park / Quantum Physics / CGI
Vs
Stock control / human resources / payroll / personal information / financial transactions
There is a real link here to the basis of Winston’s Model that scientific development is the trigger for his model of the life cycle of technological development and computer technology up to this point was considered by many to be a direct and inevitable result of scientific advances.

HyperCard was born in to this world in August 1987

Some stuff will go here about:
What people were doing and drawing parallels with Winston’s run up to ‘invention’.
Changes brought about by the new consumer society
The background to HyperCard’s development and in particular that while HyperCard was created and released with a technologically deterministic approach, its creators were a product of two social environments – the counter culture of the sixties and the Deterministic Age of the so called ‘Computer Revolution’. In essence its creation was a triggered by people who absorbed the radical views of the counter culture in the societies of the 1960s so its creation can be argued to be a result of those social ideals and the resulting needs it suggested and its release was a result of a decision made within social and (latent) economic pressures to a) not get left behind by the Computer Revolution juggernaut and b) sell more units.
Equally since the software (and also the Macintosh itself) was a product of those views it can be argued that the technology was loaded with those ideals and its form was a direct consequence. If you want to ‘stick it to the Man’ how co-incidental is it that the software you have just created undermines traditional technological, economic and political ideas about control, ownership and empowerment? At this stage it seems clear that the software was totally misunderstood by its owners and this led to an indifference that smacks of the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. A lack of vision that leads to indifference is a suppressor as much as any active obstruction to diffusion and although HyperCard needed its masters to find a suitable economic model they did no such thing. From a technologically deterministic stance they perceived its success and eventual diffusion as inevitable. (Need some citation here about what was going on at apple at the time). This was hardly surprising given that the economic model for the entire industry revolved around models translated from the manufacturing and industrial era where what was primary was the shifting of units of commodities – in this case computer hardware.

Early adopters (or what Gladwell describes as Mavens) included artists, designers and educators. The attraction of non-linear interaction and the ability to ‘write as we read’ offered the promise of redefining what it meant to be an author/designer/artist/educator/student/audience/user – this is a deterministic position and one that underpins not only a belief in the inevitability of technology but also to a degree its autonomy in the sense that HC and Hypertext technology in general would almost change relationships between creator, content and consumer without any human agency at all. Technologically deterministic language such as “offered the promise of” also underlines a deterministic stance. Furthermore, there is a question of whether this indicates that the technology itself is neutral. It also through its ease of use and the fact that HC was designed with the creator as well as the end user in mind meant that no specific prior knowledge was required to master it. HC was not built for programmers who were very much an established field and fiercely protective of their domain. HC was also not designed for geeks. A basic understanding of computer technology was all that was required. In essence the tool appeared to come out of nowhere (Kay’s Notecards, Engelbart, Bush, Nelson of course all lead to this and as Winston points out as in other areas the development can be seen as the result of a great many disparate developments shaped by social, cultural and political forces over a long period. Memex, Xanadu were prototypes while Notecards, given what was happening in Apple Labs was seemingly already redundant) which seemingly (and falsely) gives credence to a deterministic interpretation.

HC required a rethink about how information was organised and accessed – with the key issue here being ‘your’ information. All software prior to this had, in an illustration of remediation at work, taken the paradigm of the piece of paper – the document. You create a document, fill it and then print it. HC files were called stacks comprised of at least one card. These cards essentially were containers for ‘stuff’ – in fact Hypertalk’s variables themselves were called Containers. You added cards as required and placed ‘content’ onto them. The really intriguing aspect of the process was the mechanisms you created in order to access that content or to put it another way to navigate through this digital construct. Whenever you launched HC it took you to a home stack where a series of buttons existed that would allow you to jump off to other stacks. These buttons/links etc were fully customisable and predate the modern home page or web portal. They also predate the document styles start-up panels now almost de rigour for contemporary software. The home stack was your Grand Central Station.
This is important as it implies that HyperCard was not autonomous by nature but rather that the user became autonomous through interaction with it.

The use of HyperCard began at the ground floor with individuals first in the US and then quickly in the UK creating stacks to handle something they needed it to do. Winston might argue that early adopters were employing existing paradigms to use the software to handle tasks where a stack of cards made sense – in effect using the software for interactive texts of some kind with the software acting like an easy to use database – and I would agree that some early users were doing little more than word processing with linked passages of text. Apple Inc viewed the product from a deterministic stance believing that the increased functionality of the Mac with HyperCard preloaded would inevitably lead to greater sales of the hardware – HyperCard was just another ‘insanely great’ feature of the Mac hardware. However, it could be argued that the software was in need of a supervening necessity to allow it to gain traction in terms of adoption.
Initially, much of this was text based and incorporated some buttons to allow navigation. People created stacks to keep a database of their Music and VHS collections, stacks for playing text based role play games, stacks for holding their bibliographies and much more. The interactive nature of the HC product coupled with its Nelson based origins in Hypertext and Hypermedia led to academics and students alike creating interactive essays and dissertations where the references and quotes could be immediately expanded via clicking on key words (this predates the Mosaic web browser). In fact I made my first interactive essay in 1989.

This adoption by educators and their charges led to an increase in HC’s use as an education medium since users could produce anything from essays to PhD texts in full interactive form with little or no computer knowledge – the absence of IT at a time when then industry was pushing a new hegemonic idea to the population – that of “IT”. Stacks started to appear that helped you learn about anything from the periodic table through to the general theory of relativity. The newfound interactive teaching material ‘fit’ (in the Winston sense) into the cultural and social transition to ‘engaging learners’ and adopting interactive, ‘fun ‘ ways of delivering material in an education setting – ‘what we have to learn we learn by doing’. In addition to this stacks started to appear that assisted teachers and professionals themselves including HC timetabling stacks, grading stacks and attendance registers.

It needs to be re-iterated that the driving force behind its use was a rag tag band of early adopters who found themselves in tune with a technology that even they did not understand. At the moment this sounds terribly technologically deterministic. However I am arguing that any technology that is not created for a specific use or ‘market’ can if left unmolested be deterministic in the sense that it finds an evolutionary symbiosis with the society in which it exists. Mackenzie and Wajcman [3] believe that technology is only neutral if it's never been used before, or if no one knows what it is going to be used for (Green, 2001). In this sense HyperCard was neutral from the perspective and experience of the end user (at the early adopter stage) and would only lose that neutrality through potential eventual acceptance and standardisation of use.
HC facilitated the creation of interactive content by people who were not traditionally ‘computer people’ because it presented an associative way of storing, linking and ‘playing’ and provided a framework for building products/artworks/technologies. As a result the uses to which it was put were staggeringly broad and seemingly often unconnected. However HC was pitted against its own nature – the very same flexibility that made it so powerful also ensured that a great many people didn’t use it at all through a complete confusion about what it was supposed to be for.
While the concept of ‘computer literacy’ was now be coming a standard subject at school level it was delivered from a completely deterministic standing with the public encouraged to view the computer as the latest in a long line of technological marvels that would usher in a new era of prosperity and human superiority over natural power. In effect the computer was autonomous and all future digital technology would remove us from the tedium of daily life. Worse still was the growing trend for corporate interests, newly freed by legislation to broaden their scope within media industries and technologies to portray themselves not just as purveyors of technology but also as experts of this future. This future was too complex for the public to deal with and it needed a new class of individual and organisation to deal with the technological future approaching. It needed a new “IT” superclass. In short, the pubic were supposed to become used to the idea of technology doing things for us – through the new IT superclass. We were not supposed to consider what we ourselves might choose to do with it. HyperCard represented a clear and present threat to the status quo and the laws of suppression of radical potential was in evidence through the propagation of a myth about the need for gatekeepers of the new digital age. Later on this would encompass ideas that would strike at the heart of public fears about safety online, identity, pornography etc.
Apple Computer Inc. was developing a range of ‘new’ technologies that would further advance their platform and here lies one of the key separations of the time. The Mac OS was developed as a way of doing things in an interactive, intuitive and visual way. The ideology of the organisation and its key protagonists was geared towards creating ‘the next insanely great thing’. MS by comparison when furtively working on Windows 3.1 saw this as a mainly cosmetic exercise. This can be evidence over the next few years by the fact that Mac technology such as QuickTime, TruType, QuickDraw, and Extensions etc were all integral parts of the OS. Windows by comparison laid a GUI over DOS and each new technology effectively functioned as an application. QT on the Mac was a fundamental core technology of the OS, DirectX for windows was not.

