HyperCard
HyperCard was first released in 1987 by Apple Computers and was a successful Hypermedia system featuring the Hypertalk programming language. It was created by Bill Atkins who also created the MacPaint application and helped develop the Macintosh graphical user interface (GUI).
HyperCard was hyped by Apple as an accessible way for the everyday user of computers to create graphical programs. According to George Beekman, author of HyperCard 2.3 in a Hurry: The Fast Track to Multimedia, “Before HyperCard, it simply wasn’t possible for a computer neophyte, with an investment of a dozen hours to build sophisticated graphic presentations with complex logical structures. With HyperCard, beginners turn into programmers every day” (p.XV).
Contents
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 Reality is obsolete.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’. ”
What is HyperCard:
A HyperCard document is referred to as a stack that is comprised of cards. Each card is of an identical size established by the user when the stack is created. A user can browse the cards in a stack in the sequential order that they were created. Many cards will have buttons, or links, that will allow the user to jump to cards with related information and to bypass the order. Buttons may be hidden or visible to the user. Hidden buttons respond to clicks even though they aren’t visible, for example introductory cards often used hidden buttons that would take up the whole screen that would send you to the next card.
HyperCard players came with most Macs in the early 1990s. While the players allowed the user to read stacks the HyperCard program was required on the hard disk of the machine if the user desired to edit or create new stacks. Hypercard came with a Home stack that's first five cards hold buttons that will direct the user to applications, documents and other stacks. This stack is accessible through a drop down menu in every other stack (Beekman, p.342). Another stack that is included with HyperCard is the Addresses stack.
ADD STUFF ABOUT THREATS TO DATA BASES
Uses
- Tool for accessing information- contains links that lead you to other related information. A medium for receiving packages of information that were created by someone else
- Tool for managing information
- Software construction kit- Bill Atkinson, HyperCard’s creator, calls it a ‘software erector set
- Medium for publishing information in a nonsequential form
- Gateway to multimedia computer applications – (Beekman, p.XXII) “it is often used to create friendly ‘front ends’ for other software packages, hardware peripherals, and multimedia devices.” Ex. Devices like videodisc player or CD-ROM drive
Layers and User Levels
HyperCards are composed of two layers: the transparent card layer and the opaque background layer. Depending on the user level selected on the last card of the deck, the user will have different degrees of access and editing ability on the two levels of the card. The five different user levels include: 1 Browsing, 2 Typing, 3 Painting, 4 Authoring, and 5 Scripting. The browsing level is the most restricted and will only allow the user to navigate through the cards via buttons. Level 2 allowed the users to populate and edit text fields on the card layer, but did not allow them to access the background layer or create any buttons. The painting level allowed the user to change the appearance of the card level. Authoring allowed the users to access the background layer, create buttons that link cards and stacks together, and create fields. Any change to the background of one card, effected all the other cards that utilized the same background. Therefore if the user wanted to make a specific graphical change or add a button to just one card, they would add it at the card level. The final level was scripting and it allowed the user to script stacks, background, cards, buttons, and fields (Beekman, p.50).
ADD SOMETHING MORE ABOUT SCRIPTING HERE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER APPLICATIONS
Organization and Output
The program stores 42 “recent cards.” When you select recent cards from a drop down menu, you see all 42 cards thumb nails in the order you visited (minus repeats) you can click on any of them to be sent to the card. This is similar to memory cache on internet browsers. The user can also mark cards so that they can be quickly accessed or grouped for printing. In the standard address stack, the user simply clicks the top right corner of the card, and the corner will ‘fold over.’ This skeuomorph reminds the user of selecting a subset of papers or note cards by physically turning over a corner of the paper so the user can easily separate the marked cards/sheets from the rest of the group. The user can mark cards by searching for cards with specific text. There is an option for searching for multiple terms using a intersection or union of two or more variables (Beekman, p.39).
The user can select marked cards or the entire stack to print. As opposed to printing the actual cards, the program can print reports similar to those produced by contemporary database software that highlight certain variables. The user must create and design a print layout that can be saved as a template. HyperCard stacks may have up to sixteen associated templates (Beekman,p.44).
External Commands and Functions
Problems
- Can’t Undo—have to check after every step
- Easy to save over files. You have to manually move originals and copies around as well as *configure your memory to avoid this from happening.
- For stacks that follow narrative or are interactive you need to take a long time to plan and map out the network of cards is required
GOTO and COME FROM
- Navigation
- AppleTalk
- Peripheral Link-ups
Failures
Theorists have criticized HyperCard from the outset for introducing a graphical metaphor that was incompatible with hypermedia’s broader intentions. At the inaugural address of the 1987 ACM Hypermedia conference, computer scientist Andy van Dam cautioned against widescale acceptance of HyperCard’s GUI, saying “[w]e would not want to be limited to a single way of looking at the world such as in HyperCard. ” The graphical metaphor of HyperCard falls into what Ted Nelson would call a “virtual reality” trap. Instead of challenging the writing act; the notion of paper, and the office environment one normally associates with the task of writing; HyperCard seeks to simulate it . The skeuomorphic motif of “cards” and “stacks” are meant to conjure for the user the rolodex or a group of index cards, thus encouraging the familiarity associated with these objects.
- "l'internet raté"
- Economic Failures
Technological Geneology
- Server Scripting
- Erector Set Logic
- Browser metaphors
- Index cards
- Presentation software
- Rolodex
- Card Catalog
- Databases
References
- Nelson, Theodore Holm. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Distributors, 1974.
- Nelson, Theodore Holm and Robert Adamson Smith. Back to the Future: Hypertext the Way It Used to Be. [2]
- Nielson, Jakob. “Hypertext ‘87”. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin archive, 1988.
- Beekman, George. HyperCard 2.3 in a Hurry: The Fast Track to Multimedia. Peachpit Press, 1996.
