Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on HyperCard

After posting the video on the history of HyperCard the other day, I went down a bit of a HyperCard rabbit hole on the Internet Archive. There are a ton of HyperCard programs, manual & packaging scans, and other resources available on IA; among them:

• The Manhole, from the developers of Myst
• A bird identification quiz
• The 1991 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference Presentation (“Contains session info, presentations, and attendee list”)
• The “expanded book” version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• A guide to the first season of Twin Peaks
• The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog from Stewart Brand & Kevin Kelly

I also found this version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies:

You can see why people call HyperCard “the web before the web”…it’s all right there.

Also, don’t miss this comment from Keith Dawson (who you may remember from the pioneering tech newsletter Tasty Bits From the Technology Front) on how HyperCard was almost called Wildcard.

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.

Wild.

• Apple
• Brian Eno
• computing
• HyperCard
• Keith Dawson

HyperCard Changed Everything

This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said:

HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets people put things together without having to know how to solder.

There’s a ton of information about HyperCard at hypercard.org, including this HyperCard simulator that runs in your browser.

• Apple
• Bill Atkinson
• computing
• HyperCard
• Vannevar Bush
• video