> Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media.
I want to do this badly. Has anyone taken LSD here on HN? What can you share about this, almost sounds like an urban myth, claim that one can have revolutionary ideas, profound realizations that otherwise cannot be had?
Or, better, read Be Here Now. I recommend it every chance I get: never have had a friend who's disliked it. It has a few anecdotes on Leary, and it's probably influenced Atkinson far more than Leary has (Jobs recommended it a bunch, and, in his own (paraphrased) words, there once was a time where every college student in America had read Be Here Now).
Have not myself. Many of my friends have. The revelations are often profound and positive but directly tangible results like "LSD --> Hypercard" seem to be quite the exception and I suspect Atkinson left out many steps for the sake of brevity.
Standard psychedelic advice is to try them with experienced friends if at all possible when getting started. Trips can also be bad and scary (and sometimes, that is a necessary step on the road to positive change)
I dream of someone taking psychedelic drugs and coming back with an invention completely beyond their capabilities and a memory of it being gifted. I don’t mean a talented scientist being inspired to make HyperCard. I want a cashier to be handed the plans for a more efficient rocket.
I know you're joking, but to be clear for others, it doesn't work that way. =)
Best case scenario w.r.t. real-world engineering challenges, drugs enable some lateral thinking and allow you to make connections you might not have otherwise. Very often this best case scenario is not going to be the case though ha ha ha.
HyperCard is just as mind expanding as LSD, and you can make it stop whenever you want, and come back to it in the exact same state when you're ready for more.
"Reactions that are prolonged (days to months) and/or require hospitalization
are often referred to as "LSD psychosis," and include a heterogenous
population and group of symptoms."
"In spite of the impressive degree of prior problems noted in many of these
patients, there are occasional reports of severe and prolonged reactions
occuring in basically well adjusted individuals."
Also, one famous example of "bad trips" (maybe with "prior problems"):
it can be mind-bending for sure, it's hard to describe. You might have profound ideas, or not, it's hard to predict; and not all of these will seem so profound when sober the next day. It does seem to increase one's senses of curiosity and wonder and open-mindedness. You might also get new focus/energy/direction/ideas about your passions and life trajectory generally. art/music/nature are enhanced as well.
it almost certainly won't make you an overnight savant (speaking a new language, factoring 4096-bit numbers in your head). but if you're already good at something (musical instrument, painting, engineering/programming, etc) and you are able to spend a bit of your trip thinking hard about a problem you are trying to solve in that domain, you might indeed have some new perspective on the matter. Visualizing abstract CS/math-y things (data structures, networks, algorithms, linear algebra, etc) is great fun. Good luck!
My advice is to stay far far away from psychedelics. I took LSD a few months ago after hearing about what great insights it can enable, or the euphoria it lets you feel.
I ended up having a bad, panic-inducing trip which caused something in my brain to flip and start having panic attacks and dissociation. The dissociation/depersonalization faded after a couple weeks (although those weeks were hell) but the anxiety and general feeling of weirdness still affect me.
I don't really feel like I've ever gotten back to how I've been before I took the drug. As some other commenter on HN said, "it's like throwing a wrench in your neurological cogwheels." The rewards definitely don't outweigh the risks.
Remember that his experience is just an anecdote. You should not base your reasoning upon someone else's experience. You should research and keep in mind that yes, bad trips exist and also that we're talking about banned compounds and as such their purity varies. God knows what he took. The only way to know for sure is to order from a (legal) EU lab, which makes a similar compound or something. With that said, my personal opinion is that it doesn't make sense to take something under researched, artificially isolated. As such, imo, you're better off growing your spores, again, ordered from and consumed in a legal place, such as, Holland. There was a thread about them both those things here on HN, with some great comments. You might wanna use HN search and sift thru the comments. But as far as spores, I think it's pretty accurate to say that what you'll experience is a dissociation from your ego, which, is a totally abstract concept, and quite unimaginable. Mhh, I'd say what happens is you see everything from the outside, you realize everything is a mental construction and feel like everything is connected. I recommend reading a piece on Santa Claus and the spores. Gives much more context than anything for what their use should be, and was, imo. Don't expect to turn an apple into a Macintosh.
I've done far-too-high doses of weed before accidentally, which I can describe as being similar and psychedelic. After the incident I cut out any psychoactive drugs, including caffeine and alcohol.
From my experience LSD basically amplifies what's already inside you plus the setting which is around you. So you need to be prepared. It basically real life "the zone" from stalker:
So if you have some worries, even deep inside, and not acknowledging them, LSD will bring that up for you even if the setting is super relaxing and safe. Also the opposite, if setting is threatening, you will have bad trip.
This so much. Broken people shouldn't do psychedelics, or they might end up more broken. You really can't hide your flaws and issues from it. How to define who is broken and who is not is not for this post, or this site, more for good experienced psychologists. I've been disassembled down into atoms of my personality, 'saw' them dance and swirl on gentle shamanic music I played in the background and when coming down from the trip, assembled back again, piece by piece, sense by sense. Only then I realized that my mental state was perfectly OK and no hidden cracks looming beneath the surface. I would never recommend such a leap of faith to random people I don't know deeply.
Doing this with anybody else wouldn't achieve any of this insight, I presume a lot fo energy would be spent managing communication with other person or attempt to stay more grounded rather than let it go.
For rest of us, it is often a life changing experience and defining moment of our lives. It was for me (mushrooms grown from spores from Netherland, never did acid but should be +-similar). One trick with shrooms - raw lemon juice makes it way more intense and shorter experience, which is combination I prefer for introspection.
I'd encourage you to read at least the trip reports on erowid[1] and The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide by James Fadiman.[2] You might also be interested in reading LSD, Spirituality, and the Creative Process: Based on the Groundbreaking Research of Oscar Janiger.[3]
Then, if you decide to try it, prepare yourself for a very special journey -- one that you'll only be able to go on once in your life (as you'll never again have a first time with that particular substance.. an experience many chase over and over again later in life, but few ever manage to recapture it). You'll want to be in a safe, supportive environment, ideally with an experienced trip sitter you like and trust, and without any prior commitments for that day and ideally the next. The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide has more specific advice on how to prepare.
Be aware: Unless you have very good connections, the psychedelic “LSD” you can get on the street today is likely not of the same chemical composition as the common LSD of 1985. It will still give you a psychedelic experience, but the type of trip and risk profile may be different.
LSD has a way of giving one a new perspective. However, it can also make one very suggestive and can amplify any emotion, good or bad. Set and setting is key, and even if the experience feels "bad", there's often some sort of benefit one can derive from that trip, if you approach it with mindfulness.
Psychedelics are not a magic band-aid to fix all your problems. But they can nonetheless change your life for the better, if you approach them right.
