Up until then it existed a tool for creating interactive content that was never meant to be simply printed or viewed but 'had' to be interacted with.
Early developers included artists and designers as well a people for who software development had previously been a subject shrouded in mystery and seemingly exclusive with overtly complex ideas and techniques acting as barriers for most people to get involved with.
Its true that the early BBC Micros, Sinclairs and Ataris had programmes free in magazines that you could type in and voila! get yourself a game - but, ultimately people simple typed these in rote and didn't really know what they were typing in - I know I did!!!
Hypercard came at a time (post modern) when we were re-evaluating our relationship to content and questioning the idea of a passive audience/spectator. A mini 'industry' grew up (with virtually no money changing hands!!) where thousands of people world wide were using it to create interactive content for education, art, design, information and entertainment. The key word here is interactive. were they laying the ground work for a future where interacting with content and media would become common place and second nature? Here was a technology that seemed to have no limit relative to our understanding of interactivity and content at the time. However, did it, in a determinist way, change our society/way of looking/thinking/acting/interacting? If so then why was it such a relative failure?
In 1992 Apple Computer Inc placed development of the software with Claris with a view to trying to find ways of monetising this software. IOW how on earth do we make money out of something we cannot seem to understand or easily categorise? Hypercard was not at this time dead - but the full software was no longer available and bundled free - you now had to buy it. Apple bundled a crippled Hypercard Player only instead.
This period coincided with the birth of the WWW, Mosaic and the rise of competing (non-free) software such as Director and Supercard. Incidentally the first 'major' web browser was violaWWW which ironically was based on Hypercard:
Viola was the invention of Pei-Yuan Wei, who at the time was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. His interest in graphically based software began with HyperCard which he first discovered in 1989. Gillies and Cailliau quote Pei-Yuan Wei on this discovery: "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac...and I didn't even have a Mac" (p.213). Only having access to X terminals, he (in 1990) created the first version of Viola for them: "I got a HyperCard manual and looked at it and just basically took the concepts and implemented them in X-windows[sic]"
As ViolaWWW developed, it began to look more like HyperCard:
It had a bookmark facility so that you could keep track of your favourite pages. It had buttons for going backwards and forwards and a history feature to keep track of the places you had been. As time went on, it acquired tables and graphics and by May 1993 it could even run programs."
What I guess I'm heading towards in my first assignment is the way this event (which led to the demise of Hypercard) also allowed a wide range of software for a variety of platforms to emerge - all dedicated to creating interactive content. Hypercard was firmly entrenched in the physical media world of CDs, laserdiscs etc but at the end Hypercard 3.0 (never released) was being developed for online content. Future developments such as Flash, PHP, Java, AJax - even the likes of frontpage and dreamweaver would take this on and move interactive content online.
Hypercard allowed non-programmers to develop complex projects. people who had never really thought about interface, feedback, user experience, interaction etc were now free do so without needing to spend an eon learning complex technologies. However, the majority of Hypercard era content creators appear to have been graduate level educated.
Today with social networks, online communities etc the creation of content by just about anyone is something we take for granted. However, it is not quite in the same spirit. Much of the content we currently create is primarily a form of 'self celebration' - the 'look at me' culture. The value of this content I'm not sure about. I'm also not sure about whether people really do create 'content' or whether we are just constantly changing our definitions. Aren't people who spray paint on the side of tube trains creating content? Aren't the million and one school desks with "Gary 4 Tracy 4 ever" etched onto them content creation?
What does this really say about what content is and also about how we define content creators/authors/film makers? Is the difference between Transformers the Movie and a Youtube video of 3 kids pretending to be Optimus Prime simply a bigger budget?
Equally, its so much harder now to create online interactive content as the tools have once again become shrouded in mystery. Hypertalk was aimed to mimic plain english constructs within the limitations of the technology of the time. Try putting together a project comprised of chunks of Actionscript, Flex, Air and C++!!! We can create online interactive content relatively easily if we just use online templates or cut and paste bits of code from various tutorial sites. Unless of course our future as creators is one in which we generate content within clearly defined parameters to fit into a prebuilt infrastructure - a la iphone SDKs
It just doesn't seem to be the technology that is driving this. I spoke to an American Hollywood animation producer once and asked him why all ANimation software was the same? ie why were we using computers to just do what traditional animators did anyway when the technology was capable of so much more? He said, "Beats me. Every now and then we get these computer software companies coming to us and asking us what we want. We tell them what we do and they make us software that does just that!"
I'm still not sure if the birth or the demise of Hypercard is the critical incident here. I'm trying to argue that this 'new wave' of 'designers/content creators' were now creating interactive content that was designed from the start to be computer mediated. This was new - were there interactive media authors prior to Hypercard? (I don't know). It also started to put into place a lot of the things we now take fro granted online - from the humble browser back and forward buttons, to the sitemap, to the creation of content with little traditional computer skills. However, the stacks created back then feel different to what is going on today online.
I can't seem to bring myself to go with the technological determinism theory. It just doesn't seem to fit - and also every single experience in my life seems to point otherwise. Maybe someone can correct/inform/scold(!) me on this.
In terms of truths, I'm kinda sketchy here. I'm (in principle) with Kayo on the whole idea of subjectivism and there perhaps being no universal truths anyway. But:
Technology advances and we as a society adapt to and evolve with it?
The internet is free?
Stuff you find on the 'net MUST be true?
The net is democratic and gives us back some power?
Interactive is always better? If people are 'doing' things they learn much better?
Kids today are so much better with technology because they grow up with it don't they?
Everyone has broadband?
Ordinary people are creating interactive content - mashups, blogs, videos, flash sites?
If people get involved they can promote real change?
Actionscript/AJAX/Php/Flex/C++ are easy?
Standardisation is good?
I'm running out of steam for the moment.
I'm a bit ashamed to say that I feel kinda like the class dummy at the moment. I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere fast and don't seem to have moved on from a couple of weeks ago. I'm still having a hard time learning how to deal with and find things in the BU library!! I would appreciate people's thoughts.
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