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 . . .