I recommend that you study psychedelics intensely before making the decision. LSD may not even be the psychedelic for you. There are also psilocybin mushrooms, as well as N,N-Dimethyltryptamine.
For about three years it was my favorite thing, but after that it didn't do much for me. Not because the drug wasn't working, but because it wasn't showing me anything new anymore.
I did it a lot for those three years. Often enough to discover that taking it more than about once every four days was self-defeating, because I built up a tolerance so fast.
You can have what seem like revolutionary ideas and profound realizations, and later discover that they were no such thing. That experience is common enough to be a running joke.
You can have legitimate revelations, too, but you can also have those without a drug.
It seems to me like the main effect it has on inspiration is it temporarily disables some of your machinery of categorization. For a little while, your thoughts and feelings and sensations don't stay in their lanes, and the resulting mishmash can offer some new looks at things that you might not have experienced otherwise. I think that's probably mostly randomness at work, and if you want that, there are other ways to get it.
It feels like amazing cosmic revelation, but that's probably at least partly because of the way it amplifies your emotions. That amplification is probably also a cause of bad trips. Bad trips are rare--according to the medical literature in 1978 when I wrote a paper about the subject, they were somewhere around one in a thousand--but I can testify that they are very unpleasant indeed. It's about six or eight hours of unadulterated terror and hopelessness, so be advised.
I don't regret my experiences with it. On the other hand, I don't miss it, either. I am glad that responsible researchers have lately managed to start studying psychedelics seriously. They seem promising for treatment of alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and maybe some other things. There might also be a place for them, wisely and judiciously applied, in making the lives of some healthy people better.
I wouldn't recommend doing what I did with it. I was lucky, but not everyone will be lucky.
There's some interesting stuff about LSD and psilocybin that you can find by googling for something like "LSD OCEAN personality traits". A few researchers have tried measuring the Big Five personality traits before and after psychedelic therapy. They have generally found that psychedelics move some of the trait scores significantly, which is a big deal in personality research, because conventional wisdom is that nothing other than horrific trauma makes much difference in the Big Five.
(The big five correspond to the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism--all measurable personality traits that tend to remain pretty stable over time.)
Some papers claim that psychedelics cause lasting shifts in the traits. This one:
...claims that they significantly increased O, C, and E, left A unchanged, and decreased N.
If true, that's probably a further reason for caution. Those reported changes might seem good (they seem pretty good to me), but if it's true that the only other thing that makes significant changes in the Big Five is horrific trauma, then maybe we ought to regard a drug that can do it with some wariness.
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs.
The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.
With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
Was this bit about LSD and Hypercard covered before what seems like a 2016 interview and some later articles? So much has been written about HyperCard (and MacPaint and QuickDraw) I'm wondering if I somehow managed to miss it in all that material.
As far as I know, the first time Bill Atkinson publically mentioned that LSD inspired HyperCard was in an interview with Leo Laporte on Apr 25th 2016, which claims to be "Part 2". I have searched all over for part 1 but have not been able to find it.
Then Mondo 2000 published a transcript of that part of the interview on June 18 2018, and I think a few other publications repeated it around that time.
And later on Feb 4, 2019 he gave a live talk to Brad Myers' "05-640: Interaction Techniques" user interface design class at CMU, during which he read the transcript.
It's well worth watching that interview. He went over and explained all of his amazing Polaroids of Lisa development, which I don't think have ever been published anywhere else.
Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.
The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description of how important and amazing HyperCard was.
Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):
The article was written and published in 2018 and needs (2018) in the title here on HN.
Also the date in the article header "1979" is a typo, as the ID on the picture proves. That one should refer to 1978, but of course can't be changed here.
> Apple published HyperCard in 1987, six years before Mosaic, the first web browser
Mosaic was the first Mac and Windows web browser (1992-93) but the first UNIX/NeXT web browser was WWW, 1990-91.
Bill Atkinson (and HyperCard) are awesome though. Imagine a networked HyperCard ushering in the web in 1987; or Intermedia for that matter in 1985; or much earlier in the 20th century a la Vannevar Bush (1930s) or Ted Nelson (1960s); or if Netscape had focused on Gopher, WAIS, FTP, and/or NNTP and dropped HTTP as being superfluous.
I used and programmed HyperCard quite a bit back in the day (even C extensions into HyperCard!). The jump from HyperCard to web is bigger than it appears from the UI:
- to make HC work on the hardware at the time it had quite a lot of optimised MC68000 assembly so it wasn't very extensible which was why it didn't take off like visual basic i.e. you could build stacks but not really apps
- there was no declarative format, stacks were binary files
- It didn't support networking at all as far as I can remember
- Networking at Apple based on AppleTalk so their thinking was very much in the local network, in fact their TCP/IP extension (not built into the OS at the time) was not very well supported.
HyperCard was great, but it was never designed with a browser model in mind, mainly sharing binary stacks between people.
All very true - I also wrote XCMD/XFCN plug-ins back in the day, and my first published technical articles, in MacTutor and Washington Apple Pi magazine, were about how to do that.
HyperCard had more innovations that I miss. One of them was the ability to paint on the card background and foreground layers separately. This meant that you could cover black pixels in the background with white pixels in the foreground.
The HyperTalk language was kind of an oddball, quirky mess; it was designed to closely resemble English, but this actually tended to make it harder to come up with just the right syntax to do what you wanted. But that object-oriented model was carried over into AppleScript, and the whole scripting model for writing scriptable applications. It was not exactly easy to write code that would follow the OSA scripting model, but applications that supported it could be "puppeted" to do some amazing stuff. For example, I wrote a C++ program in PowerPlant which would "puppet" Quark XPress to generate customized newsletters.
Atkinson deserves a lot of credit for making a 68000 do things people could barely believe could be done without custom graphics hardware, and his whole region model (described in a patent) is amazing. And you can now browse the source code for MacPaint and QuickDraw: https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...
It's not really legible if you don't have some expertise in 68000 assembly language, but even if you don't, it's still a model of clarity and an inspiration.
Hypertalk (the language of HyperCard) had a lot of syntactic sugar, but was pretty easy to get started with even with almost no programming background.
For example, a very simple button might have a script that looks like:
on mouseUp
ask "What is your name?"
put it into card field "Name"
end mouseUp
You could get pretty far by reading scripts and trying things out in Hypercard.
I also tend to think that the idea of network aware Hypercard sounds super cool, but would have been a security nightmare. Hypercard wasn't written in an era of adversarial coding, it would have been knocked over 10 different ways every day by hackers. Code and content were heavily mixed together and there was no permission model beyond preventing people from editing your stacks by accident. Every stack or even card you loaded would be downloading and executing code.
HyperCard inspired Arthur van Hoff to develop a network aware version of HyperCard in PostScript for James Gosling's networked-PostScript-based NeWS Window System. It was originally called "GoodNeWS", then called "HyperNeWS", then finally released as a product called "HyperLook", which I worked on with Arthur and used to port SimCity to X11/NeWS on SunOS/Solaris.