It should be stated very clearly here that the prevailing belief in the computer industry (even after the beginning of MS’s destruction of IBM via DOS) was that the hardware was everything. Software simply ran on the hardware – but it was the hardware that needed to be sold in large quantities.

This system wide technology approach allowed HyperCard to simply hook into anything the Mac could handle. Suddenly HC could incorporate QT as in Video, Audio and Animation. It could use Plaintalk that allowed speech integration. It could use QT to access and control MIDI data. It could also using the nature of Mac files and applications now also talk directly to other applications. The hardware of the Mac relied on these integrated technologies so in turn HC could use the hardware directly. HC could access printers, scanners, the serial ports and DSPs.

Now all of a sudden HC could be used for far more ‘Multimedia’ orientated work. This led to the first batch of interactive titles (many originally on Laserdisc) including ‘The Complete Maus’, “Guernica”, “Mozart” and many more. The emphasis of these products was not on accessing information but on ‘exploring’ the subject (semantic web). You could start and end anywhere and two people could find themselves having two very different experiences. In other words the act of interacting created explicit meaning.

At this time the growth of the CD market while still not dominant was large enough to suggest it as a medium for the delivery of interactive content and the ‘media public sphere’ had presented this as an indestructible, robust and future-proof vehicle. The only thing we had to worry about apparently was miniaturisation – the CD would be around for years so we were informed, it would just obviously get smaller.

The VHS market was now mature and the eighties saw the rise of the visual pop star. No longer was it enough to hear the music, you had to see the music. The music video became a potent weapon in the music arms race to the coveted number one slot and many bands of the era owed their initial popularity to the portrayal of their look via glossy, challenging or quite simply ‘cool’ videos. I myself decided to get into a creative field rather than an IT field after seeing David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video on Top of the Pops!

Atari STs had long been used by the music industry in music production so the software to create music was not new. Equally, for the first time software such as Adobe Premiere allowed for the editing of video (albeit via very expensive additional hardware) via a computer (again ONLY a Mac initially).

The games industry had moved away from dedicated consoles (although the Atari 800 can still do some things that are impossible on my £3000 Quad Core Mac pro!!!) as computers and were developing instead ‘games consoles’ that were gaming machines. While the Mac enjoyed 8bit colour courtesy of the Mac II family with its fully integrated graphics engine, PCs had long been restricted to a limited graphics capability that gradually changed with the introduction of graphics cards based on VESA standards that allowed some level of compatibility and interoperability. These were becoming cheaper trough the use of far eastern manufacturing plants and games manufacturers could realistically consider the PC a potential gaming device. Games such as Doom, Wolfenstein et al hinted at a hitherto unused potential of the beige box sat in the corner of the living room/bedroom.

But here now in HC was a way of melding sound, vision and interaction.

The increasing digitisation of media types and the consequences for the once separate industries that centred around each one was again hyped up within the ‘media public sphere’ as evidence of a new grand meta theory – that of convergence. It smacked of an attempt at some kind of grand unifying theory of media. (?!!)

HC was never used to create the content but rather to author it. It spawned a class of software applications that would later come to be known as authoring packages.

Now Rock stars and bands such as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and the Residents were creating interactive CD ROMs that merged their music products, with associated visuals and the element of ‘play’ and ‘explore’. The Enhanced Audio CD standard appeared to pave the way for a new generation of ‘Media’ stars who simply created content in many media – all they needed was a tool to author it all together.

The above examples were ALL created in HyperCard.

It seemed that the massive consumer entertainment industry might provide a supervening necessity for HC. The need for the public to be entertained and to have access to entertainment not governed by schedules, linear access or (?) was being serviced to the tune of (a huge amount of money!!?). Could the computer be a plaything? A leisure activity? An entertainment mechanism? A means to sell via?

This also underlines another key separation.

Personal Computer (i.e. PC) = Computer with all the ‘history’ baggage that comes with the term. The architect of the wave taking us to a new digital future.

Mac = Toy

The pinnacle of this stage of HyperCard’s History came with the release of a groundbreaking game – Myst. Myst, a fantasy adventure involving puzzles in a seemingly immersive and highly detailed graphic environment went on to become at the time the fastest selling game of all time – no mean feat given that it was strictly Mac only!
Now ideas about spacial awareness and networks were becoming important given how complex some of the work produced with HC was becoming. Ideas such as having a home or moving ‘Back’ or ‘Forward’, changing the cursor when anything clickable was rolled over, audio and visual feedback cues and much more started to develop as a language and hesitantly conventions started to appear and become slowly adopted within this cult market.

What it demonstrated again was the sheer breadth of what was possible with HC. Ironically, the strength of Myst sales may have prompted the beginning of the end for HC.

HC was now starting to be noticed by individuals and organisations outside the Apple Mac design fraternity. Universities, schools and colleges were beginning to consider HC as a viable option for the creation of learning material. The first education shows in London that I visited were completely dominated by interactive products created in HC. NASA were expressing an interest in using HC as a means of creating an intuitive front end for its complex technology. Various companies were now investigating its use as a technology for creating interactive content. All this and HC was still essentially black and white!

Apple computer was still bundling HC free with All new Macs (indeed for a while you could download it free for an older Mac) but by this point there was a real desire to turn this niche product with its cult following into a commercially viable money making enterprise. Despite this, arguments still raged over exactly what it was. Users had been clamouring for the addition of colour for some time but from the point of view of the hardware this simply did not make sense to Apple. The majority of people who owned Macs owned one of their All in One models – almost all of which had a built in black and white screen with a fixed resolution of 512 x 356. The expensive modular (and colour) Mac made up a tiny minority of hardware sales. Apple, therefore promoted the in built extensibility of HC and encouraged its users to extend and in effect drive its evolution.

The early adopters of HC, in particular, those within academic environments had access to the Internet via primitive technologies such as Telnet. What then flourished was a small but passionate global network of HyperCard stacks for people to download and use – some were free and some monetised. Universities such as Dartmouth uploaded their stacks for anyone to freely download. HyperCard could be extended by the use of XCMDs and XFCNs that were written in a high level programming language such as C or Pascal. The early adopters who came from a technical background began creating large numbers of these add-ons that extended the capability and reach of the software. If there was something you wanted to do and HC couldn’t facilitate it then somewhere online it seemed that someone would have written an XCMD for it.
One of these XCMD suites was AddColor an impressive HC extension that finally allowed for the integration of colour into HyperCard.

This last technology (i.e. XCMDs) became the catalyst for HC now being used in a physical sense. HC was being used to control machinery, equipment, audio visual technology, ground satellite dishes, domestic heating and lighting systems, TVs and Hi-Fis (in a move that predates the domestic media player/centre).

HC was also network aware in the sense that it could utilise the AppleTalk protocol embedded into all Macs. While the majority of local area networks were employing the IBM token ring it hardly seemed to matter that HC spoke AppleTalk given that it was an Apple only environment anyway. I personally created a stack that allowed several users on a network to paint and draw on a stack at the same time on the same network. HC could via XCMDs talk TCP but more of this later.

