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Is it hype or card?



Author: Mike Furniss
Date: March, 1989
Keywords: Hyperbit hypercard hypermedia stack
Text: * See related stories in this issue. There was a fine turnout for this month's Special Interest Group on HyperCard at the Redwood Community Action Agency Facility. More than 15 people came to participate in a discussion of HyperCard and its possibilities. Larry Goldberg had asked me many times during the past year if I would like to do a SIG on HyperCard. He knows I'm a HyperCard Stack developer and aficionado, and have the pleasure of being a long-time friend of Apple-fellow and Mac-Hero Bill Atkinson. Larry also seems to have superb intuition about where SMUG's interest lie. I said yes to Larry, but life as an adult being what it is, scheduling was difficult. We finally arranged it for this February, and the turnout was surprising and exciting. The level of interest in HyperCard and hypermedia in general is very high throughout the Mac community and in the world of personal computing at large. It is clearly and idea whose time has come. The idea of hypermedia is an obvious one, and was first described by Vannevar Bush in 1945, in an article published in the Atlantic Monthly titled, ''As We May think.'' A computer visionary named Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext in the 1960s and fluffed out the concept of associative navigation through large information bases. You might be wondering by now, what is hypertext and hypermedia ? Good question. Bush put it this way in 1945 in his description of ''The Memex'': ''A device in which an individual stores his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.'' Bush's concept departs from other forms of data storage in that it described an associative structure that closely models the structure of human memory. We think in associative webs, networks of logically associated memory and information processing structures, and Bush's Memex would mimic this way of organizing and navigating through information. Bush goes on: ''Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope...to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage.'' It took the availability of cheap mass memory and powerful computers to bring hypermedia to the people. HyperCard was not the first hypermedia program and is certainly not the only one available now; but the combination of the Mac's graphics and Bill Atkinson's genius and programming virtuosity makes HyperCard an enormously rich way to introduce large numbers of people to the idea and practical use of hypermedia. Jeff Conklin {IEEE Computer, September 1987} provides an excellent survey of the history of hypermedia. There have been a number of important milestones. In 1968 Doug Elgelbart demonstrated the use of a hypertext document and another of his inventions, the mouse. Other hypertext systems were developed including Brown University's ''Intermedia,'' Xerox PARC's ''NoteCards' and University of North Carolina's ''WE'' system. The introduction of HyperCard through Apple's promotion and bundling of it with Macs has changed hypermedia from an esoteric concept known to only a few hundred people to a familiar computing and information environment known to millions. It's nothing less than a revolution in computing and information storage and retrieval. There isn't any hypermedia software for the MS-DOS/OS-2 machines that comes anywhere close to what HyperCard does. HyperCard is a very important way that Macs differ from and excel over PCs. Macintosh has a huge lead here, and because we are Mac Users, we have that lead too. HyperCard is many things. Like a computer, what it is depends on what you are doing with it. Play with the program. Try a variety of stacks. Then think of how you or your occupation could employ it. The possibilities are mind boggling and really diverse. Howard Seemann suggested that I write a regular HyperCard column for the newsletter. The SIG demonstrated that interest in HyperCard is high in SMUG, and I will take Howard up on that suggestion. Please share your HyperThoughts with me at the meetings, on Redwood BBS, or call me at 826-9326.

Copyright © march, 1989 by Mike Furniss


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