HyperCard, what is it? It's not hyper, it's not even a card, it's not quite system software, it's not quite application software.
There must be at least one guy who knows what HyperCard is, Danny Goodman, he just wrote a 700 page book about it.
And there's one other guy who knows what HyperCard is, he developed it, Bill Atkinson.
They'll both be on our show. Today we unravel the mystery of HyperCard on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
The Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by McGraw-Hill, publishers of Byte Magazine, and Bix, the Byte Information Exchange.
In print and online, Byte and Bix serve computer professionals worldwide with detailed information on new hardware, software, and technologies.
Welcome to the Computer Chronicles, I'm Stuart Shafay and this is Gary Kildall. Gary, I haven't totally lost my mind here and reverted to my childhood and playing with this Erector Set.
What I'm trying to do is understand HyperCard, because the guy who developed HyperCard says it's like an Erector Set to help me build applications on my Macintosh.
People are having trouble understanding this concept of HyperCard. What's the background, what's the derivation of it?
Well, HyperCard is based upon hypertext, it's a concept that was introduced by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart in the 60s.
The basic idea is this, if we're trying to do research on a complicated, or not even complicated, just any kind of a subject,
the subject matter really exists in all sorts of different places. It can be books, magazines, videos, tape recordings, CompuServe.
And if we can somehow link all this stuff electronically, so that we click on Beethoven and then we all of a sudden can jump from one to the next,
collect up the information that we want, put it into the document, listen to the music, do some word processing and so forth,
that's what hypertext is all about, or hypermedia, and this is supposed to be the foundation for HyperCard.
Well, we're going to find out about HyperCard today. We're going to meet the two guys who developed it at Apple, Bill Atkinson and Dan Winkler,
and we're going to see several applications already being developed using HyperCard.
We begin by going to San Jose, California, to meet a man who's using HyperCard to develop something called the Complete Car Cost Guide.
Shopping for a new car can be a bewildering experience.
Making the wrong choice among look-alike models at breathtaking prices can turn a simple purchase into a lifelong mistake.
But Peter Levy thinks he can take some of the risk out of car buying with the help of a Macintosh and a HyperCard.
Peter has written a program to construct a model car according to specific choices entered by the buyer.
The HyperCard version of the Complete Car Cost Guide was spawned by the original book of the same name.
The guide uses HyperCard visual cues to prompt even a first-time user to enter the kind of information that affects the cost of ownership,
like optional equipment, yearly mileage, and geographical location.
The screen presents notebook pages that flip and turn, and commands are entered by either placing the cursor over a menu bar,
a HyperCard button, or by simply pointing and clicking on the appropriate part of the vehicle.
The Complete Car Cost Guide doesn't promise to turn a shopping chore into a happy experience,
but the HyperCard stacks make it easy to personalize several choices and then compare them side by side.
Two vehicles may cost the same, but differ sharply in the long term because of depreciation and operating costs.
But in spite of individual differences, owning any vehicle is expensive.
The opening screen contains a reminder that the first four years of ownership will cost more than the original price of the car.
♪♪♪
Joining us in the studio now is Bill Atkinson. Bill is an Apple Fellow, the creator of HyperCard, also the creator of QuickDraw and MacPaint.
Next to Bill is Dan Winkler. Dan is the senior engineer at Apple working on the HyperCard project. Eric?
Stuart, a HyperCard sounds like a hardware board you'd put into your computer system, but this particular HyperCard comes on four floppy disks.
Would you tell us what HyperCard's all about, Bill?
Well, really simply put, HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets non-programmers put together interactive information.
Show us how you actually do this, Bill.
You use cards that contain graphics and text and buttons.
Here I've got a stack of cards and I can press on this button and it will take me to another card.
Okay, and that button's particular function is get to the next card.
Right. You can have lots of buttons to do different things.
Buttons can do things like dialing the phone and taking you to cards and lots of different things.
Whatever you tell it to do.
Yeah.
Okay.
The cards are grouped together into stacks that you put on a floppy disk and can share with somebody else.
And you can organize it so that any card can jump to any other card.
Is this where you get that notion of hypertext built into the HyperCard system?
Yeah, it's kind of the freedom to organize the information according to how things are associated with each other,
not just according to the next card in the list.
