HyperCard was pretty great, and it rapidly developed a devoted community. It had some fairly severe limitations (only about five built-in widgets and a scripting language in which the only data structure was text strings), but people still managed to make a lot of cool stuff with it--sometimes by writing extensions called XFCNs and XCMDs, generally in C.
SK8 removed HyoerCard's limitations, but it never really made it out of ATG. Well, there were a few technology-sharing projects with universities and industry.
But Apple's management had no idea what to do with HyperCard, much less SK8. They couldn't figure out what marketing category to put it in or how to charge for it. Heck, the only reason it existed at all was because of a promise they had made to Bill Atkinson to try to keep him from leaving.
I hear you about the current state of computing. I do miss the tools I was regularly working with in the early 90s.
HyperCard was pretty great, and it rapidly developed a devoted community. It had some fairly severe limitations (only about five built-in widgets and a scripting language in which the only data structure was text strings), but people still managed to make a lot of cool stuff with it--sometimes by writing extensions called XFCNs and XCMDs, generally in C.
SK8 removed HyoerCard's limitations, but it never really made it out of ATG. Well, there were a few technology-sharing projects with universities and industry.
But Apple's management had no idea what to do with HyperCard, much less SK8. They couldn't figure out what marketing category to put it in or how to charge for it. Heck, the only reason it existed at all was because of a promise they had made to Bill Atkinson to try to keep him from leaving.
I hear you about the current state of computing. I do miss the tools I was regularly working with in the early 90s.