Arthur later went on to Sun, wrote the Java compiler in Java, developed the AWT user interface toolkit, then formed Marimba with Kim Polesi and Jonathan Payne and others from the original Java team, where they developed Castanet and Bongo.
>1996-11-01: Tuning in to Marimba. Kim Polese wants you to upgrade your HTML-based browser to a more interactive, more TV-like, Java-based "tuner" by the name of Castanet.
>Marimba's first product, scheduled to be announced in early October, is the punnily named Castanet, which aims to push Java toward its full potential. Java was created to deliver interactive content over distributed networks, and its much-hyped arrival last year promised to completely change the way information and entertainment are delivered electronically. The first popular Java programs have been based on HTML - for example, the Java applets that lend some animation to boring Web pages. But Java doesn't need the Web to fly. It was designed to communicate over any kind of decentralized system. [...]
Marimba developed Bongo, a Java-based gui toolkit / user interface editor / graphical environment, inspired by HyperCard (and HyperLook), which they used to develop and distribute interactive user interfaces over Castanet.
>Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo, By Chris Baron
>In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration. Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.
Bongo was unique at the time in that it actually let you edit and dynamically compile scripts for event handlers and "live code" at run-time (in contrast with other tools that required you to recompile and re-run the application to make changes to the user interface), which was made possible by calling back to the Java compiler (which Arthur had written before at Sun, so he knew how to integrate the compiler at runtime like a modern IDE would do). Without the ability to dynamically edit scripts at runtime (easy with an interpreted language like HyperTalk or PostScript or JavaScript, but trickier for a compiled language like Java), you can't hold a candle to HyperCard, because interactive scripting is an essential feature.
>You could get pretty far by reading scripts and trying things out in Hypercard.
I think that's true - but my experience was that it was a good language for beginners, but didn't "scale" well as you started working on more complex programs. The English-like syntax could get in the way as soon as you started to assemble more complex expressions, and you'd be left hunting for the right syntax as if you were playing an old Infocom game. It gave the impression that the parser was more accommodating and sophisticated than it really was, when really it had a rigid syntax like most other programming languages. And because most of the documentation was aimed at beginners, it was hard to find clear answers about _exactly_ what the syntax had to look like when assembling those more complex expressions. It has been a long time since I was writing HyperTalk, but I remember being very frustrated that I couldn't find a formal language spec (in BNF or a bubble diagram or something) the way I could for languages like Pascal.
Still, it really should get a lot of credit for encouraging a lot of beginners to write code and build quite sophisticated little databases complete with all kinds of animations and visual effects that would have been monstrously difficult to code from scratch in C or Pascal. I should also remember that as a programmer and Computer Science student, _I was not the real target audience_ for the language design.
OMG WAP! I was a member of Washington Apple Pi from the Apple ][ days. I just loved the meetings and journals (a bunch of which are online). Are you the Paul who worked at Computerland?
To give you an idea of just how exciting and groundbreaking and disruptive HyperCard was, and how many people were going totally and justifiably ape-shit about it when it was released, here are the first mentions of it I could find in just the October 1987 WAP journal, talking about how it was the hit of several Mac trade shows:
There was a WAP HyperCARD SIG, and Bill Atkinson even gave a demo of HyperCard at a special WAP meetings!
[...] HyperCard (about which more later)
requires a minimum of about 700K of RAM in which to run. If
you actually want to run two powerful applications at the same
time, you will need the next step up-2.5 megabytes of RAM. [...]
[...] Bernie reported that Bill Baldridge has done some interesting work on a HyperCard application which would describe WAP. Tom's picture is already on the HyperCard stack. Bernie hopes to see a complete package at dealers when we have it completed. [...]
[...] We ended on a happier note with a demonstration of Bill Atkinson's amazing HyperCard, the hit of the Boston Expo and a program which will no doubt be fully discussed elsewhere in the Journal. [...]
With Mac fever, all kinds of people clamored around the Expo floor with Mac tote bags, filling them up with complimentary copies of MacWeek, MacUser, MacWorld, MACazine, The
Macintosh Business Letter (premiere edition) and hundreds of flyers being handed out by hawkers dressed in medieval costumes or business suits or T-shirts. Terms like Connectivity, MultiFinder, HyperCard and "stackware developer" were tossed
about even more freely.
As everyone knows now, HyperCard was the main feature at the Expo; a new programming environment had been introduced. It was programming for "real people", as Jean-Louis
Gassée explained it. Super star Bill Atkinson had created a combination operating system shell, database manager and programming environment with this "real person" user interface. No one could seem to clearly describe all that HyperCard could
do; but everyone in the know alluded to its potential. John Sculley called it a "personal information tool kit" in Apple's press release. It is an organizer of words, numbers, sounds and pictures into programs coined "stackware". You will see "stackware" everywhere soon (already there are "stackware" downloads on WAP's BBS). You won't fully appreciate HyperCard until you have tried it. Let me warn you, HyperCard screams for
memory, so it is a great lead-in for adding 1 meg chips or better yet, CD-ROM. Now, we need some import utilities so we can easily load existing databases into stacks regardless of the delimiters.
Jean-Louis Gassée was the Wednesday afternoon speaker.
Sporting a three piece suit and diamond earring, he told his
audience, "PCs are the wings of the mind" and that they would
eventually enrich the quality of human life. He added, that
HyperCard would also change the world and the way computers
deal with information-in a more human like way. It really did
sound like "hype card" might have been a more descriptive name
for the software. I think I was supposed to leave that session on
a kind of religious high, a Macintosh religious high. However, I
was more intent on finding a rest room with less than 25 people
in line.
No, but I wrote a couple of articles on how to write XCMDs/XFCNs for the Washington Apple Pi Journal, then also some stuff for MacTutor. I was a student at the College of Wooster then (in Ohio) so I never actually _went_ to a WAP meeting... but my roommate Ken Knight was from the DC area.
There was actually some type of Gopher server built on top of HyperCard. I don’t know all of the technical details, but my first paid program was a college that asked me to port a freeware Hypercard chat app I wrote to it.
While there was a debate at the time about whether HyperCard was truly "Hypertext" or a "User Interface Design Tool" or a "Personal Database" or just how to classify it, the much more important thing was that it was not just a browser, but also an authoring tool, that enabled regular users to switch back and forth between browse mode and edit mode WHILE they were using it, and empowered users as authors.
This is in stark contrast with the other hypertext browsers, authoring tools, and user interface design tools of the time (the cutting edge of which was the NeXT Interface Builder), that made a distinction between "run time" and "design time", and did not enable ordinary users to switch into design or edit mode while the normal application was running, which was absolutely essential to HyperCard.
