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

Happy birthday, big GOOG

Google is thirteen today…back in 1998 when the site was still hosted at http://google.stanford.edu, Keith Dawson gave the search engine its first online coverage in English on the fondly remembered Tasty Bits From the Technology Front.

This site, one of the few rigorous academic research projects on Web searching, presents a demonstration database — only 25M documents — that already blows past most of the existing search engines in returning relevant nuggets. Google employs a concept of Page Rank derived from academic citation literature. Page Rank equates roughly to a page’s importance on the Web: the more inbound links a page has, and the higher the importance of the pages linking to it, the higher its Page Rank.

• Google
• Keith Dawson
• search