I fell in love with computers the moment I met HyperCard — the piece of software that impacted the trajectory of my life the most. As a kid, it let me create instead of simply consume.

I met Marc Andreessen as a high school kid when he showed me early Mosaic (pre-Netscape) while at NCSA at the University of Illinois where my mom was a professor. It was “like a magazine that lived on gopher.” I liked the hyperlink part, but I remember telling him that I thought a magazine on a screen wasn’t very interesting, and that he needed to make it more like HyperCard. He told me I was too young and didn’t understand.

After later digging through years of hacked-together interactive experiences and Macromedia Flash and early JavaScript, I still feel like Mosaic should have been more like HyperCard.

Here’s a tiny sidelight on HyperCard. In the 1980s I was the product manager for Texet, an electronic publishing startup in the Boston area. In 1986 we were developing a general-purpose text munging utility to accept input in a variety of formats (Perl hadn’t yet arrived on the scene). We named it Wildcard and took out a registered trademark on that name. Soon after, I took a call from Apple. Would we be willing to give up the name Wildcard, or at least license it for their use on a new product? We discussed it. No. Apple went away and soon launched HyperCard.

In those days of the classic Mac OS, every file had a Type and a Creator code to help match up documents with the applications that created them. The creator code for HyperCard stacks was: WILD.

How would the world have developed differently if Apple hadn’t stressed the hyperlinking nature of Atkinson’s creation, harking back to Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush?

Hypercard was like magic to an 80's kid! I spent every extra minute I could find on the class computer making choose your own adventures.

My first 'programming' was working on an interactive museum presentation in HyperCard. I was 18 or 19. It made me buy my first Mac (a Mac+), which changed my life.