HC’s broad interfacing meant that it also encouraged some early adopters to play with the very nature of interfacing with the computer and or the content on a fundamental level. Thus touch screens, electronic sensors and many such devices were created albeit more from a curiosity value rather than a desire to create a marketable product. In the early 90s I created HyperCard stacks that were controlled by a variety of mechanisms including moving bodies, the human voice and alpha, beta a theta waves directly from the brain. I was not alone in this endeavour. Far from it, a growing number of enthusiasts and artists began experimenting with HC as a means of creating interactive art or public space pieces. In 1993 I set up a laser matrix (like the stereotypical laser lines guarding the proverbial priceless jewel!!) in a darkened room connected to an interface card and driven by HC. A rectangular block was then used to move through the air and cut the beam which then triggered some content. In other words you could control something on the screen by waving a piece of plastic around.

Despite all this, despite the apparent existence of supervening necessities – HC floundered and ultimately died.

HyperCard finds some friends:
With MS Windows still yet to get off the starting blocks the Mac platform with its GUI and relatively seamless integration of Media became the primary platform for the creation of interactive content and HC the key software to enable this. A killer market was still eluding the company and despite the growing popularity of the software Apple Inc remained almost unaware of or indifferent to the potential or the value of their creation.

Apple had already identified the education market in the US as a potential market for their hardware (with virtually no thought given to the software) and was attempting to market a technology to a then conservative audience. It should be noted here that it appears that Apple, in common with a great many technology innovators/creators did not at the time concern themselves with what people did with the technology once they had acquired it. This is an attitude that pervaded almost all areas of society with many governments seemingly unconcerned about what this pervasive technology was or could be being used for. “War Games” and Matthew Broderick aside, it was home Video technology that was bearing the brunt of political social and economic attempts at control and limitation under the banners of public taste, exploitation, piracy and child welfare.

This set of attitudes resulted in HC being bundled free with each new Mac as a way of selling hardware – the content in essence was irrelevant since, according to this view of technology, it was up to individuals to create and have the content they so wished. Borne of the counter culture and a radical interest in liberation, spiritualism and empowerment of the individual HC represented the pinnacle of the technology as individual empowerment mechanism.

Thus educators were offered the hardware on the basis of its superb handling of sound and graphics – two vital weapons in the quest to devise education strategies that were based upon the use of teaching / learning materials that engaged students and allowed for interaction giving learners a degree of autonomy and self determination within their studies. This move towards active and interactive learning while not new owes its “technologisation” to the Information Age myth propagated within the ‘media public sphere’. Computers would allegedly define the next great age of mankind and popular culture began to promote the wonders of learning through technology in a way that resonated with the public’s own perception of the ‘state of the art’. In the same way that today huge sums of money are being spent on items such as Smartboards in classrooms with little or no real analysis of their worth in a specific scenario so computers were starting to be pushed at educational establishments as more than just tools for learning about Computing and IT – they could be educators or ‘learning facilitators’ too. It wasn’t that there was a demonstrably evidential range of benefits inherent in the particular technology – it was simply that everyone was going to be doing it – after all; this was the future right now. The Medium is the Message.

The education market became HC’s largest single market although the vast majority of this material was created by individuals and used or distributed freely with no direct monetisation or apparent economic model. A number of enterprising companies sprang up to service the need for educational material for those non computer literate educators unable to use even the intuitive HC. However, quality of product varied wildly as did the relative pricing models employed. Added to this was the fact that most commercial material was only available through mail order in specialist or niche publications with no opportunity to ‘try before you buy’.

Hence within Education and the entertainment industry it could be agued that supervening necessities were in evidence. It could also be argued that a third, namely the desire to have individual control of the technology and therefore to ‘ride the digital wave’ was also present. However, HC’s power was also a major contributor to the ongoing confusion about what it was and what it was supposed to do. The range of uses that it was put to are too numerous to go into in detail here but I will attempt to outline just a few in addition to those already mentioned above.

As a result of HC’s card based metaphor it became popular as a pseudo database style development tool with the added advantage of having a toolset capable of creating virtually any front end. Renault, the French car manufacturer was using HyperCard in 2002 for its inventory system.
In the same year HC was running part of the lighting system for the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – a superb comparison of scale given how many people were using it in the US to control the heating and lighting systems in their own more modest houses!
As I have mentioned above games were a mainstay of the HC community, not just glorious graphic wonders such as Myst but many far more graphically basic games such as text based role play games and it was here that HC enabled ordinary individuals with a great idea to put together a game that could then be distributed and enjoyed by others – whether freeware, shareware or commercial. In addition to this game players could create their own levels or worlds by creating new stacks and further distribute those – a clear predation of contemporary games such as WoW.
HC essentially gave application development power to ‘the masses’ and found another niche, this time amongst developers in the Mac fraternity who used the software as a rapid prototyping tool for software development. Software developers on the Mac platform were in small numbers starting to see HC and multimedia in general as a way in to the as yet untapped education markets.
Interactive educational or encyclopaedia type products were also another growth area with companies such as Voyager, Grolier and later Dorling Kindersley quick to recognise and take advantage of an emerging market – a market that was later to be owned by MS by default. Publishers saw CDROM as a way of repackaging existing content that they already owned. Print publishers however lacked the skills required to produce interactive content and the early 1990s saw collaborations between publishing houses and software developments companies to produce interactive content.
In tandem with the growth in stack creation and distribution there was a symbiotic growth in the development of XCMDs and XFCNs that extended the reach of the software still further.
However, this versatility continued to defy Apple’s attempts at marketing and hence monetizing the software and its potential. Was it a visual environment for developers? If so then how come non-professionals could also create useful programs with it? Was it a database engine? A prototyping tool? An introduction to object-oriented programming?
Apple, like the rest of the counter culture inspired computer start-ups of the 70’s were inherently technologically deterministic in their approach. The technologies built in their labs (sometimes with a clear purpose but more often than not in the early days the direction of which was driven by the desires and whims of individuals) were created within this Information Age aura where each technology was seen to logically naturally lead onto the next best thing. What was being created here was the future while the dying embers of grand Meta narratives cooled in the distance.

HyperCard Leaves home:
In 1984 and 85 a small Chicago based Mac software developer was selling SoundWorks and VideoWorks, two simple audiovisual creation packages for the Macintosh. In 1987 Videoworks was renamed Director and now took the form of an essentially linear presentation and animation tool. HC was by now the foremost (albeit within a relatively small market) tool in a nascent interactive multimedia authoring market and 1988 saw the addition of interactivity to Director via its Lingo scripting language. Director, while in many ways remaining far more limited than HC, operated in full colour and used a timeline based non-static metaphor for its production – something that was relatively easy for existing animators and video makers to grasp.
However, such was HC’s perceived dominance that Lingo was at first 100% compatible with HyperTalk and Macromind (then Macromedia) went to great lengths to ensure that even HC externals (XCMDs) could be seamlessly embedded into Director ‘Movies’ to allow full functionality. This idea of embedded plug-ins within an interactive host first started by HC then adopted by Director is now a mainstay of web browser technologies.
There were other products quick to follow – most notably new tools that were designed to offer some of HC’s power within the now rapidly growing MS Windows market. HC was always single platform and one of the key obstacles to its acceptance and prevalence was its limitation of being restricted to the Mac OS. While this was fine for content creators, artists and designers who represented the bulk of Mac users it severely restricted the potential market for and therefore income from any products made with it.
One of the first cross platform tools was Spinnaker Plus – a basic HC clone that functioned on both Mac and PC albeit with a restricted functionality. Plus was incorporated by Oracle into Oracle Card – a version of Plus (and by implication a derivative of HC) that was actually designed to look more business like and less ‘cute’ in order to appeal to ‘serious’ developers and the business community. Oracle were also keen to exploit their large scale database technologies for business by using Oracle Card as a relatively easy to use front end creation tool.
A more notable competitor came in 1989 in the form of the Mac only Supercar from Silicon Beach Software (in an ironic twist, SuperCard was bought by Aldus, often credited as one of the saviours of the Mac platform through PageMaker and Freehand who were ultimately acquired by Adobe who in turn bought the cross platform Director through the acquisition of Macromedia and ultimately through this acquired Director’s successor; Flash). Supercar was notable for its extension of the card metaphor and merging with it some more conventional programming and development ideas such as separating compilers and tools. SuperCard was also full colour from the ground up (or at least 8 bit). Like Director before it and in a nod to HC’s superiority great lengths were taken to ensure complete compatibility (without translators) with HC Stacks.