At the beginning of the web, browsers did not have the ability to author hypertext (and server-side authoring tools like Medium or even AJAX-y client-side authoring tools did not exist yet). So authoring tools (and user interface editing tools) were big and expensive and complex and not user friendly, and there was often a compilation step between editing and browsing in a different program, so you couldn't just pop into edit mode and tweak the actual specification then pop back into browsing like you could do with HyperCard.
Eventually Netscape and Internet Explorer got some shitty half-assed WYSIWYG editing abilities that were sub-par, and produced terrible HTML, and couldn't be applied to any web page, and required a lot of other user interface support to be usable even for the most trivial kinds of editing, but that was a far cry from the comprehensive fully integrated high fidelity WYSIWYG browsing/editing tool that HyperCard was from day one.
In fact, one of the earliest tools that enabled anyone, even children, to author and publish their own interactive dynamic web applications with graphics, text, and even forms and persistent databases, was actually based on HyperCard and the MacHTTP/WebStar web browser on the Mac:
>One of the coolest early applications of server side scripting was integrating HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar, such that you could publish live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web! Since it was based on good old HyperCard, it was one of the first scriptable web authoring tools that normal people and even children could actually use! [8]
>[8] MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher:
>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
Yes, lots of good HyperCard memories for me. One convention that didn't make it to the web browser was having a key (option?) you could press to highlight which elements were clickable. Lots of modern webapps could use that...
Yes definitely there should be a way to highlight all possible links! And also instead of "disabling" links and buttons and other elements so they are inexplicably useless, they should be dimmed but still enabled, so hovering or clicking on them immediately tells you WHY they're disabled, and WHAT you can do to enable them.
HyperTIES was an early hypermedia browser and authoring tool developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab under the direction of Ben Sheniderman. (I helped develop the NeWS version of HyperTIES in PostScript, FORTH, and Emacs MockLisp on the Sun.)
It had both text and graphical "embedded menus" as links, that highlighted text and popped up magnified arbitrarily-shaped cookie-cutter targets with drop-shadows when you pointed at pictures with embedded links, and it highlighted all of the text and graphical links at once when you clicked on the background.
We had a cool demo of the The Hubble Space Telescope with a diagram that popped up all the different parts of the telescope. And also a photo with pop-up targets on the three heads of the Sun founders!
Ben also showed a fun NeWS / PostScript / PSIBER / PseudoScientific Visualizer / ARPAnet map demo later in that talk, which also shows clicking in the background of the PSV to highlight everything at once (the X-ray view of the ARPAnet map, at 28:10):
>Hyperties incorporates graphics while preserving the embedded menu approach used for text only documents. A displayed page can mix text and graphics while allowing arbitrarily-shaped regions to be designated as targets, which provide links to other articles. The addition of graphics provides significant advantages (14). Information that is structured in the form of charts, graphs, maps, and images may be explored with the same facility as text. But the use of graphics in hypertext requires more work on the part of the author to produce comprehensible documents. There is no simple technique for emphasizing the targets that is acceptable in all cases, and the author must laboriously link targets to their references (they are not “self-naming”, as in the text case). In the Sun version of Hyperties rudimentary tools have been developed to simplify the author’s job of establishing graphical links between entries. These consist of editors for designating arbitrary regions of an image using rectangles or polygons, associating names with these regions (which are used by the system to locate references), designating their appearance when highlighted, as well as overall management facilities for keeping track of graphics that have been produced.
On a slightly related note, I have to say I love the whole folklore website. It adds a really human face to the fascinating developments in IT at that time, and a lot of that I think comes from Andy Hertzfeld who tells a story really well.
So around 5:10 he starts to explain why the soft keys they thought to use were such a bad idea, because they would relabel with changing contexts but the user never would read the label again.
That's basically one of the major problems with the TouchBar.
> So around 5:10 he starts to explain why the soft keys they thought to use were such a bad idea, because they would relabel with changing contexts but the user never would read the label again.
> That's basically one of the major problems with the TouchBar.
The soft keys Atkinson describes are quite a bit different than the UI of the Touch Bar.
For many softwares, Touch Bar elements change shape, size, and color as well as text.
For example, in QuickTime Player opening a video shows a play button, a timeline/scrubber, and panel for brightness, volume, and Siri. Tapping the brightness button hides all the other elements and expands the brightness
button into a slider with a dismissal "x". Tapping the "x" restores the controls to their original state. There is little (no) possibility of touching a button whose text label has changed in this case.
Other apps, like Mail, which do have changing text labels are dynamic enough that most (?) users would not be likely to tap a button by mistake due to a changing label.
In summary, Touch Bar elements are much more varied than what Atkinson describes with the Lisa prototype. The two don't present comparable usability models, so criticizing the Touch Bar based on how soft keys worked on the Lisa prototype doesn't really make sense.
The problem with putting keys on the keyboard that radically change depending on context is that you cannot use them from memory just like the other keys. Of course CMD+C doesn't copy when you didn't select anything nor will CMD+W close a tab in a tabless application but when I want to lower the volume on a TouchBarless Mac it's always the same key in the same place while it might exist or not exist depending on the application I'm in.
Perhaps in Final Cut Pro I'm not able to lower the volume anymore because there's a video scrubber in the place of that key instead. So I cannot depend on that key anymore.
> The problem with putting keys on the keyboard that radically change depending on context is that you cannot use them from memory just like the other keys.
Yes, this is one of the tradeoffs the Touch Bar makes in order to have a dynamically changing touch interface. I wouldn't really call it a "problem", though many do in light of the Touch Bar taking the space of function keys.
I do miss the function keys, but I also sort of like the Touch Bar in certain circumstances.
Anecdotally, I was pretty fed up with my 2017 MacBook Pro (butterfly keyboard) and so made the change to the 16-inch. Apparently, I've gotten so used to the soft "Esc" key that I frequently rest my finger on the 16-inch's physical "Esc" key for a few monents before realizing I actually have to push down to activate it.
I’d love to understand how much of a role psychedelics in the creation of Apple’s story arc. Does anyone have information about where this has been discussed? Thanks!
It might be useful to understand early Apple Inc -- as an Apple II company, then secondly as a Macintosh company. The former was very 'California' with health and folksy undertones, but later came money-at-a-large-scale and waves of corporate hires that enabled the corporate side. So you have the California folksy (plus yes, psychedelics/art/education core) base in Phase I, adding large, expensive structure and people who were professionals at doing that, in Phase II. The fuels of market success add to the constant growth, yet the California core is still in the fabric of the culture -- that was the Macintosh era. In Phase II, 'creatives' now have modern cubicles to work with computers -- HyperCard, typography and desktop publishing, awareness of the media business (LA) and some interaction with LA, but definitely print itself, worldwide. The printed word had a significance that is hard to explain if you only know a post-Internet world. So Apple was in education, print, media, and also (they thought) business.
