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Comment by Zecc | Hacker News Reader

I honest to goodness thought this was going to be about the video container format. In retrospect this makes much more snse.

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It's not a crazy thought — QuickTime Movies were to be the native file format for HyperCard 3.0[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard#HyperCard_3.0

Interactivity was added to QuickTime movies. I think this feature was called “wired actions”. I have no idea how this relates to the HyperCard integration.

Apple didn't make an authoring tool for this feature, but another company did: “LiveStage” by Totally Hip.

> I have no idea how this relates to the HyperCard integration.

As I mentioned, QuickTime Movies were to be the file format for HyperCard 3.0 stacks, with QuickTime the HyperCard 3.0 runtime. The QuickTime team demonstrated it at WWDC in 1996.

> Apple didn't make an authoring tool for this feature, but another company did: “LiveStage” by Totally Hip.

The two most Flash-like tools for authoring QuickTime's interactivity capabilities were LiveStage and Electrifier Pro[1]. Additionally, several other tools (like Adobe GoLive and Terran Cleaner) supported simpler forms of interactivity. I was in Apple evangelism/developer relations then, so I was the person working with QuickTime developers on the Apple side.

[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/1014980/quicktime.html

Isn't PDF almost Turing-complete?

Postscript definitely is.

I thought the whole point of PDF was to excise the Turing-completeness from Postscript.

I believe at least doubly so (in addition to postscript you can embed JavaScript)

This is correct.

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