HC was falling victim to the ‘laws’ of suppression through the inability and inaction of its owner to capitalize on its promise and the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. The development industry as part of the new “IT” industry relied on its existence on the fact that technological control remained outside the grasp of the many. Hence although the vast majority of end users could happily purchase a computer package to teach their kids about pet care or to keep their CD collection in order, few of them knew how or had the means to create the software themselves. HC was potentially a game changer and a major threat to that orthodoxy. Apple itself apparently recognized the problem and responded by referring to HyperTalk coding officially as Scripting and not Programming in an attempt to deflect hostility – both outside and inside Apple.
The 1980s and 1990s had also seen a massive upheaval in ownership of media concerns be it in terms of content production, distribution or licensing with new laws on both sides of the Atlantic seeking to relax controls and restrictions of cross ownership. These new megalithic organizations were now increasingly powerful and thus politically and economically influential. Unlike Apple Inc. they were sensing an emerging content driven era (an idea in part self propagated through the ‘media public sphere’).
What was plain to the likes of MS was that hardware was increasingly a marginal business with standardized components ultimately killing off the specialist hardware economies of the past. The new markets were in content generation and ownership and MS (amongst others) set on a path of aggressive and expensive takeovers of publishing outfits, digital photo libraries and media banks.

In response, Apple spun out the development and responsibility for HC to its Software arm; Claris who at the time controlled MacWrite and Filemaker. The decision appears to have been taken almost entirely on a business level ad Claris had no experience of dealing with content generation and interactive multimedia and worse still had only limited success at pushing Apple’s other software tools. It has been argued by some that those on the board who heard the word ‘database’ during presentations by the HC team latched onto it and thus justified its inclusion in the Claris portfolio next to their ‘other’ database flagship; Filemaker.

Since figures pointed to the alarming (for Apple) fact that the bundling of HC free was having little or no effect on hardware sales of the Macintosh platform, Claris set about turning HC from a beloved ‘curio’ to income generating product. The strategy involved creating two separate forms of HC. One would be the normal full version of HC, hitherto bundled free but now priced at $99. The other was a limited HC Player that allowed for the playing of stacks but not their creation or editing. The player would continue to be bundled free with all new Macs. Thus Claris would at a stroke remove a defining set of Mac only capabilities right out of the box while at the same time making no effort to find a way to market HC in a way that would entice consumers and developers alike.

HC languished at Claris but saw an incremental release in HC 2.0 which boasted some improvements including extending HC’s ability to communicate with other applications, greater HyperTalk capability and the ability to work with a wider variety of network protocols.

By now HC’s card based metaphor with each card representative of a page or screen all based around a starting point or ‘home’ stack were becoming an underlying principle for interactive media. Its organizational structure and its linkage of media and content gave rise to various structural ideas for information based content products – from ordered hierarchical organization to more freeform and complex web structures.

1985 had seen the launch of Windows version 1 for the PC and 1988 saw the launch of the now pivotal lawsuit by Apple against MS for infringement. While the legal case was being fiercely contested at great cost (and often in public for the titillation of a public hungry for news about the computer industries first two celebrity organizations), MS subsequently launched Windows 3 in 1990 – astonishingly without any legal bar. While Windows 3 (and following it Windows 3.1) was little more than a graphic shell that sat atop DOS, the ‘media public sphere’ drove the notion of the Information Revolution and pitched this as a full interactive intuitive OS. Developers were encouraged by MS to see the PC as being a viable platform for Multimedia content delivery and interaction (if not, as yet, creation). The problem remained the hardware – PCs were notoriously problematic in terms of guaranteeing audiovisual hardware and peripheral compatibility.

On December 2nd 1991 Apple Computer would launch QuickTime and reveal glimpses of technologies that focused on a connected world. In 1993 Microsoft would win the lawsuit and in 1995 MS would release Windows 95.

Meanwhile in March 1989 Tim Berners Lee put forward a proposal paper for a technology based on earlier Hypertext concepts . . .

Contact:

By 1989 the concept of Hypermedia structures had been around for several decades with a great many groups and individuals researching and experimenting with each successive, incremental technological ‘improvement’ but the means to produce real world artefacts that appeared to make good on the promise of Hypertext had only been in the wild for 2 years. In that time as we have seen it had drifted onto the radar of technologists, artists, researchers, educationalists and scientists – those that had ready access to the technology and the technological means to share the fruits of that technology.
Tim Berners Lee had as far back as 1980 considered a Hypertext system designed to facilitate the sharing of scientific information across systems and even went as far as creating a prototype (ENQUIRE). It was not though until 1989 that Berners Lee, having put forward a proposal to build a “"Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers", using a client-server architecture” and set about trying to gain support for his ideas. When this support was not forthcoming he took it upon himself to create the necessary pieces to realize the project.
On August 1st 1991 Berners Lee set up the worlds ‘first’ web server on a Next Machine (ironically at the time built by the new company formed by the recently ousted head of Apple, Steve Jobs who was at Apple when Atkinson was creating HyperCard), coupled with the first web browser WorldWideWeb. One of the most interesting aspects of this browser was the fact that it was a web editor as well and this is a topic that I shall return to later.
Lee had not been alone in considering the potential of Hypertext as he had like others been influenced by a body of research and invention that spanned back to Nelson, Englebart and Vannevar Bush. The crucial difference here is that whereas the majority of efforts had focused on the use of Hypertext to provide a way of authoring or accessing by the individual (the exception is Nelson although the technology simply did not exist for Nelson to suggest an alternative), Berners Lee had considered Hypertext as separate from the individual and existing more as a nebulous (but structured) environment where information existed in nodes linked together. Individuals contributed nodes to this web and Berners Lee saw the existing technology of the Internet as the conduit for the existence of the environment. Thus his insight was the fusion of Hypertext and the Internet. Berners Lee was not alone through this in that he was working with a fellow scientist Robert Cailliau whose key contributions included the development of the HTTP protocol – Cailliau has suggested that his implementation of the HTTP protocol had in part been influenced by HC and the notion of unidirectional links that underpinned their WorldWideWeb had first been glimpsed through HC’s linking of cards and the information on them. Through this insight the technologies now taken for granted (the URL, HTTP and HTML –although the latter is in effect an incremental change and development from existing SGML technology) were created to facilitate his prototype. It was not however an overnight success and still required further technological innovation to (scientific competence) allow it to fulfil existing social and economic needs. These needs included a greater business drive towards global communication and control of companies spread via merger across continents. It included the active teaching movement geared towards developing engaging and interactive forms of teaching and for whom the information Revolution represented the natural and inevitable progression for teaching and learning. It also included economic imperatives for reaching out to global markets for the exchange of new goods and services while bringing the mechanism of contact and therefore ‘exchange potential’ to a greater consumer mass. Berners Lee’s prototype while meaningful and useable by the scientific community for which it was originally proposed (although not by any means by everyone in the scientific community) did not represent a technology that could ‘fit’ within the existing social environment. It was not easy to use, non intuitive and required a specific mode of employment and interaction for it to be of use.
HC had by this time garnered a good deal of enthusiasm and support as an idea if not as a product or technology in its own right. Just as there were fervent supporters of its liberating and creative power so there were those dismissive of it as merely a flat, non object orientated database on steroids. Many observers (curiously the majority of whom were not known to be heavy HC users or creators) pointed to its relatively high technological requirements and non conventional approach to programming. Worse still was a growing resentment almost of it as being indicative of a closed system – something that not only ran purely within the Apple eco-system but also existed in isolation were individual (Mac) users created stacks for their own purposes and not for social or economic advancement. In other words HC users were merely using it to enrich their own lives and empower themselves through the creation of custom technological artefacts that allowed them to define how they used their own (as in ‘purchase owned’) technology.
The ‘media public sphere’ was at this time a place where the technological revolution was a deterministic and inevitable path that would lead society to a richer, freer, more prosperous and better educated plateau. The Information Revolution as perpetuated by economic, political and scientific interests was about society becoming technologised – it was not about the empowerment of the individual. Technology defined social change according to the interests influencing ‘public debate’ and individual responsibility ironically meant using the technology in a way that benefited society – not the individual.
HC (by now in version 2) was still plagued by a number of ‘weaknesses’ as defined by its detractors. Firstly was the fact that at its heart it was still essentially a black and white medium. Colour functionality had been added via the integration of third party XCMDs called AddColor. This was an early example of development being shared across parties with a major player opting to integrate the functionality developed by another rather than seeking to ring fence the product’s development in house. It could be argued that Apple, not realising quite what they had, considered HC not valuable enough to devote significant resources to innovating further – the indifference a clear indicator of a form of the ‘laws’ of suppression. A more charitable view might be that this development of HC predates the model subsequently employed in the development of contemporary software – the only difference being the now customary financial acquisition of the third party in order to assimilate its technology. This contemporary assimilation is also another indicator of the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential and it is quiet possible that had at the time Apple been an even smaller concern, or had anyone realised HC’s potential that Apple Inc itself might have been acquired, assimilated and a ‘defanged’ version of HC released by the new owners.
The second and most serious of the flaws in HC was its static, disk based, local model as opposed to having a connected architecture. Bill Atkinson, himself has remarked that if he had only realized the power of network-oriented stacks, instead of focusing on local stacks on a single machine, HyperCard could have become the first Web browser. In fact I believe that Atkinson, while correct was actually still not quite able to grasp the nature of his own creation in the same way that (phone / gramophone).
It must be said at this point that HC itself was not totally insular in the sense that it was not able to work across networks or even the internet. Indeed a great many stacks existed with built in XCMDs created by HC’s loyal hypermedia fan base that allowed for the use of HC across networks and also to access material on the Internet. I myself built a network game than ran over AppleTalk and IBM Token Ring LANs. I also created a HC stack that allowed a number of users to simultaneously work on a screen based art piece across a LAN before clicking on a button and using FTP protocols to upload the resulting ‘artwork’ to a remote server.
It is therefore overly simplistic to suggest as some observers have done that HC’s eventual demise can be attributed solely to the rise of Berners Lee's World Wide Web which as we shall see appeared to offer some of HC’s functionality without the lack of connection. Indeed it would be some considerable time before the World Wide Web acquired enough functionality to even rival HC’s broad (and extendable) feature set.
The final key flaw identified is perhaps the one that invites the greatest argument and passion – namely that HC was a wholly proprietary technology that required individuals to move into the Apple eco-system. Fundamentally, at the time of HC 2.0 Apple, in keeping with most other tech companies, saw everyone and everything else as a competitor and rival. Thus for HC to have been a success and achieve diffusion of its technology, society as a whole would have had to walk willingly into planet Apple.
The evidence suggests that Apple were at the time aware of this seemingly impossible scenario and, prompted by the prototype from Berners Lee, were finally beginning to understand the potential of HC. The ‘media public sphere’ was engulfed in a quest for moving images – video. Indeed the quest for the conquering of video was a central and recurring theme of the Information Revolution – everything from computer enhanced video to video phones. Apple was developing a technology to not only handle video but also redefine the way media and system related. This, they called QuickTime.


