Engelbart and Kay --was: Back to the Future with Hypercard

[Judy Perry]

On Dec 28, 2007 2:43 AM, Bill Marriott <wjm at wjm.org> wrote:
> Does Revolution have the same, "your six-year-old can write a stack" elan
> the HyperCard did? Probably not, but I think that is due to a variety of
> factors:
>
> - The included stacks in HyperCard like clip art and stack ideas. This kind
> of content could surely be created in Revolution, but there doesn't seem to
> be much of a demand for it.

--Bill, I would respectfully disagree with you on this.  I've only
been to 2 RevCons, but I am fairly certain that this was discussed as
a 'must have' at both as a measure to improve the 'out of the box'
experience for new Rev users. As a matter of fact, people asked me
about this very issue at the educational conference last summer where
I presented a paper on Rev being an ideal tool for educators!

And what was I to tell them?  That the company doesn't think that
there is " much of a demand for it"?!?

If all you want to do is sell Rev to that small niche (perhaps even
smaller than the potential niche of the ed market!) of savvy
programmers who aren't afraid to use something other than the
commonly-accepted programming languages of C/++/#, Java etc., then
fine; but if you want to open up Rev's installed user base into other
areas, these HC-like stacks are a must have.
>
> - The vastly more complicated computing environments of today's operating
> systems. HyperCard could more easily exploit the full power of the Apple
> Macintosh of the day, because the domain was much smaller. (And there *was*
> color back then; HyperCard just punted on it.)

--Not real color, as you must know, unless you were on the Apple IIGS.
>
>
> - Education refocusing on Office- and application-based learning, when back
> then there was still an interest in exposing high school students to
> programming.

--It doesn't have to be this way.  I have 8 y.o. twin niece & nephew
whose third grade teacher makes them produce their vocabulary words in
PowerPoint.  Why?  It's the only thing she was taught to use.  Office
apps will continue to dominate education in the most bizarre and
useless ways possible until educators see that there is an alternative
that is not bizarre, is not useless, but is useable for them (which
Rev currently is not but could be).

>
> - Dramatically enhanced external illustration programs that obviate the need
> for things like the lasso and spray can tools. (HyperCard was popular in
> part because it was a greatly enhanced successor to MacPaint.)

--Ever tried to teach adults to use such simple things?  I'm talking
about adults who just want to casually produce some images for some
other purpose, not graphic artists who live for Photoshop.

For that matter, try to teach these same casual users to use Photoshop
just to do something simple.  They return telling you how much they
hate computers.  I'm currently teaching a Rev-less 3rd year course for
my CS department which is a general education course on computers and
society.  To help them understand just how "easy" it is to produce
digital hoaxes that they are unprepared to discern, I have them
produce their own digital hoax.  Since the machines in the room have
Micro$oft PhotoDraw, I have the assignment based on using that.  The
very few Mac users tried instead to d/l the Photoshop trial and told
me how it made them want to tear their hair out.  Bottom line:
there's still a market out there who would prefer HC-level simplistic
graphics tools.  (I have a soft spot myself for fatBits).

>
> - Desire for Revolution to be as similar to, and compatible with, HyperCard
> as possible. For example, I almost never use cards anymore. I find myself
> using a different paradigm when creating my solutions. I'm much more likely
> to use multiple windows and substacks (oops, another huge item for the list
> above). It may well be the case that further departing from the HyperCard
> metaphor will be necessary for the next great leap forward. After all,
> HyperCard itself was a break with previous metaphors.

--Breaking metaphors may well be required... but what made the card
metaphor successful was that it was a metaphor that people *already
understood* as opposed to some new, esoteric metaphor that nobody
understood.  One early study examined people using both a print
resource as well as a Hypercard stack resource for finding
information.  For those users using the HC stack, they were found to
be more comfortable using embedded search techniques which mimicked
pre-existing search metaphors than they were with more esoteric
metaphors that they couldn't understand (Hypertext or book: Which is
better for answering questions?  Barbee T. Mynatt, Laura Marie
Leventhal, Keith Instone, John Farhat, Diane S. Rohlman [June 1992],
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing
systems CHI '92)

Judy