You might ask similarly, what was the role of psychedelics in Hollywood? of course it was there, but to be a business, you had the business people, who were not-at-all about expanded consciousness, but competitive and territorially aggressive, ego-driven, etc. Same but different at corporate Phase II Apple. By the time of the Macintosh, a feeling of Big Corporation was in the air already, and the tie-dye was not often worn on the outside. Steve must have taken psychedelics, but was way too arrogant, aggressive and lets say it, dangerous (he was at NeXT in Fremont by then). Steve personally traded tie-dye for scary and intimidating black luxury cars early on. So how do you categorize that ?
Jobs did speak up about his LSD use at some points, but I think he probably transcended that and followed the practices outlined in one of his favorite books: "Autobiography of a Yogi", which I'd highly recommend to anyone interested in consciousness.
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” Steve Jobs
So many articles come along discussing his work without actually mentioning his name. I think Bill is one of those contributors to technology that are often underestimated.
Anecdote: Steve Jobs came up to him standing in line to buy the original iPhone and said to him, “Bill, I already sent you one!” Bill responded, “But I need three more!”
>Steve Jobs came up to him standing in line to buy the original iPhone and said to him, “Bill, I already sent you one!” Bill responded, “But I need three more!”
HyperCard was a great idea. In 1989 Bill Appleton released SuperCard. SuperCard had support for networking and better support for colors. I wrote an email client for it. If SuperCard only had been able to download supercard code from the net, it could have become what the web is today.
It went with Objective-C because of Nextstep. Apple bought NeXT because NeXT had a real operating system and Apple didn't. Apple had burned a few years and a hundred million dollars or so trying to build a proper operating system, and they weren't very happy with what they had to show for it. So they bought NeXT.
The application layer of Nextstep was written in Objective-C. So Objective-C became Apple's new application-programming language.
By the time of the NeXT acquisition, Pascal was already out of fashion. Apple's officially-blessed application framework, MacApp, was originally written in Object Pascal, but Pascal wasn't particularly popular with programmers inside or outside of Apple. People liked C better, and most of them used it whenever they could.
When it came time to plan for development of MacApp 3.0, the development team was hearing a lot of complaints about Pascal and hopeful wishes about C. I remember a meeting where Steve Friedrich, the lead developer on MacApp, wrote down all the options he could think of on a whiteboard and crossed them off one-by-one. All the objections boiled down to what programmers inside and outside Apple would put up with. The last thing left on the list was C++, so MacApp 3.0 was written in C++.
Only a handful of programming-language nerds complained about the change. Ironically, one of the complainers was Steve himself. He was a Smalltalk guy, but he was there to give Mac developers what they wanted, not to push his linguistic preferences.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadI want to do this badly. Has anyone taken LSD here on HN? What can you share about this, almost sounds like an urban myth, claim that one can have revolutionary ideas, profound realizations that otherwise cannot be had?
Standard psychedelic advice is to try them with experienced friends if at all possible when getting started. Trips can also be bad and scary (and sometimes, that is a necessary step on the road to positive change)
Best case scenario w.r.t. real-world engineering challenges, drugs enable some lateral thinking and allow you to make connections you might not have otherwise. Very often this best case scenario is not going to be the case though ha ha ha.
People on DMT have experiences of being given messages, but it always seems to be things about themselves (stop worrying or whatever).
A drug induced discovery that couldn’t possibly be explained by lateral thinking would be an incredible event.
https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd.shtml
https://erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_health1.shtml
"Reactions that are prolonged (days to months) and/or require hospitalization are often referred to as "LSD psychosis," and include a heterogenous population and group of symptoms."
"In spite of the impressive degree of prior problems noted in many of these patients, there are occasional reports of severe and prolonged reactions occuring in basically well adjusted individuals."
Also, one famous example of "bad trips" (maybe with "prior problems"):
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/thats-one-hell-of...
it can be mind-bending for sure, it's hard to describe. You might have profound ideas, or not, it's hard to predict; and not all of these will seem so profound when sober the next day. It does seem to increase one's senses of curiosity and wonder and open-mindedness. You might also get new focus/energy/direction/ideas about your passions and life trajectory generally. art/music/nature are enhanced as well.
it almost certainly won't make you an overnight savant (speaking a new language, factoring 4096-bit numbers in your head). but if you're already good at something (musical instrument, painting, engineering/programming, etc) and you are able to spend a bit of your trip thinking hard about a problem you are trying to solve in that domain, you might indeed have some new perspective on the matter. Visualizing abstract CS/math-y things (data structures, networks, algorithms, linear algebra, etc) is great fun. Good luck!
Smile, relax, and remember that you are great.
My advice is to stay far far away from psychedelics. I took LSD a few months ago after hearing about what great insights it can enable, or the euphoria it lets you feel.
I ended up having a bad, panic-inducing trip which caused something in my brain to flip and start having panic attacks and dissociation. The dissociation/depersonalization faded after a couple weeks (although those weeks were hell) but the anxiety and general feeling of weirdness still affect me.
I don't really feel like I've ever gotten back to how I've been before I took the drug. As some other commenter on HN said, "it's like throwing a wrench in your neurological cogwheels." The rewards definitely don't outweigh the risks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(1979_film)
So if you have some worries, even deep inside, and not acknowledging them, LSD will bring that up for you even if the setting is super relaxing and safe. Also the opposite, if setting is threatening, you will have bad trip.
Doing this with anybody else wouldn't achieve any of this insight, I presume a lot fo energy would be spent managing communication with other person or attempt to stay more grounded rather than let it go.
For rest of us, it is often a life changing experience and defining moment of our lives. It was for me (mushrooms grown from spores from Netherland, never did acid but should be +-similar). One trick with shrooms - raw lemon juice makes it way more intense and shorter experience, which is combination I prefer for introspection.
Then, if you decide to try it, prepare yourself for a very special journey -- one that you'll only be able to go on once in your life (as you'll never again have a first time with that particular substance.. an experience many chase over and over again later in life, but few ever manage to recapture it). You'll want to be in a safe, supportive environment, ideally with an experienced trip sitter you like and trust, and without any prior commitments for that day and ideally the next. The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide has more specific advice on how to prepare.
[1] - https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd.shtml
[2] - https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Explorers-Guide-Therapeut...
[3] - https://www.amazon.com/LSD-Spirituality-Creative-Process-Gro...
For a non-pharmacological trip, I highly recommend “Psychedelic Information Theory”: http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/pdf/PIT-Print-Web.... [PDF]
Psychedelics are not a magic band-aid to fix all your problems. But they can nonetheless change your life for the better, if you approach them right.
I recommend that you study psychedelics intensely before making the decision. LSD may not even be the psychedelic for you. There are also psilocybin mushrooms, as well as N,N-Dimethyltryptamine.