HyperCard Dies:
Apple clearly at this time had plans for connected technology as can be evidenced by their work on e-world (with a nod to Compuserve and AOL), Hot Sauce, and the John Scully driven Knowledge Navigator programme which would culminate with the ill fated Newton project. Although not the only emerging audio visual technology, QuickTime was unique among the competing technologies of its kind in a number of ways. Firstly it represented a environment or a wrapper as opposed to a single technology or file type. In short a .Mov file was just an audio visual file that was handled by the QuickTime architecture. Secondly, and in another example of Apple’s deterministic approach it was integrated into the Mac operating system as a core piece of technology as opposed to its competitors’ products that all took the form of separate software running atop the existing operating system. QuickTime, like HyperCard was bundled free with every new Mac.
Berners Lee’s defining decision regarding his fledgling WWW project was to allow the technology to be totally license free and OS free. Hence, while like HyperCard the technology was in itself without cost, the WWW was totally platform and hardware independent from the ground up. HyperCard’s proprietary technology was now rapidly becoming what Winston would describe as redundant in the face of Berners Lee’s “invention’.
In the context of the Mac platform QuickTime was a stunning success and buoyed with the response from its consumer base (and the expansion of the platform into the nascent desktop video market to add another media type to those already associated with the platform), Apple, it is alleged, finally began to see the potential of HyperCard in the context of the QuickTime architecture and development of the software was spun out to the QuickTime development team. It is at this point that the HyperCard story becomes difficult to grasp in terms of separating fact from fiction.
It is held by some that the purpose was to develop a new technology called QTI which would be the fusion of HyperCard and QuickTime to create a brand new Audio Visual interactive technology that would not only handle all digital media local to the machine but also afford online interaction. In essence HyperCard stacks would become interactive QuickTime Movies with QuickTime acting as a wrapper for the content. The enormity of this possibility cannot be underestimated. What in effect this would represent is a fully audio visual web browser that functioned as an intuitive web editor and creator at the same time. Such a technology would clearly have predated technologies such as online forms, Google docs, Google chrome, facebook et al.
At the same time the team were working on HyperCard 3 as an intermediate stage and showed off a prototype of the technology that allowed the functioning of stacks within a browser environment.
Neither technology was ever publicly released and Apple (in a move now familiar to its loyal consumer base) became silent over the future of HyperCard.

Some stuff here about the MS war including Avie Tevian being told to “Knife the Baby”, MS threatening Apple with the removal of Office, MS ramping up efforts to install IE as the de facto browser and the belief amongst some that Apple effectively sacrificed HyperCard (the only potential threat not only to IE’s ascendency but also to the MS and “IT” superclass hegemony) to keep QT and survive as a company.

Legacy:
what it left behind – to come

Conclusion:

To come!

One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest . . .

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

With MS Windows still yet to get off the starting blocks the Mac platform with its GUI and relatively seamless integration of Media became the primary platform for the creation of interactive content and HC the key software to enable this. A killer market was still eluding the company and despite the growing popularity of the software Apple Inc remained almost unaware of or indifferent to the potential or the value of their creation.

Apple had already identified the education market in the US as a potential market for their hardware (with virtually no thought given to the software) and was attempting to market a technology to a then conservative audience. It should be noted here that it appears that Apple, in common with a great many technology innovators/creators did not at the time concern themselves with what people did with the technology once they had acquired it. This is an attitude that pervaded almost all areas of society with many governments seemingly unconcerned about what this pervasive technology was or could be being used for. “War Games” and Matthew Broderick aside, it was home Video technology that was bearing the brunt of political social and economic attempts at control and limitation under the banners of public taste, exploitation, piracy and child welfare.

This set of attitudes resulted in HC being bundled free with each new Mac as a way of selling hardware – the content in essence was irrelevant since, according to this view of technology, it was up to individuals to create and have the content they so wished. Borne of the counter culture and a radical interest in liberation, spiritualism and empowerment of the individual HC represented the pinnacle of the technology as individual empowerment mechanism.

Thus educators were offered the hardware on the basis of its superb handling of sound and graphics – two vital weapons in the quest to devise education strategies that were based upon the use of teaching / learning materials that engaged students and allowed for interaction giving learners a degree of autonomy and self determination within their studies. This move towards active and interactive learning while not new owes its “technologisation” to the Information Age myth propagated within the ‘media public sphere’. Computers would allegedly define the next great age of mankind and popular culture began to promote the wonders of learning through technology in a way that resonated with the public’s own perception of the ‘state of the art’. In the same way that today huge sums of money are being spent on items such as Smartboards in classrooms with little or no real analysis of their worth in a specific scenario so computers were starting to be pushed at educational establishments as more than just tools for learning about Computing and IT – they could be educators or ‘learning facilitators’ too. It wasn’t that there was a demonstrably evidential range of benefits inherent in the particular technology – it was simply that everyone was going to be doing it – after all; this was the future right now. The Medium is the Message.