Right, right, okay.
The buttons, as I said, can do lots of things.
Here's one that makes a noise and sounds.
And you can have lots of different kinds of cards.
The standard 3 by 5 card is a little weak metaphor, but you can include things like an expense report
or maybe an appointment book, things like that.
Lots of different kinds of things can be on cards.
Even little interactions.
Here's a little keyboard that you could click on.
And it makes sounds and moves the note accordingly.
So you can do things within a card itself.
A card is just not some information.
Right.
What's really important is that cards contain both information and interaction.
Right.
That's sort of what's new here.
One particular card that we use a lot is the home card,
which serves as sort of a home base of leading out to all the other stacks of cards that I use frequently.
For example, if I touch here on the home card, I can go to my address list.
Here I've got cards that have names and addresses of people.
Can you make up your own stacks of cards then also?
Right.
HyperCard comes with a set of stacks that you can use as they are, but also make your own.
Some people start by making small changes to the stacks,
and then they'll actually make their own fresh ones.
And people have already developed quite a few stacks using HyperCard, haven't they?
Right.
There are several hundred on the public networks.
Okay.
What other things can you do here, Bill?
So I might say, find Jim and quickly get to a card containing that.
Okay.
Wait.
Now that's a real new element you just introduced.
You can actually just write a natural language phrase in here and ask HyperCard to do something for you.
To find Jim.
It'll find it.
I could go to a calendar and see a yearly calendar here or touch on a particular day and go out to a weekly for that.
It opens up the whole thing.
Yeah, and these are different stacks of information.
Here I've got a stack that has my to-do list in it, and I could select something there
and then touch on the address icon, and that button will take me to the address stack
and look up what I had just selected there.
So I can have the information in these stacks tied together in ways that make sense.
Exactly.
It's the following hypertext link in that case, right?
Right, only that was actually computed.
It not only went there but then did a search once it got there.
I see.
Right.
I could have other stacks.
Here, let's go back to the home.
Here's a stack that contains more graphical information.
Here I might say, find a horse and get to a card that has a horse.
Or I could branch around to other cards that had horses just by clicking on them.
There's nothing real magic here.
Okay, so you went find horse, it pulled up all the horse cards, and you now have a horse card stack?
Is that it?
No.
It's just shown me the next card that had the word horse in it.
Okay, that's what I meant.
I could say, show me, here's a button on this wheel.
So if I touch on that, see, it's going to other wheels.
So these buttons or links can be used to express thematic threads running through information.
Here, touch on a hat to get the things that have hats.
And this way you can organize information in multiple ways.
You can also scan through images rather quickly to just see, show me what's there,
even if you don't know what you're looking for.
Dan, you were involved in the HyperTalk part of HyperCard, which is, I guess, the highest level here.
Could you explain that a little bit?
HyperTalk is the language that tells the buttons what to do.
When you look inside a button, you can see its script, which is its brains.
This message box here, where we've been typing commands like find, can do a lot more.
It can do calculations there.
It knows about the value of pi.
It knows all the math functions.
It knows what the date is or what the long date is.
Oops.
The long.
Nobody saw the title.
Or you can give it little commands like go to next card, like that, and it will.
And if you look inside one of these little buttons, you'll see that its brains actually say go to next card.
That's how that button knows how to do it.
So this is script for that button.
This is how a customer or user would actually program the buttons themselves.
That's right.
Let's make a new button.
For example, let's go back to the first card here.
Supposing we wanted this i to tie in some other place.
You could take the button tool, stretch out a button here, and say link that to, say, find an i, and say link it to this card.
That's all it takes to make a new link between that i and that button so that you can go there.
To do that much doesn't require any knowledge of scripting, but once you learn about scripting, you can progress to modifying buttons like that.
For example.
If we look inside this button, we'll see that what link to really did was it wrote a little script for us.
Okay, which is your little program telling the button what to do.
Right.
And now you can go in by hand and modify that.
For example, we could add a visual effect.
We could say visual effect dissolve, for example.
Now that very same button, when you touch on it, will dissolve to that i.
Or you could go a step farther and say, well, I want a sound effect in there, too.
So you could say, well, play me a sound like this.
Like boing.
