OT: Priorities (was: Re: Stack with the same name loop)

[Richmond]

What seems to come out of your interesting historical observations is 
that HyperCard
went "wrong" when people had to start paying for it.

There is obviously a lesson for today here.

Interestingly enough WINE (open source) and CodeWeavers (prop.) seem to 
manage to
co-exist and help each other successfully.

On 23.10.21 19:02, Paul McClernan via use-livecode wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 7, 2021 at 11:56 AM Bob Sneidar via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>
>> I say the people at Livecode LTD. deserve all the recompense they can get,
>> and by the way, we should be thankful to Steve Jobs who gave us Hypercard
>> (and actually convinced Apple to give it away for free!
>
> This may be going slightly further off topic, but it's a subject
> I've recently become very interested in again, and so for the sake of
> accuracy I'd like to try to correct this...
>
> It was actually HyperCard creator Bill Atkinson that gave HyperCard
> (originally called WildCard) to Apple on the condition that they would give
> it away to users included free with Macintosh computers.
>
> According to Bill, Jobs was actually angry that Atkinson refused to leave
> Apple to join Jobs' new company NeXT. Bill wanted to finish HyperCard and
> so stayed at Apple. Meanwhile NeXT created Objective C / NeXTstep, AppKit,
> etc. (much of which is open source, still available as GNUStep, thanks to
> Roger Stallman requiring Jobs to do so to use his GCC compiler). That's
> stuff that became the basis for the modern macOS.
>
> In the late 80s the first, and more advanced, clone of HC, SuperCard showed
> up, but Apple didn’t sue, they had a working group to standardize HyperTalk
> compatible languages (commonly known as xTalk).
>
> Over at Apple HyperCard while financial troubles hit, HC was spun off to a
> new subsidiary Claris (now FileMaker Inc.), which re-released HC as
> seperate a commercial product, and then HC's popularity started to wane.
> Around the same time HC inspired “WebBrowsers” with JavaScript their
> Scripting language, came to be. Which further reduced HCs popularity.
> Eventually HC was returned to Apple Proper, but hitch was then going to be
> used for QuickTime Interactive features of QT 3.0, which didn’t happen due
> to a shift towards streaming movies over interactivity.
>
> When Jobs came back to Apple, allegedly Jobs didn’t like HyperCard because
> it had “Sculley’s Stink all over it” because Jobs blamed John Sculley for
> convincing Atkinson to stay at Apple, and so under Jobs, Apple stopped
> supporting HyperCard, leaving it to wither away and die.
>
> HyperCard’s early success popularity was in large part due to it being
> freely available and ubiquitous on Macintosh, not in spite of it. Of course
> Apple was (and much more so now) a large company that could afford to give
> away a product like that to add value to its platform.
>
> I like the idea that in some alternate universe timeline where Apple
> successfully made XTalk a widely used standardized language, interactive
> pages of information and interactive content is being driven by xTalk
> Script rather than HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
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