The education market became HC’s largest single market although the vast majority of this material was created by individuals and used or distributed freely with no direct monetisation or apparent economic model. A number of enterprising companies sprang up to service the need for educational material for those non computer literate educators unable to use even the intuitive HC. However, quality of product varied wildly as did the relative pricing models employed. Added to this was the fact that most commercial material was only available through mail order in specialist or niche publications with no opportunity to ‘try before you buy’.

Hence within Education and the entertainment industry it could be agued that supervening necessities were in evidence. It could also be argued that a third, namely the desire to have individual control of the technology and therefore to ‘ride the digital wave’ was also present. However, HC’s power was also a major contributor to the ongoing confusion about what it was and what it was supposed to do. The range of uses that it was put to are too numerous to go into in detail here but I will attempt to outline just a few in addition to those already mentioned above.

As a result of HC’s card based metaphor it became popular as a pseudo database style development tool with the added advantage of having a toolset capable of creating virtually any front end. Renault, the French car manufacturer was using HyperCard in 2002 for its inventory system.
In the same year HC was running part of the lighting system for the tallest buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – a superb comparison of scale given how many people were using it in the US to control the heating and lighting systems in their own more modest houses!
As I have mentioned above games were a mainstay of the HC community, not just glorious graphic wonders such as Myst but many far more graphically basic games such as text based role play games and it was here that HC enabled ordinary individuals with a great idea to put together a game that could then be distributed and enjoyed by others – whether freeware, shareware or commercial. In addition to this game players could create their own levels or worlds by creating new stacks and further distribute those – a clear predation of contemporary games such as WoW.
HC essentially gave application development power to ‘the masses’ and found another niche, this time amongst developers in the Mac fraternity who used the software as a rapid prototyping tool for software development. Software developers on the Mac platform were in small numbers starting to see HC and multimedia in general as a way in to the as yet untapped education markets.
Interactive educational or encyclopaedia type products were also another growth area with companies such as Voyager, Grolier and later Dorling Kindersley quick to recognise and take advantage of an emerging market – a market that was later to be owned by MS by default. Publishers saw CDROM as a way of repackaging existing content that they already owned. Print publishers however lacked the skills required to produce interactive content and the early 1990s saw collaborations between publishing houses and software developments companies to produce interactive content.
In tandem with the growth in stack creation and distribution there was a symbiotic growth in the development of XCMDs and XFCNs that extended the reach of the software still further.
However, this versatility continued to defy Apple’s attempts at marketing and hence monetizing the software and its potential. Was it a visual environment for developers? If so then how come non-professionals could also create useful programs with it? Was it a database engine? A prototyping tool? An introduction to object-oriented programming?
Apple, like the rest of the counter culture inspired computer start-ups of the 70’s were inherently technologically deterministic in their approach. The technologies built in their labs (sometimes with a clear purpose but more often than not in the early days the direction of which was driven by the desires and whims of individuals) were created within this Information Age aura where each technology was seen to logically naturally lead onto the next best thing. What was being created here was the future while the dying embers of grand Meta narratives cooled in the distance.

In 1984 and 85 a small Chicago based Mac software developer was selling SoundWorks and VideoWorks, two simple audiovisual creation packages for the Macintosh. In 1987 Videoworks was renamed Director and now took the form of an essentially linear presentation and animation tool. HC was by now the foremost (albeit within a relatively small market) tool in a nascent interactive multimedia authoring market and 1988 saw the addition of interactivity to Director via its Lingo scripting language. Director, while in many ways remaining far more limited than HC, operated in full colour and used a timeline based non-static metaphor for its production – something that was relatively easy for existing animators and video makers to grasp.
However, such was HC’s perceived dominance that Lingo was at first 100% compatible with HyperTalk and Macromind (then Macromedia) went to great lengths to ensure that even HC externals (XCMDs) could be seamlessly embedded into Director ‘Movies’ to allow full functionality. This idea of embedded plug-ins within an interactive host first started by HC then adopted by Director is now a mainstay of web browser technologies.
There were other products quick to follow – most notably new tools that were designed to offer some of HC’s power within the now rapidly growing MS Windows market. HC was always single platform and one of the key obstacles to its acceptance and prevalence was its limitation of being restricted to the Mac OS. While this was fine for content creators, artists and designers who represented the bulk of Mac users it severely restricted the potential market for and therefore income from any products made with it.
One of the first cross platform tools was Spinnaker Plus – a basic HC clone that functioned on both Mac and PC albeit with a restricted functionality. Plus was incorporated by Oracle into Oracle Card – a version of Plus (and by implication a derivative of HC) that was actually designed to look more business like and less ‘cute’ in order to appeal to ‘serious’ developers and the business community. Oracle were also keen to exploit their large scale database technologies for business by using Oracle Card as a relatively easy to use front end creation tool.
A more notable competitor came in 1989 in the form of the Mac only Supercar from Silicon Beach Software (in an ironic twist, SuperCard was bought by Aldus, often credited as one of the saviours of the Mac platform through PageMaker and Freehand who were ultimately acquired by Adobe who in turn bought the cross platform Director through the acquisition of Macromedia and ultimately through this acquired Director’s successor; Flash). Supercar was notable for its extension of the card metaphor and merging with it some more conventional programming and development ideas such as separating compilers and tools. SuperCard was also full colour from the ground up (or at least 8 bit). Like Director before it and in a nod to HC’s superiority great lengths were taken to ensure complete compatibility (without translators) with HC Stacks.

HC was falling victim to the ‘laws’ of suppression through the inability and inaction of its owner to capitalize on its promise and the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. The development industry as part of the new “IT” industry relied on its existence on the fact that technological control remained outside the grasp of the many. Hence although the vast majority of end users could happily purchase a computer package to teach their kids about pet care or to keep their CD collection in order, few of them knew how or had the means to create the software themselves. HC was potentially a game changer and a major threat to that orthodoxy. Apple itself apparently recognized the problem and responded by referring to HyperTalk coding officially as Scripting and not Programming in an attempt to deflect hostility – both outside and inside Apple.
The 1980s and 1990s had also seen a massive upheaval in ownership of media concerns be it in terms of content production, distribution or licensing with new laws on both sides of the Atlantic seeking to relax controls and restrictions of cross ownership. These new megalithic organizations were now increasingly powerful and thus politically and economically influential. Unlike Apple Inc. they were sensing an emerging content driven era (an idea in part self propagated through the ‘media public sphere’).
What was plain to the likes of MS was that hardware was increasingly a marginal business with standardized components ultimately killing off the specialist hardware economies of the past. The new markets were in content generation and ownership and MS (amongst others) set on a path of aggressive and expensive takeovers of publishing outfits, digital photo libraries and media banks.

In response, Apple spun out the development and responsibility for HC to its Software arm; Claris who at the time controlled MacWrite and Filemaker. The decision appears to have been taken almost entirely on a business level ad Claris had no experience of dealing with content generation and interactive multimedia and worse still had only limited success at pushing Apple’s other software tools. It has been argued by some that those on the board who heard the word ‘database’ during presentations by the HC team latched onto it and thus justified its inclusion in the Claris portfolio next to their ‘other’ database flagship; Filemaker.

Since figures pointed to the alarming (for Apple) fact that the bundling of HC free was having little or no effect on hardware sales of the Macintosh platform, Claris set about turning HC from a beloved ‘curio’ to income generating product. The strategy involved creating two separate forms of HC. One would be the normal full version of HC, hitherto bundled free but now priced at $99. The other was a limited HC Player that allowed for the playing of stacks but not their creation or editing. The player would continue to be bundled free with all new Macs. Thus Claris would at a stroke remove a defining set of Mac only capabilities right out of the box while at the same time making no effort to find a way to market HC in a way that would entice consumers and developers alike.