And maybe make it visual effect dissolve slowly.
I want a slow dissolve.
And now when you touch there, it plays a sound and dissolves slowly.
Right.
So the scripting language lets you customize buttons and make new buttons that weren't already there.
Okay.
This is really a multidimensional erector set that will go on forever.
Right.
It comes with boxes of parts already.
There's lots of art ideas that you can cut and paste if you're slow with the painting tools.
You can copy and paste any of these things.
It comes complete with libraries of buttons and stacks.
For example, if you were going to make a new stack, you might go through a list of templates here and say, I like that one.
A new stack, say we're going to make a stack for incoming messages.
We choose new stack from the file menu.
We name it messages.
That's all it takes to make a new stack.
We've got our own stack.
Now we can type into it call Ted Kaler.
And maybe his number was 3561234 or something like that.
Bill, Dan, we could spend all day here with this toy.
This really looks great.
We're going to have to move along.
We're going to be back in just a minute with another guy who probably knows more about HyperCard than anybody except for these two guys, and that's Danny Goodman.
So stay with us.
Joining us in the studio now is Danny Goodman, author of the Complete HyperCard Handbook called The Bible of HyperCard.
I'm back with us, of course, Bill Atkinson, the developer of HyperCard.
Danny, I'd be interested, what was your first reaction, the first time you looked at HyperCard?
I've been covering the computer industry for several years, and the only three things that ever made me tingle when I saw something new, and HyperCard was definitely one of them.
And it's like my brain expanded because I saw so much opportunity.
You've got to tell me what the other two were, by the way.
Well, they happened to be the Macintosh and output from the first, from Prototype LaserWriter.
Now, you're not a programmer, right?
No, I'm a writer.
But you've already developed some things using HyperCard, and Focal Point is one of them.
And tell us what that is and why you developed it.
Focal Point is stackware, and it's published by Activision.
And it's a collection of stacks that help you manage the things in your business.
I actually wrote it for myself to manage the things in my business, things I don't like to have to worry about.
I don't like to retype.
I don't like to remember things.
So it comes up to something like a daily appointment book, and you can navigate by day, week, month, or year just by clicking there on the arrows.
There is an intelligent to-do list that lets you list items that you need to do.
You can also type in, like, priorities like that and let HyperCard sort them for me so they're in my order.
And when I check off an item as being done, that's fine.
I don't know, Gary or Stuart, I don't always finish everything every day that's on my list.
And when that happens, I just click on this carryover button down here, and all unchecked items get carried over automatically to tomorrow.
And there are other – there's a telephone management system here.
There is a document launcher, which lets you create little mini-finders or group documents from within here the way you like to group them, the way that makes sense to you.
And you go straight out to the application and then come back afterwards.
For more client and vendor, that kind of management, we have a number of buttons on the right side.
And you can look at your client records and also then also on your projects.
And to enter information about your clients, I give you a little pop-up list, and you just click, and the name gets put in there automatically, no retyping.
And the one application here that ties everything together is the deadlines.
And it goes into all your cards, pulls out all your little milestones and follow-ups, organizes them, sorts them chronologically, and gives you at a glance where you stand, what's late, what's today, what's coming up.
You could really use one of those.
Now, let's turn it around, Bill.
How did you react when you saw how a non-programmer, Danny, was actually able to use HyperCard?
Well, it was very rewarding to me to see somebody really building stuff with this.
The software erector set approach was actually working for people putting together interactive information.
Now, Apple is handling HyperCard in a kind of unusual way.
I mean, how do you get HyperCard?
If you buy a Macintosh, it comes free with it.
If you have a Macintosh already, you can buy it for $49.
So you're really trying to get people out there like Danny.
We want it to be there for everybody who makes stacks to be able to share them, and everybody should have the program to be able to access those stacks.
Where do you think this is going to go in terms of, you know, at first it looks like the Mac came out as a sort of a successor to the Apple II and got into games and drawings and things like that.
It's sort of become a business computer now.
Do you see that the HyperCard also is going to be a very powerful business tool?
What sort of applications do you see?
I think what it's going to do is to open up the software architecture of the Mac and let the nature of information on a computer go from text and graphics to text and graphics and interaction.
