HyperCard

Origins

Hyper-reality

We have entered the age of hyper-reality.

Day-to-day living provides only a limited variety of physical stimulus, and little incentive to manipulate the physiological and psychological processing involved. Man’s historical preoccupation with the need to maintain constant images of the physical world, is a product of his extreme orientation toward physical survival in a hostile environment. The current evolving of society of leisure orientations removes this need for constant images ant thereby enhances the opportunities for a more complete use of the sensory apparatus and those related brain functions. Many have turned to drugs or meditation. More specifically it is proposed here, that modern communications technology be employed as a ‘vehicle of departure’ from this need for constant images, to bring about a more complete use of human technology itself. Hyper-reality is the employment of technology other than the biological machinery, when used to affect the performance of the biological machinery beyond its own limitations. This is almost like making adjustments on a television set, except you are what’s plugged in, and the controls are outside your body, being part of whatever technology is interfaced to the body itself. As part of such a man-machine interface you could extend your own mental processes, or if you should choose, you could just diddle with the dials. Hyper-reality is an opportunity to enhance the various qualities of the human experience. Reality is obsolete.

—How Wachspress

In Theodore Holm Nelson’s Dream Machines (an artifact of computing culture that is more of a ‘zine than a book), hypermedia is philologically explained in terms of hyper-reality. The advent of hyper-reality represents a change in the human sense apparatus, challenging the linearity of vision by overlaying another viewing dimension exposing the fractured and interconnected status of all objects. To access this dimension, man needs certain technologies, or rather, man must technologize the body in interfacing with a machine that can parse and assist in the navigation of the new viewing dimension. The underlying data structure that supports hyper-reality and renders it usable is hypertext and hypermedia.

Hypertext and Hypermedia

The terms hypertext and hypermedia, as they pertain to computing, are officially attributed to Nelson, who described the phenomenon as text or other media “visibly cross-connected by two-way links and transclusions.<ref name="xanadu">[1],Nelson, Ted and Robert Adamson Smith. Back to the Future: Hypertext the Way It Used to Be</ref> ” (Nelson goes on to define transclusions as any method of “presentation which indicates the identity or origins of media content”.) The term, coined in 1965, expressed possibilities that were still two decades away from fruition. Hypertext owes its origin to engineer Vannevar Bush’s allegorical Mimex machine: a microfilm-based system of organizing media, regardless of their format, using a navigation scheme modeled after the non-linear twists and turns of mental association . The technological feasibility of such a non-linear hypertextuality was not realized until the mid-1980’s. By the late 1980s, programmers and software engineers began to see broader possibilities for hypertext; increased computation speed, wider proliferation and accessibility of personal desktop computers, and greater interest in a nascent public internet drove computer scientists to consider new ways of human computer interaction (HCI) that could include hypertextuality. By 1987, the concept had been linked to a specific definition pertaining exclusively to computers, and the first Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia was held by the Association for Computing Machinery to address the fledgling theory. This coincided with the release of Apple’s first version of HyperCard. Computer Scientist and hypermedia pioneer, Jakob Neilson, inaugurated the first ACM Hypertext and Hypermedia conference, and introduced hypertext as:

“non-sequentially linked pieces of text or other information. If the focus of such a system or document is on non-textual types of information, the term hypermedia is often used instead. In traditional printed documents, practically the only such link supported is the footnote, so hypertext is often referred to as ‘the generalized footnote’. ”

GOTO and COME FROM

• Navigation

Failures

• Philological Failures
• Economic Failures

Technological Geneology

• Server Scripting
• Erector Set Logic
• Browser metaphors

References

1. Nelson, Theodore Holm. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Distributors, 1974.
2. Nelson, Theodore Holm and Robert Adamson Smith. Back to the Future: Hypertext the Way It Used to Be. [2]
3. Nielson, Jakob. “Hypertext ‘87”. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin archive, 1988.