HC languished at Claris but saw an incremental release in HC 2.0 which boasted some improvements including extending HC’s ability to communicate with other applications, greater HyperTalk capability and the ability to work with a wider variety of network protocols.

By now HC’s card based metaphor with each card representative of a page or screen all based around a starting point or ‘home’ stack were becoming an underlying principle for interactive media. Its organizational structure and its linkage of media and content gave rise to various structural ideas for information based content products – from ordered hierarchical organization to more freeform and complex web structures.

1985 had seen the launch of Windows version 1 for the PC and 1988 saw the launch of the now pivotal lawsuit by Apple against MS for infringement. While the legal case was being fiercely contested at great cost (and often in public for the titillation of a public hungry for news about the computer industries first two celebrity organizations), MS subsequently launched Windows 3 in 1990 – astonishingly without any legal bar. While Windows 3 (and following it Windows 3.1) was little more than a graphic shell that sat atop DOS, the ‘media public sphere’ drove the notion of the Information Revolution and pitched this as a full interactive intuitive OS. Developers were encouraged by MS to see the PC as being a viable platform for Multimedia content delivery and interaction (if not, as yet, creation). The problem remained the hardware – PCs were notoriously problematic in terms of guaranteeing audiovisual hardware and peripheral compatibility.

On December 2nd 1991 Apple Computer would launch QuickTime and reveal glimpses of technologies that focused on a connected world. In 1993 Microsoft would win the lawsuit and in 1995 MS would release Windows 95.

Meanwhile in March 1989 Tim Berners Lee put forward a proposal paper for a technology based on earlier Hypertext concepts . . .

One sided . . .

I've been trying to read and think thru a haze of being annoyingly ill . . .

1 Million Years BC

Something here about competences?
The motivations of Atkinson, Apple, PARC, Kay etc?
The computer landscape – ie the domination of hardware over software
A generation brought up on Tomorrow’s world and with a modernistic outlook that embraced grand meta-narratives
The full force of the emerging global consumer society
The illusion of the (Habermas) public sphere where corporations and economic concerns invade the sphere and create a new media sphere that fuels the belief in the ‘Computer Revolution’.

All leading up to August 1987 – The launch of Hypercard

The Matrix

Set against the war between MS and Apple for control of the desktop (the prevailing paradigm in a society that was comfortable with the idea of centralised ie local data/information rather than distributed data/information) just prior to the launch of windows 3.1 when the Mac OS was the only GUI in town. The Mac had originally been reliant ironically on programs like Visicalc and WingZ (spreadsheets) but the growth of the DOS based PC market heralded oblivion (?). The arrival of Aldus Pagemaker and the nascent DTP market ‘saved’ the platform (?) but more importantly enshrined it as an artist / designer’s extension. It found a home amongst creatives and educators alike who were more likely to use it in unorthodox ways.
Postmodernism entered the public consciousness on the express train of mass consumerism and in the UK the shift in the public sphere is demonstrated by the gradual ineffectiveness of public debate in effecting political change (This lady really wasn’t for turning). The US also sat in a conservative fog under the Reagan administration.
The majority of people had no personal computers but were increasingly becoming used to their use ‘behind the scenes’ of transactions and interaction in a capitalist structure. Also, more and more it was becoming possible to come into first hand contact with them at school and work – although at school in the uk it primarily BBC micros which shared more in common with the original games console based machines such as the ataris, sinclairs et al.

Computers were for work. They were expensive, serious tools for the processing of increasingly complex and vast information problems.
The human genome project / Jurassic Park / Quantum Physics / CGI
Vs
Stock control / human resources / payroll / personal information / financial transactions

Hypercard was born in to this world.
At this stage it seems clear that the software was totally misunderstood by its owners and this led to an indifference that smacks of the ‘laws’ of suppression of radical potential. It was the only game in town but, what to do? What to do?

Early adopters (Mavens) included artists, designers and educators. The attraction of non linear interaction and the ability to ‘write as we read’ offered the promise of redefining what it meant to be an author/designer/artist/educator/student/audience/user. It also through its ease of use and the fact that HC was designed with the creator as well as the end user in mind meant that no specific prior knowledge was required to master it. HC was not built for programmers who were very much an established field and fiercely protective of their domain. HC was also not designed for geeks. A basic understanding of computer technology was all that was required. In essence the tool appeared to come out of nowhere (Kay’s Notecards, Engelbart, Bush, Nelson of course all lead to this and as Winston points out as in other areas the development can be seen as the result of a great many disparate developments shaped by social, cultural and political forces over a long period. Memex, Xanadu were prototypes while Notecards, given what was happening in Apple Labs was seemingly already redundant).

HC required a rethink about how information was organised and accessed – with the key issue here being ‘your’ information. All software prior to this had taken the paradigm of the piece of paper – the document. You create a document, fill it and then print it. HC files were called stacks comprised of at least one card. These cards essentially were containers for ‘stuff’ – in fact Hypertalk’s variables were called Containers. You added cards as required and placed ‘content’ onto them. The really intriguing aspect of the process was the mechanisms you created in order to access that content or to put it another way to navigate through this digital construct. Whenever you launched HC it took you to a home stack where a series of buttons existed that would allow you to jump off to other stacks. These buttons/links etc were fully customisable and predate the modern home page or web portal. The home stack was your Grand Central Station.

The use of Hypercard began at the ground floor with individuals first in the US and then quickly in the UK creating stacks to handle something they needed it to do.
Initially, much of this was text based and incorporated some buttons to allow navigation. People created stacks to keep a database of their Music and VHS collections, stacks for playing text based role play games, stacks for holding their bibliographies and much more. The interactive nature of the HC product coupled with its Nelson based origins in Hypertext and Hypermedia led to academics and students alike creating interactive essays and dissertations where the references and quotes could be immediately expanded via clicking on key words (this predates the Mosaic web browser). In fact I made my first interactive essay in 1989.

This adoption by educators and their charges led to HC’s use as an education medium. Stacks started to appear that helped you learn about anything from the periodic table through to the general theory of relativity. The newfound interactive teaching material ‘fit’ (in the Winston sense) into the cultural and social transition to ‘engaging learners’ and adopting interactive, ‘fun ‘ ways of delivering material in an education setting – ‘what we have to learn we learn by doing’. In addition to this stacks started to appear that assisted teachers and professionals themselves including HC timetabling stacks, grading stacks and attendance registers.

It needs to be re-iterated that the driving force behind its use was a rag tag band of early adopters who found themselves in tune with a technology that even they did not understand. At the moment this sounds terribly Technologically deterministic. However I am arguing that any technology that is not created for a specific use or ‘market’ can if left unmolested be deterministic in the sense that it finds an evolutionary symbiosis with the society in which it exists. HC ‘led to’ the creation of interactive content by people who were not traditionally ‘computer people’ because it simply presented an associative way of storing, linking and ‘playing’ and provided a framework for building products/artworks/technologies. As a result the uses to which it was put were staggeringly broad and seemingly often unconnected.

Apple Computer Inc. was developing a range of ‘new’ technologies that would further advance their platform and here lies one of the key separations of the time. The Mac OS was developed as a way of doing things in an interactive, intuitive and visual way. The ideology of the organisation and its key protagonists was geared towards creating ‘the next insanely great thing’. MS by comparison when furtively working on Windows 3.1 saw this as a mainly cosmetic exercise. This can be evidence over the next few years by the fact that Mac technology such as Quicktime, TruType, QuickDraw, Extensions etc were all integral parts of the OS. Windows by comparison laid a GUI over DOS and each new technology effectively functioned as an application. QT on the Mac was a fundametal core technology of the OS, DirectX for windows was not.