Sort of the rest of the world is kind of catching up to the graphics part while we're moving on to the interaction part.
And so the programmers are actually going to be coming from some of the vertical markets and so forth themselves rather than being the traditional programmers?
A whole new body of people that have creative ideas but aren't programmers will be able to express their ideas or their expertise in a certain subject area.
We have another example of that right now.
Matter of fact, the ability of HyperCard to organize not only text but sounds and pictures has led to one company taking its mail order catalog and turning that into stackware.
Wendy Woods has a report from Sausalito.
The Whole Earth catalog has been published here in Sausalito since 1969.
It's basically a listing of useful and hard to find products.
And some two and a half million copies of this catalog have been sold worldwide.
But for the first time, people here are opting for a new publishing method.
They're putting the entire catalog on Apple's HyperCard software.
HyperCard, in fact, solved a problem with which they'd been struggling.
How to make locating, tracking, even expanding upon information in the catalog fast and more efficient.
Part of the problem was none of the software that we'd ever looked in terms of accessing a lot of information was ever very visual.
And the Whole Earth catalog is, if nothing else, a very graphic medium.
And HyperCard, because it dealt with graphics, was able to meet those requirements for one thing.
The second was it was easy to build. None of us are hackers.
We don't, we aren't programmers.
And this was something that we could do without having to learn a new language.
Text and pictures were captured with an optical scanner or a video camera.
HyperCard also allowed sound effects to be added.
And to hear them, all you do is click a mouse button.
This is considered the largest HyperCard project ever undertaken.
Its output the equivalent of more than 80 diskettes.
This project is expected to reach final form as a CD-ROM or optical disk.
In Sausalito, California, for the Computer Chronicles, I'm Wendy Woods.
♪♪
Joining us now in the studio is Robert Stein.
He's with the Voyager Company in Los Angeles, and they're working with HyperCard and the LaserDisc, aren't you?
Yeah, Stuart, as we were talking about earlier, the HyperCard concept really is based on hypertext and hypermedia.
It involves text, graphics, sound, video, and so forth.
And Robert's got a product here that he's working with that involves a full-size video disc.
As most of the viewers know, this is a rather old technology.
It involves about 30 minutes of rolling video or 54,000 still frames.
Robert, can you tell us how you've used this?
Sure. We've taken the National Gallery of Art video disc,
which has on it photographs of the entire standing collection of the National Gallery of Art,
everything that's on display there.
And we've tried to make it possible for the user to look at these pictures in different ways.
For example, you can press on a chronological, and you'll get an index that lets you press on 16th, for example,
and see all the works from the 16th century.
Or I can go in by nationality, in which case I can press on this,
and it'll show me all the Russian works or French works or Belgian works.
Or I can go in by style or period, in which case, let's say, Cubism gives me a definition of the Cubist style,
and these are representative works that I can click on and go to see them.
Or I also have a complete artist index, and I can press on this, and you can see...
You can essentially create your own exhibits or rooms in the museum, is what you're doing.
Exactly. Here I can press on Manet, and it'll take me to the gallery,
and it will find the first Manet chronologically in the gallery for me.
And it comes up on the screen, gives me information about this particular painting,
and the painting is on the screen.
Let's say I'm interested in Manet, I can ask for more of this artist,
in which case, press on that button, and it will find me the next painting by Manet.
Or let's say I'm interested in this style of Impressionist painters.
I can ask for more Impressionist painters, it'll find Manet, do it again, it'll find Renoir for me.
Sometimes a magnifying glass comes up on the screen,
and this means that I have a detail on the video disc of this particular painting.
And sometimes a motion picture projector comes up,
and this tells me I have a motion picture sequence on the video disc about this particular painting.
Renoir's little girl with a watering can is a scene from every...
I can control that from here.
...everyday life. You see...
And also this icon up here, it's our marginalia icon, lets me put a note in here.
I can say, for example, reminds me of my daughter, Katie,
and the note card will go away, and this will change from empty to full.
And then a year from now, I don't have to remember the name of this painting or who did it.
I can simply just ask it to find Katie,
and with a little bit of luck, it'll go and find that painting for me.
So I can really personalize a very large-scale database.
This is our serendipity button, it takes me randomly somewhere in the gallery, you don't know quite where.
