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

[Kay C Lan]

On Dec 29, 2007 3:24 AM, Bill Marriott <wjm at wjm.org> wrote:

> Part of my thinking is not
> just the clip art stacks but also the address, date book, charting and
> other
> stacks where it seems we just won't have people switching from
> Office/Outlook.
>

But I don't think the intention is to have anyone switch.  Way back with my
first Mac I got HC. When I joined a Mac User Group, the BBS was 75% HC
stacks being shared around or talked about. Probably 50% of those were just
other peoples recreation of the address, date and other 'Apple supplied'
stacks. None of them made me switch from Palm Desktop - which was Claris
something back then but is so long ago I can't even remember it's name;-(

>
> My challenge would be that if there is a need for this kind of content, by
> all means let someone create it.


And this is a very small part of the reason that the Mac User Group that I'm
now a member of has 0 Rev stacks in it's download library. Personally I
believe that the success of HC came down to 3 things:

1) It was brilliant (Rev is even better)
2) It came with every Mac (Hard for Rev to emulate)
3) A whole bunch of 'simple' example stacks

It was 2 & 3 that created the ground swell that had all the MUGs swimming in
stacks which just further fanned the fire.

For me, a non-programmer, the HyperTalk chat that was going on on the BBS
was complete gobbledygook. It was the ability to open up those simple stacks
that created the 'you mean its THAT easy' kind of reaction. That's what got
me tinkering. From there I started looking into what others were downloading
to the BBS and seeing how they had taken the simple and extended it. Some I
could understand, others were over my head. So a good book or two from
authors we know so well and soon the gobbledygook started making sense.

>
> I think, for example, Revolution Media in particular would greatly benefit
> from these kinds of enhancement. It would be really interesting to see
> what
> a talented person could do to "re-imagine" the home stack and library of
> sample stacks that were included with HyperCard, using the new
> capabilities
> that are part of Revolution.
>

I certainly agree that Media would greatly benefit but the talented people
you are talking about, these were the kind of people that were downloading
'enhanced' stacks to the BBS. I very much believe that this List is just
overflowing with such people. But this is Step 2 in the process. These
people didn't make the basic stacks way back then, Apple did, they came in
the box.

IMHO people are no smarter today than way back then, I'd even suggest that
people today think that programing a computer is harder than it was in '87.
If you want more people to have a HC kind of 'you mean programming is THAT
easy' experience with Media, then when they download that 30 day trial there
needs to be a whole swathe of very simple stacks that show off glimpses of
Rev's potential, but firmly focused on 'easy to use'. And that, I believe,
is for Rev to orcestrate, not to just hope that someone talented will come
along.

It's a bit like me just wishing that there'd be a couple of Rev users in my
local MUG;-)