It should be stated very clearly here that the prevailing belief in the computer industry (even after the beginning of MS’s destruction of IBM via DOS) was that the hardware was everything. Software simply ran on the hardware – but it was the hardware that needed to be sold in large quantities.

This system wide technology approach allowed Hypercard to simply hook into anything the Mac could handle. Suddenly HC could incorporate QT as in Video, Audio and Animation. It could use Plaintalk that allowed speech integration. It could use QT to access and control MIDI data. It could also using the nature of Mac files and applications now also talk directly to other applications. The hardware of the Mac relied on these integrated technologies so in turn HC could use the hardware directly. HC could access printers, scanners, the serial ports and DSPs.

Now all of a sudden HC could be used for far more ‘Multimedia’ orientated work. This led to the first batch of interactive titles (many originally on Laserdisc) including ‘The Complete Maus’, “Guernica”, “Mozart” and many more. The emphasis of these products was not on accessing information but on ‘exploring’ the subject (semantic web). You could start and end anywhere and two people could find themselves having two very different experiences. In other words the act of interacting created explicit meaning.

At this time the growth of the CD market while still not dominant was large enough to suggest it as a medium for the delivery of interactive content and the ‘media public sphere’ had presented this as an indestructible, robust and future-proof vehicle. The only thing we had to worry about apparently was miniaturisation – the CD would be around for years so we were informed, it would just obviously get smaller.

The VHS market was now mature and the eighties saw the rise of the visual pop star. No longer was it enough to hear the music, you had to see the music. The music video became a potent weapon in the music arms race to the coveted number one slot and many bands of the era owed their initial popularity to the portrayal of their look via glossy, challenging or quite simply ‘cool’ videos. I myself decided to get into a creative field rather than an IT field after seeing David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ video on Top of the Pops!

Atari STs had long been used by the music industry in music production so the software to create music was not new. Equally, for the first time software such as Adobe Premiere allowed for the editing of video (albeit via very expensive additional hardware) via a computer (again ONLY a Mac initially).

The games industry had moved away from dedicated consoles (although the Atari 800 can still do some things that are impossible on my £3000 Quad Core Mac pro!!!) as computers and were developing instead ‘games consoles’ that were gaming machines. While the Mac enjoyed 8bit colour courtesy of the Mac II family with its fully integrated graphics engine, PCs had long been restricted to a limited graphics capability that gradually changed with the introduction of graphics cards based on VESA standards that allowed some level of compatibility and interoperability. These were becoming cheaper trough the use of far eastern manufacturing plants and games manufacturers could realistically consider the PC a potential gaming device. Games such as Doom, Wolfenstein et al hinted at a hitherto unused potential of the beige box sat in the corner of the living room/bedroom.

But here now in HC was a way of melding sound, vision and interaction.

The increasing digitisation of media types and the consequences for the once separate industries that centered around each one was again hyped up within the ‘media public sphere’ as evidence of a new grand meta theory – that of convergence. It smacked of an attempt at some kind of grand unifying theory of media. (?!!)

HC was never used to create the content but rather to author it. It spawned a class of software applications that would later come to be known as authoring packages.

Now Rock stars and bands such as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel and the Residents were creating interactive CD ROMs that merged their music products, with associated visuals and the element of ‘play’ and ‘explore’. The Enhanced Audio CD standard appeared to pave the way for a new generation of ‘Media’ stars who simply created content in many media – all they needed was a tool to author it all together.

The above examples were ALL created in Hypercard.

It seemed that the massive consumer entertainment industry might provide a supervening necessity for HC. The need for the public to be entertained and to have access to entertainment not governed by schedules, linear access or (?) was being serviced to the tune of (a huge amount of money!!?). Could the computer be a plaything? A leisure activity? An entertainment mechanism? A means to sell via?

This also underlines another key separation.

Personal Computer (ie PC) = Computer with all the ‘history’ baggage that comes with the term. The architect of the wave taking us to a new digital future.

Mac = Toy

The pinnacle of this stage of Hypercard’s History came with the release of a ground breaking game – Myst. Myst, a fantasy adventure involving puzzles in a seemingly immersive and highly detailed graphic environment went on to become at the time the fastest selling game of all time – no mean feat given that it was strictly Mac only!
Now ideas about spacial awareness and networks were becoming important given how complex some of the work produced with HC was becoming. Ideas such as having a home or moving ‘Back’ or ‘Forward’, changing the cursor when anything clickable was rolled over, audio and visual feedback cues and much more started to develop as a language and hesitantly conventions started to appear and become slowly adopted within this cult market.

What it demonstrated again was the sheer breadth of what was possible with HC. Ironically, the strength of Myst sales may have prompted the beginning of the end for HC.

HC was now starting to be noticed by individuals and organisations outside the Apple Mac design fraternity. Universities, schools and colleges were beginning to consider HC as a viable option for the creation of learning material. The first education shows in London that I visited were completely dominated by interactive products created in HC. Nasa were expressing an interest in using HC as a means of creating an intuitive front end for its complex technology. Various companies were now investigating its use as a technology for creating interactive content. All this and HC was still essentially black and white!

Apple computer was still bundling HC free with All new Macs (indeed for a while you could download it free for an older Mac) but by this point there was a real desire to turn this niche product with its cult following into a commercially viable money making enterprise. Despite this, arguments still raged over exactly what it was. Users had been clamouring for the addition of colour for some time but from the point of view of the hardware this simply did not make sense to Apple. The majority of people who owned Macs owned one of their All in One models – almost all of which had a built in black and white screen with a fixed resolution of 512 x 356. The expensive modular (and colour) Mac made up a tiny minority of hardware sales. Apple, therefore promoted the in built extensibility of HC and encouraged its users to extend and in effect drive its evolution.

The early adopters of HC, in particular, those within academic environments had access to the Internet via primitive technologies such as Telnet. What then flourished was a small but passionate global network of Hypercard stacks for people to download and use – some were free and some monetised. Universities such as Dartmouth uploaded their stacks for anyone to freely download. Hypercard could be extended by the use of XCMDs and XFCNs that were written in a high level programming language such as C or Pascal. The early adopters who came from a technical background began creating large numbers of these add-ons that extended the capability and reach of the software. If there was something you wanted to do and HC couldn’t facilitate it then somewhere online it seemed that someone would have written an XCMD for it.
One of these XCMD suites was AddColor an impressive HC extension that finally allowed for the integration of colour into Hypercard.

This last technology (ie XCMDs) became the catalyst for HC now being used in a physical sense. HC was being used to control machinery, equipment, audio visual technology, ground satellite dishes, domestic heating and lighting systems, Tvs and Hi-Fis (in a move that predates the domestic media player/centre).

HC was also network aware in the sense that it could utilise the Appletalk protocol embedded into all Macs. While the majority of local area networks were employing the IBM token ring it hardly seemed to matter that HC spoke Appletalk given that it was an Apple only environment anyway. I personally created a stack that allowed several users on a network to paint and draw on a stack at the same time on the same network. HC could via XCMDs talk TCP but more of this later.

HC’s broad interfacing meant that it also encouraged some early adopters to play with the very nature of interfacing with the computer and or the content on a fundamental level. Thus touch screens, electronic sensors and many such devices were created albeit more from a curiosity value rather than a desire to create a marketable product. In the early 90s I created Hypercard stacks that were controlled by a variety of mechanisms including moving bodies, the human voice and alpha, beta a theta waves directly from the brain. I was not alone in this endeavour. Far from it, a growing number of enthusiasts and artists began experimenting with HC as a means of creating interactive art or public space pieces. In 1993 I set up a laser matrix (like the stereotypical laser lines guarding the proverbial priceless jewel!!) in a darkened room connected to an interface card and driven by HC. A rectangular block was then used to move through the air and cut the beam which then triggered some content. In other words you could control something on the screen by waving a piece of plastic around.

Despite all this, despite the apparent existence of supervening neccesities – HC floundered and ultimately died.

The Day The Earth Stood Still