The searching is very powerful, we have keywords for everything in here.
So for example, I can ask for all Impressionist landscapes with boats,
and the system will find it for me, and I can press again, it'll find another one,
and then another.
And let's suppose I find this to be an interesting subject,
and I wonder how it was treated during a different period.
So I'll change the word Impressionist to the word Romantic,
and it will find Romantic landscapes with boats.
And then using one of HyperCard's most important features,
it'll remember the last 42 things that I've looked at,
so I can press Retrace, and it'll go back and find the last picture,
and the last picture, and I can retrace in both directions.
So I always pretty much have everything available to me all the time.
What do you think HyperCard means to interactive video?
I've been waiting around for interactive video for a number of years.
I've been in this business for seven years,
and we've been concentrating on what they call Level 1 discs that don't have a computer,
because we didn't think it was a computer powerful enough.
I think that HyperCard and Macintosh together mean this is your wand of interactive video.
Robert, thank you very much. That's an impressive use of HyperCard.
That's it for HyperCard. We hope you enjoyed it.
Hope you'll see us again next week on the Computer Chronicles.
♪♪
In the random access file this week, Comdex dominates the news.
Here at the Las Vegas Convention Center, it was the 10th annual Fall Comdex,
and the biggest one ever, 100,000 attendees, more than 1,700 exhibitors.
On the hardware side, the major issue was still the battle over bus architecture between ESA and MCA,
and there was no clear consensus as to who the winner would be.
At a keynote session, Compaq's Rod Canyon said the main issue was compatibility with the installed base of PCs.
But IBM's Terry Lautenbach said the old AT bus had simply run out of gas
and could not support advanced applications.
Analyst Tim Baharan said he thought microchannel architecture would prevail in the end,
but only after a difficult struggle.
Color printers were hot now that color has taken over the monitor business.
With over half the CRTs in use being color displays, the next logical step is color printers.
The increased use of desktop publishing and desktop presentations
also appears to be driving a new interest in transferring the color on the screen to color print.
Optical storage was warm, though not quite hot.
Sony was demonstrating and taking orders for its new erasable optical disk drives.
Microsoft was pushing their CD-ROM products, and Intel, which recently acquired digital video interactive technology,
was showing prototypes of new DVI optical disk products.
Apple returned to Comdex with a major push for the Macintosh II,
and Commodore and Atari were here, very visible, each pushing graphics, music, animation, and desktop video.
On the software side, the buzzword was groupware.
Groupware is more than just network software.
It's software which primarily supports groups and group work activities rather than individuals.
Analyst Amy Wall, who chaired the Comdex session on groupware,
said the hot topic is procedural processing software that can track the movement of paper through an organization.
Other hot software topics were PIMs, personal information managers, with Lotus reporting good sales of Agenda.
Many marketers' eyes at this Comdex were focused more on Europe than on the United States.
In 1992, Europe was scheduled to unify and move to one common set of computer standards.
That means a new unified Europe would represent a larger market than the United States.
Indeed, the standards issue may be simpler there than here at home.
IBM took some heat from analysts at Comdex.
One characterized OS II as yesterday's software tomorrow, saying Unix can do everything OS II can and more.
But the issue was at what price and ease of use.
IBM itself put on quite a show, saying OS II and PS II were doing very well, thank you.
And Businessland exec Enzo Teresi said IBM's MCA computers
now make up more than 50 percent of its business in 286 and 386 machines.
Byte magazine ran a survey on operating systems, asking Comdex attendees which operating system would dominate in the 1990s.
The winner was Extended DOS.
In second place was Standard DOS.
OS II came in third, followed by Graphic Interface Unix, Standard Command Line Unix,
and last among the Comdex voters was the Macintosh operating system.
Finally, Zerco unveiled its new laptop car seat.
It's a laptop platform that fits onto the passenger seat of your car, turning it into a computer workstation.
Get stuck at a red light? Just turn around and start computing.
That's it for this week's Chronicles. We'll see you next time.
The Computer Chronicles is made possible in part by McGraw-Hill,
publishers of Byte magazine, and Bix, the Byte Information Exchange.
In print and online, Byte and Bix serve computer professionals worldwide
with detailed information on new hardware, software, and technologies.
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