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