Honestly, meditation is another path to similar kinds of insights — it just requires more patience. But it’s also free, and legal.
For about three years it was my favorite thing, but after that it didn't do much for me. Not because the drug wasn't working, but because it wasn't showing me anything new anymore.
I did it a lot for those three years. Often enough to discover that taking it more than about once every four days was self-defeating, because I built up a tolerance so fast.
You can have what seem like revolutionary ideas and profound realizations, and later discover that they were no such thing. That experience is common enough to be a running joke.
You can have legitimate revelations, too, but you can also have those without a drug.
It seems to me like the main effect it has on inspiration is it temporarily disables some of your machinery of categorization. For a little while, your thoughts and feelings and sensations don't stay in their lanes, and the resulting mishmash can offer some new looks at things that you might not have experienced otherwise. I think that's probably mostly randomness at work, and if you want that, there are other ways to get it.
It feels like amazing cosmic revelation, but that's probably at least partly because of the way it amplifies your emotions. That amplification is probably also a cause of bad trips. Bad trips are rare--according to the medical literature in 1978 when I wrote a paper about the subject, they were somewhere around one in a thousand--but I can testify that they are very unpleasant indeed. It's about six or eight hours of unadulterated terror and hopelessness, so be advised.
I don't regret my experiences with it. On the other hand, I don't miss it, either. I am glad that responsible researchers have lately managed to start studying psychedelics seriously. They seem promising for treatment of alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and maybe some other things. There might also be a place for them, wisely and judiciously applied, in making the lives of some healthy people better.
I wouldn't recommend doing what I did with it. I was lucky, but not everyone will be lucky.
There's some interesting stuff about LSD and psilocybin that you can find by googling for something like "LSD OCEAN personality traits". A few researchers have tried measuring the Big Five personality traits before and after psychedelic therapy. They have generally found that psychedelics move some of the trait scores significantly, which is a big deal in personality research, because conventional wisdom is that nothing other than horrific trauma makes much difference in the Big Five.
(The big five correspond to the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism--all measurable personality traits that tend to remain pretty stable over time.)
Some papers claim that psychedelics cause lasting shifts in the traits. This one:
...claims that they significantly increased O, C, and E, left A unchanged, and decreased N.If true, that's probably a further reason for caution. Those reported changes might seem good (they seem pretty good to me), but if it's true that the only other thing that makes significant changes in the Big Five is horrific trauma, then maybe we ought to regard a drug that can do it with some wariness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21726302
Bill Atkinson is the humblest, sweetest, most astronomically talented guy -- practically the opposite of Rony Abovitz! I think they're on very different drugs. The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson, as told to Leo Laporte.
"In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California." ...
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
Full interview with lots more details about the development of HyperCard:
https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/247?autostart=f...
Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Including polaroids of early Lisa development.
About PhotoCard:
http://www.billatkinson.com/aboutPhotoCard.html
PhotoCard by Bill Atkinson is a free app available from the iTunes App store, that allows you to create custom postcards using Bill's nature photos or your own personal photos, then send them by email or postal mail from your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.
Bill Atkinson, Mac software legend and world renowned nature photographer, has created an innovative application that redefines how people create and send postcards.
With PhotoCard you can make dazzling, high resolution postcards on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, and send them on-the-spot, through email or the US Postal Service. The app is amazingly easy to use. To create a PhotoCard, select one of Bill's nature photos or one of your own personal photos. Then, flip the card over to type your message. For a fun touch, jazz up your PhotoCard with decorative stickers and stamps. If you're emailing your card, it can even include an audible greeting. When you've finished your creation, send it off to any email or postal address in the world!
His trip description really resonated with me, just having finished Rovelli’s “Reality is Not What it Seems.”
Then Mondo 2000 published a transcript of that part of the interview on June 18 2018, and I think a few other publications repeated it around that time.
And later on Feb 4, 2019 he gave a live talk to Brad Myers' "05-640: Interaction Techniques" user interface design class at CMU, during which he read the transcript.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/schedule....
It's well worth watching that interview. He went over and explained all of his amazing Polaroids of Lisa development, which I don't think have ever been published anywhere else.
See Bill Atkinson's Lisa development polaroids:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atki...
Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.
See video of Bill's talk:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description of how important and amazing HyperCard was.
See video of Don's talk:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...
Also the date in the article header "1979" is a typo, as the ID on the picture proves. That one should refer to 1978, but of course can't be changed here.
Mosaic was the first Mac and Windows web browser (1992-93) but the first UNIX/NeXT web browser was WWW, 1990-91.
Bill Atkinson (and HyperCard) are awesome though. Imagine a networked HyperCard ushering in the web in 1987; or Intermedia for that matter in 1985; or much earlier in the 20th century a la Vannevar Bush (1930s) or Ted Nelson (1960s); or if Netscape had focused on Gopher, WAIS, FTP, and/or NNTP and dropped HTTP as being superfluous.
- to make HC work on the hardware at the time it had quite a lot of optimised MC68000 assembly so it wasn't very extensible which was why it didn't take off like visual basic i.e. you could build stacks but not really apps
- there was no declarative format, stacks were binary files
- It didn't support networking at all as far as I can remember
- Networking at Apple based on AppleTalk so their thinking was very much in the local network, in fact their TCP/IP extension (not built into the OS at the time) was not very well supported.
HyperCard was great, but it was never designed with a browser model in mind, mainly sharing binary stacks between people.
HyperCard had more innovations that I miss. One of them was the ability to paint on the card background and foreground layers separately. This meant that you could cover black pixels in the background with white pixels in the foreground.
The HyperTalk language was kind of an oddball, quirky mess; it was designed to closely resemble English, but this actually tended to make it harder to come up with just the right syntax to do what you wanted. But that object-oriented model was carried over into AppleScript, and the whole scripting model for writing scriptable applications. It was not exactly easy to write code that would follow the OSA scripting model, but applications that supported it could be "puppeted" to do some amazing stuff. For example, I wrote a C++ program in PowerPlant which would "puppet" Quark XPress to generate customized newsletters.
Atkinson deserves a lot of credit for making a 68000 do things people could barely believe could be done without custom graphics hardware, and his whole region model (described in a patent) is amazing. And you can now browse the source code for MacPaint and QuickDraw: https://computerhistory.org/blog/macpaint-and-quickdraw-sour...
It's not really legible if you don't have some expertise in 68000 assembly language, but even if you don't, it's still a model of clarity and an inspiration.
