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Before the World Wide Web did anything, Apple’s HyperCard did everything

Sunday May 26, 2019. 04:50 AM , from Mac Daily News
“Sometime around 1988, my landlady and I cut a deal. She would purchase a Macintosh computer, I would buy an external hard drive, and we would leave the system in the living room to share. She used the device most, since I did my computing on an IBM 286 and just wanted to keep up with Apple developments,” Matthew Lasar writes for Ads Technica. “But after we set up the Mac, I sat down with it one evening and noticed a program on the applications menu. ‘HyperCard?’ I wondered. ‘What’s that?'”
“I opened the app and read the instructions. HyperCard allowed you to create ‘stacks’ of cards, which were visual pages on a Macintosh screen,” Lasar writes. “Intrigued, I began composing stacks… I eventually glanced at my wrist watch. It was 4:00 AM. Startled and quite tired, I turned in with visions of stack buttons dancing in my head.”
“Even before its cancellation, HyperCard’s inventor saw the end coming. In an angst-filled 2002 interview, Bill Atkinson confessed to his Big Mistake. If only he had figured out that stacks could be linked through cyberspace, and not just installed on a particular desktop, things would have been different,” Lasar writes. “‘I missed the mark with HyperCard,’ Atkinson lamented. ‘I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I’d grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser.'”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, HyperCard. You’re still missed.
Bill Atkinson discusses Apple HyperCard:

Related articles:
3 decades on, Apple’s HyperCard lives on at The Internet Archive – August 11, 2017
Former Apple CEO John Sculley: We blew it with HyperCard – October 3, 2003
https://macdailynews.com/2019/05/25/before-the-world-wide-web-did-anything-apples-hypercard-did-ever...
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