HyperCard and Rev [was: Hobbyist License]

[Dan Shafer]

Jim Witte wrote:

>   I always thought that what Apple should have done with HC was
>integrate it directly into the Finder and the OS itself.

We're probably on the verge of starting to annoy all the new people 
who are still asking, "What's this HyperCard thing and who gives a 
rat's patoot?" but I'll risk one more anecdote.

When HyperCard was about two years old or so, I was invited by the 
then lead Evangelist for HC (bob Perez) to lunch to discuss where 
Apple was considering taking HyperCard and to get my take on it. (My 
HyperTalk book was all the rage at the time, so I had some cachet, I 
suppose.)

Bob outlined for me the idea of embedding HC into the Mac ROM and 
making it the system-wide scripting language for everything. This 
pre-dates AppleScript, remember. I told him I thought that was a 
brilliant idea. As I recall, I jumped out of my seat as I reacted to 
it.

Think about where Apple would be if they had put HC and a TCP/IP 
stack in the Mac ROM in the late 80's or even early 90's. Sadly, such 
vision was not to carry the day. For reasons I'm sure are lost to 
antiquity, AppleScript -- a decent enough language but clearly not in 
the same league as HyperTalk -- defeated the real gem of Apple's 
software universe and the rest is history.

As I understand it -- and I think this is accurate info based on the 
quality of my source -- HC3 was going to use QuickTime movies as its 
native format rather than the proprietary HC file format. But they 
couldn't get anything resembling reasonable performance out of data 
stored in QT formats.
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Dan Shafer
Technology Visionary - Technology Assessment - Documentation
"Looking at technology from every angle"
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