For example, a very simple button might have a script that looks like:
You could get pretty far by reading scripts and trying things out in Hypercard.I also tend to think that the idea of network aware Hypercard sounds super cool, but would have been a security nightmare. Hypercard wasn't written in an era of adversarial coding, it would have been knocked over 10 different ways every day by hackers. Code and content were heavily mixed together and there was no permission model beyond preventing people from editing your stacks by accident. Every stack or even card you loaded would be downloading and executing code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff
Arthur later went on to Sun, wrote the Java compiler in Java, developed the AWT user interface toolkit, then formed Marimba with Kim Polesi and Jonathan Payne and others from the original Java team, where they developed Castanet and Bongo.
https://www.wired.com/1996/11/es-marimba/
>1996-11-01: Tuning in to Marimba. Kim Polese wants you to upgrade your HTML-based browser to a more interactive, more TV-like, Java-based "tuner" by the name of Castanet.
>Marimba's first product, scheduled to be announced in early October, is the punnily named Castanet, which aims to push Java toward its full potential. Java was created to deliver interactive content over distributed networks, and its much-hyped arrival last year promised to completely change the way information and entertainment are delivered electronically. The first popular Java programs have been based on HTML - for example, the Java applets that lend some animation to boring Web pages. But Java doesn't need the Web to fly. It was designed to communicate over any kind of decentralized system. [...]
Marimba developed Bongo, a Java-based gui toolkit / user interface editor / graphical environment, inspired by HyperCard (and HyperLook), which they used to develop and distribute interactive user interfaces over Castanet.
https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/...
>Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo, By Chris Baron
>In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration. Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.
Bongo was unique at the time in that it actually let you edit and dynamically compile scripts for event handlers and "live code" at run-time (in contrast with other tools that required you to recompile and re-run the application to make changes to the user interface), which was made possible by calling back to the Java compiler (which Arthur had written before at Sun, so he knew how to integrate the compiler at runtime like a modern IDE would do). Without the ability to dynamically edit scripts at runtime (easy with an interpreted language like HyperTalk or PostScript or JavaScript, but trickier for a compiled language like Java), you can't hold a candle to HyperCard, because interactive scripting is an essential feature.
Danny G...
I think that's true - but my experience was that it was a good language for beginners, but didn't "scale" well as you started working on more complex programs. The English-like syntax could get in the way as soon as you started to assemble more complex expressions, and you'd be left hunting for the right syntax as if you were playing an old Infocom game. It gave the impression that the parser was more accommodating and sophisticated than it really was, when really it had a rigid syntax like most other programming languages. And because most of the documentation was aimed at beginners, it was hard to find clear answers about _exactly_ what the syntax had to look like when assembling those more complex expressions. It has been a long time since I was writing HyperTalk, but I remember being very frustrated that I couldn't find a formal language spec (in BNF or a bubble diagram or something) the way I could for languages like Pascal.
Still, it really should get a lot of credit for encouraging a lot of beginners to write code and build quite sophisticated little databases complete with all kinds of animations and visual effects that would have been monstrously difficult to code from scratch in C or Pascal. I should also remember that as a programmer and Computer Science student, _I was not the real target audience_ for the language design.
https://www.wap.org/journal/showcase/
To give you an idea of just how exciting and groundbreaking and disruptive HyperCard was, and how many people were going totally and justifiably ape-shit about it when it was released, here are the first mentions of it I could find in just the October 1987 WAP journal, talking about how it was the hit of several Mac trade shows:
There was a WAP HyperCARD SIG, and Bill Atkinson even gave a demo of HyperCard at a special WAP meetings!
https://www.wap.org/journal/showcase/washingtonapplepijourna...
Washington Apple Pi Journal, October 1987
HyperCard SIG, Robert C. Platt, page 76:
President's Corner by Tom Warrick
[...] HyperCard (about which more later) requires a minimum of about 700K of RAM in which to run. If you actually want to run two powerful applications at the same time, you will need the next step up-2.5 megabytes of RAM. [...]
[...] Bernie reported that Bill Baldridge has done some interesting work on a HyperCard application which would describe WAP. Tom's picture is already on the HyperCard stack. Bernie hopes to see a complete package at dealers when we have it completed. [...]
[...] We ended on a happier note with a demonstration of Bill Atkinson's amazing HyperCard, the hit of the Boston Expo and a program which will no doubt be fully discussed elsewhere in the Journal. [...]
With Mac fever, all kinds of people clamored around the Expo floor with Mac tote bags, filling them up with complimentary copies of MacWeek, MacUser, MacWorld, MACazine, The Macintosh Business Letter (premiere edition) and hundreds of flyers being handed out by hawkers dressed in medieval costumes or business suits or T-shirts. Terms like Connectivity, MultiFinder, HyperCard and "stackware developer" were tossed about even more freely.
As everyone knows now, HyperCard was the main feature at the Expo; a new programming environment had been introduced. It was programming for "real people", as Jean-Louis Gassée explained it. Super star Bill Atkinson had created a combination operating system shell, database manager and programming environment with this "real person" user interface. No one could seem to clearly describe all that HyperCard could do; but everyone in the know alluded to its potential. John Sculley called it a "personal information tool kit" in Apple's press release. It is an organizer of words, numbers, sounds and pictures into programs coined "stackware". You will see "stackware" everywhere soon (already there are "stackware" downloads on WAP's BBS). You won't fully appreciate HyperCard until you have tried it. Let me warn you, HyperCard screams for memory, so it is a great lead-in for adding 1 meg chips or better yet, CD-ROM. Now, we need some import utilities so we can easily load existing databases into stacks regardless of the delimiters.
Jean-Louis Gassée was the Wednesday afternoon speaker. Sporting a three piece suit and diamond earring, he told his audience, "PCs are the wings of the mind" and that they would eventually enrich the quality of human life. He added, that HyperCard would also change the world and the way computers deal with information-in a more human like way. It really did sound like "hype card" might have been a more descriptive name for the software. I think I was supposed to leave that session on a kind of religious high, a Macintosh religious high. However, I was more intent on finding a rest room with less than 25 people in line.
The second-strongest impression I c...
No, but I wrote a couple of articles on how to write XCMDs/XFCNs for the Washington Apple Pi Journal, then also some stuff for MacTutor. I was a student at the College of Wooster then (in Ohio) so I never actually _went_ to a WAP meeting... but my roommate Ken Knight was from the DC area.
This is in stark contrast with the other hypertext browsers, authoring tools, and user interface design tools of the time (the cutting edge of which was the NeXT Interface Builder), that made a distinction between "run time" and "design time", and did not enable ordinary users to switch into design or edit mode while the normal application was running, which was absolutely essential to HyperCard.
At the beginning of the web, browsers did not have the ability to author hypertext (and server-side authoring tools like Medium or even AJAX-y client-side authoring tools did not exist yet). So authoring tools (and user interface editing tools) were big and expensive and complex and not user friendly, and there was often a compilation step between editing and browsing in a different program, so you couldn't just pop into edit mode and tweak the actual specification then pop back into browsing like you could do with HyperCard.
