Apple, HyperCard, and a glimpse of how far we’ve come

Check out the video in this tweet, a small piece of a larger project covering HyperCard:

At the time, back in 1990, this was absolutely groundbreaking. Since the internet was still in its infancy, images and data for a project were always stored locally. And images were massive, compared to the relatively tiny hard drives of the time.

The solution? Video discs and computer controlled video disc players. Back then, paper maps were filmed on incredibly precise animation stands (like those used for special effects camera fly-throughs), then cut into frames and stored on video disc. The computer moved along the maps by stepping through frames, each one a picture of a portion of a map at a slight offset from the previous frame.

In this example, the HyperCard stack presents a picture of the heart, and clicking on various buttons or hot points tells the video disc player to jump to an appropriate image or video.

How far we’ve come. Now, all those image can be stored locally, or brought up as needed from the cloud. And using cloud-shared resources means content can be updated as needed.

Fascinating look back. HyperCard was a truly groundbreaking piece of work by Bill Atkinson, one of the members of the original Macintosh team. If you are not familiar with Bill, take a look at his Wikipedia page. We owe him a lot.