HyperCard Stack: Douglas Adams' Megapode Nest Volume Calculator (1991)

HyperCard was a wonderful creative tool at the time. (I’m pretty sure Bill Atkinson has stated on more than one occasion something along the lines of “If only I added hyperlinks!”)

Excellent book, sad funny and eyeopening.

Soon after HyperCard was introduced I was working a 'sweet' IT position at The Phone Company, IBM AS/400 stuff. It was burning me out though, I liked the machines but not the corporate culture. The thought that I was destined to have my boss's boss's job some day filled me with a sense of dread, not triumph.

Before that I'd been into PCs since the late 70s 8086|Z80|S-100|CP/M|MS-DOS and had worked for a time doing board/memory level repair of Macs. So I contacted a good friend of mine who was also comp sci professor and colleague and told him "I'm dying here! What's the next best thing? What are you working on?" He told me I was ape-shit crazy and should get over it. The job I had was one that he groomed his students for and most had to leave town to get them, here I had one and was asking him for advice??

But he was really excited about Apple IIs and Macs with HyperCard and the way it could revolutionize High School and University learning. He had the idea that some day with HyperCard apps and networks you could have the brightest HS students begin to choose a curriculum for themselves sail off at their own pace, seamlessly getting through High School and into University courses by, say, 10th grade even?

He used to say "Now we go to school because that's where the teachers are. But tomorrow we'll go there because that's where the computers are." Notice the lack of the idea that computers could become affordable. Give us a break! He thought school was a necessary environment but he envisioned teachers more as advisors than broadcasters dispensing the same curriculum to all students. He also wanted to design his own HyperCard concepts from scratch with better networking. He was convinced that Apple was working to port everything to other PCs. He clearly had something like a modern web browser in mind but we didn't know that then!

If I was foolish enough to leave my IT job I was welcome to join his team, he had some students and other consultants working for him. But in the end I did something else entirely, left the Phone Company rejoining the PC world where offices were being networked to share documents and I stayed with the command line, which led into commercial Internet providers and unix servers.

My poor friend called me a couple years later to say that his investment into HyperCard, the learning courses he'd developed, and time spent had mostly been wasted because of Apple's platform lock-in and Claris predatory licensing and pricing.

Does this mean that I can make a progressive web app with HyperCard? ; )