Eventually Netscape and Internet Explorer got some shitty half-assed WYSIWYG editing abilities that were sub-par, and produced terrible HTML, and couldn't be applied to any web page, and required a lot of other user interface support to be usable even for the most trivial kinds of editing, but that was a far cry from the comprehensive fully integrated high fidelity WYSIWYG browsing/editing tool that HyperCard was from day one.
In fact, one of the earliest tools that enabled anyone, even children, to author and publish their own interactive dynamic web applications with graphics, text, and even forms and persistent databases, was actually based on HyperCard and the MacHTTP/WebStar web browser on the Mac:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209
>One of the coolest early applications of server side scripting was integrating HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar, such that you could publish live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web! Since it was based on good old HyperCard, it was one of the first scriptable web authoring tools that normal people and even children could actually use! [8]
>[8] MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher:
CGI and AppleScript:
http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...
>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263
MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron...
http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt...
http://tidbits.com/article/6292
It had an AppleScript ...
HyperTIES was an early hypermedia browser and authoring tool developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab under the direction of Ben Sheniderman. (I helped develop the NeWS version of HyperTIES in PostScript, FORTH, and Emacs MockLisp on the Sun.)
It had both text and graphical "embedded menus" as links, that highlighted text and popped up magnified arbitrarily-shaped cookie-cutter targets with drop-shadows when you pointed at pictures with embedded links, and it highlighted all of the text and graphical links at once when you clicked on the background.
We had a cool demo of the The Hubble Space Telescope with a diagram that popped up all the different parts of the telescope. And also a photo with pop-up targets on the three heads of the Sun founders!
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
User Interface Strategies (UIS) 90 - Ben Shneiderman - Applications sections and demos. HyperTIES Space Telescope Demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uyO-xUTt6Y&t=12m42s
Ben also showed a fun NeWS / PostScript / PSIBER / PseudoScientific Visualizer / ARPAnet map demo later in that talk, which also shows clicking in the background of the PSV to highlight everything at once (the X-ray view of the ARPAnet map, at 28:10):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uyO-xUTt6Y&t=24m56s
Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser:
By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-to-facilitate-brows...
>Implications of Graphics in Hypertext
>Hyperties incorporates graphics while preserving the embedded menu approach used for text only documents. A displayed page can mix text and graphics while allowing arbitrarily-shaped regions to be designated as targets, which provide links to other articles. The addition of graphics provides significant advantages (14). Information that is structured in the form of charts, graphs, maps, and images may be explored with the same facility as text. But the use of graphics in hypertext requires more work on the part of the author to produce comprehensible documents. There is no simple technique for emphasizing the targets that is acceptable in all cases, and the author must laboriously link targets to their references (they are not “self-naming”, as in the text case). In the Sun version of Hyperties rudimentary tools have been developed to simplify the author’s job of establishing graphical links between entries. These consist of editors for designating arbitrary regions of an image using rectangles or polygons, associating names with these regions (which are used by the system to locate references), designating their appearance when highlighted, as well as overall management facilities for keeping track of graphics that have been produced.
>...
Oh, to be so used.
So around 5:10 he starts to explain why the soft keys they thought to use were such a bad idea, because they would relabel with changing contexts but the user never would read the label again.
That's basically one of the major problems with the TouchBar.
The soft keys Atkinson describes are quite a bit different than the UI of the Touch Bar.
For many softwares, Touch Bar elements change shape, size, and color as well as text.
For example, in QuickTime Player opening a video shows a play button, a timeline/scrubber, and panel for brightness, volume, and Siri. Tapping the brightness button hides all the other elements and expands the brightness button into a slider with a dismissal "x". Tapping the "x" restores the controls to their original state. There is little (no) possibility of touching a button whose text label has changed in this case.
Other apps, like Mail, which do have changing text labels are dynamic enough that most (?) users would not be likely to tap a button by mistake due to a changing label.
In summary, Touch Bar elements are much more varied than what Atkinson describes with the Lisa prototype. The two don't present comparable usability models, so criticizing the Touch Bar based on how soft keys worked on the Lisa prototype doesn't really make sense.
Perhaps in Final Cut Pro I'm not able to lower the volume anymore because there's a video scrubber in the place of that key instead. So I cannot depend on that key anymore.
Yes, this is one of the tradeoffs the Touch Bar makes in order to have a dynamically changing touch interface. I wouldn't really call it a "problem", though many do in light of the Touch Bar taking the space of function keys.
I do miss the function keys, but I also sort of like the Touch Bar in certain circumstances.
Anecdotally, I was pretty fed up with my 2017 MacBook Pro (butterfly keyboard) and so made the change to the 16-inch. Apparently, I've gotten so used to the soft "Esc" key that I frequently rest my finger on the 16-inch's physical "Esc" key for a few monents before realizing I actually have to push down to activate it.
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
You might ask similarly, what was the role of psychedelics in Hollywood? of course it was there, but to be a business, you had the business people, who were not-at-all about expanded consciousness, but competitive and territorially aggressive, ego-driven, etc. Same but different at corporate Phase II Apple. By the time of the Macintosh, a feeling of Big Corporation was in the air already, and the tie-dye was not often worn on the outside. Steve must have taken psychedelics, but was way too arrogant, aggressive and lets say it, dangerous (he was at NeXT in Fremont by then). Steve personally traded tie-dye for scary and intimidating black luxury cars early on. So how do you categorize that ?
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” Steve Jobs
edit -- Aurobindo and Paramahansa Yogananda were both Bengali, but different teachings..
Anecdote: Steve Jobs came up to him standing in line to buy the original iPhone and said to him, “Bill, I already sent you one!” Bill responded, “But I need three more!”
I LOLed, Any Source on that? Great Story.
Our Xdata data publishing plugin for QuarkXPress uses HyperTalk as its scripting language, since we shipped it first 30 years ago.
Still shipping, though XPress is dying...
Market Pressure?
The application layer of Nextstep was written in Objective-C. So Objective-C became Apple's new application-programming language.
By the time of the NeXT acquisition, Pascal was already out of fashion. Apple's officially-blessed application framework, MacApp, was originally written in Object Pascal, but Pascal wasn't particularly popular with programmers inside or outside of Apple. People liked C better, and most of them used it whenever they could.
When it came time to plan for development of MacApp 3.0, the development team was hearing a lot of complaints about Pascal and hopeful wishes about C. I remember a meeting where Steve Friedrich, the lead developer on MacApp, wrote down all the options he could think of on a whiteboard and crossed them off one-by-one. All the objections boiled down to what programmers inside and outside Apple would put up with. The last thing left on the list was C++, so MacApp 3.0 was written in C++.
Only a handful of programming-language nerds complained about the change. Ironically, one of the complainers was Steve himself. He was a Smalltalk guy, but he was there to give Mac developers what they wanted, not to push his linguistic preferences.