I realize this isn’t a strictly car-related thing, but it is something that fits in with one of my other interests, old, obsolete computers, and it’s also about someone who was very influential in developing ideas about human-computer interfaces that we still use regularly today, including at least one concept that I always thought could have become the World Wide Web that we’re all frolicking on today. The someone I’m talking about is Bill Atkinson, who died at the age of 74 about a week ago.
Atkinson worked for Apple from 1978 to 1990, on the development of the Lisa and then the Macintosh, the computers which were host to the then-new concepts of graphical user interfaces that dominate our lives today, in various forms. Atkinson wrote the underlying code to draw all the stuff that was needed to put these interfaces on the screen, something that would eventually come to be called QuickDraw, and in that process came up with some ideas that we’re so used to they just seem like an inherent part of the visual world we work in, somehow always present.
I’m talking about things like menu bars and the lasso selection tool, the “marching ants” dashed lines that indicate something selected, and more.
Bill Atkinson is one of those people whose names I’ve always seen associated with the tools of my work (I was a UI/UX/graphic designer/illustrator before I dedicated my life to taillight lore)and someone I’ve always had a great deal of respect for.
He was also instrumental in a fascinating project that was incredibly influential, but just a bit too far ahead of its time. It was a tool that I wish had a modern equivalent, because while many traits of it are still around, it’s not quite the same. It was something called HyperCard.
Here’s a clip from a 1987 television show episode that focused on HyperCard, with Atkinson there to explain things, and yes, there is some car-related content in here:
Look, there’s an ’87 Mustang in there, rendered in glorious 1-bit black-and-white dithered graphics!
So let’s talk about what HyperCard was here for a moment, so you understand why I think it’s so important: it was a very simple way for people to create these “stacks” of “cards” and each card could have hypertext links that opened files or other cards – just like the hypertext links on the web today.
You could make cards with buttons that did things, all using a built-in scripting language. You could place images on cards, blocks of text, animations, videos (remember QuickTime?), and more.
Buttons could be images, too, as you can see up above with that carmaker selection card. Are those all the brands that guy included? Kind of an odd mix, mostly because of Jaguar. And it’s a little weird to see the Chrysler Pentastar with just “Dodge” under it.
If you’re thinking all of this sounds just kind of like web pages, then, yeah, you’re absolutely right, it does! Essentially, what Atkinson made with HyperCard was the World Wide Web, years early, but without one key element: the internet.
Hypercard stacks were designed to be distributed on diskette, and whatever data or resources they linked to would need to be on those disks or perhaps a hard drive. There just wasn’t a good, easy way to get access to the then very-nascent internet at the time. There were some online services, like Compuserve, but they were more like big bulletin board systems (BBS) than anything like what we know the web to be today.
But HyperCard was a LOT like the web, in some ways better, as it was easier to put together cards, which you could do without any coding, really. It was a very drag-and-drop system, no need for clunky HTML or style sheets or JavaScript or anything like that.
I remember the ease and speed with which you could throw together pretty complex and good-looking HyperCard stacks, and I miss a tool like that today; a quick and easy way to make a new tool or little application. For example, my old sketch comedy group used a HyperCard stack to act as a digital sound-playing system when we did shows. I used it for interactive presentations and silly art projects. It was great!
You know the early CD-ROM game Myst? That was originally written in HyperCard.
HyperCard could have become a (I think) slightly better World Wide Web had anyone managed to see that one crucial missing element – connecting with the world, easily. If faster modems existed in 1987, if a more mature internet was around, who knows what could have happened? A HyperCard-based web would have been great.
That’s not how things worked out, of course, and that’s okay. But I did want to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of a person I respected a lot, and someone who many people may not realize was such a crucial part of what has become so much of our modern world.
Top graphic image: anoved via flickr, also via computerhistory.org
Yes, he was a great guy. My wife and I went to a presentation where he was demonstrating what you could do with graphics software. Very friendly nice guy. My first Mac was the 512 Fat Mac which I used to make recruitment posters at the Los Angeles Peace Corps office. I later took it to Ecuador, Costa Rica and finally traded it in the Dominican Republic. Not well remembered, but Bill Atkinson came up with a postcard app where you could design a post card anyway you wanted with custom stamps. You could either make a PDF or send the file to him where he would print it and send it out. I really got a kick out that program though certainly a lesser accomplishment compared to HyperCard.
I bought a Mac Plus in 1986 at the start of my first year teaching and it was way different from anything out there (well, the Amiga was interesting in its own way.). It took two paychecks to pay for it, I kept it for nearly ten years. I did buy Hyper Card when it first came out but didn’t really know what to do with it. As you noted, you couldn’t share them, you couldn’t display them to a group… Mac software wasn’t compatible with PCs (or Apple IIc, IIe) either. These were the days before internal hard drives on computers… I had a rudimentary scanner that was some sort of camera on a dot matrix printer cartridge insert. Early days.
Hypercard was good. I remember, with no programming experience beyond very basic BASIC in HS computer class (punchcards!!), I wrote a stack to do some function or other that I needed done over and over and wanted to automate. Just using whatever was in the Help menu for instruction, IIRC.
I remember Bill Atkinson’s name appearing many places thruout the Mac. RIP.
Another thing I remember and wish you could do today, was edit all the system resources. There were icon editors etc. built in to the System on Macs, and you could mess around with stuff without breaking it. Resource fork and data fork accessible in all the applications, Edit a CLUT and make things crazy, but be able to go back again.
I would appreciate Hypercard more if my Mac SE didn’t run out memory all the time. I suppose I could load it into an emulator, since that allows me to run lots of memory and the fastest possible CPU.
Atkinson was indeed visionary. FWIW, some of us did figure out how to connect hyperlinks over Apple Talk (an early networking protocol) and even over modem connections. Fun times.
I’d also like to call out the accomplishments of Alvy Ray Smith, who fortunately still roams this rock. If you are into computer graphics, he has been massively transformative and consequential to where we are today. He also seemed like a really nice guy the times I interacted with him.
Being a graphic design major in the late 80’s I was deep into the emergence of Macs as a graphic design tool. And, of course, Hypercard. Much to my regret.
It was very easy to make animations which worked the same as a flip book. Just auto play the cards through a set of pictures, each slightly altered from the one before. As a class project I did about a 40 card animation which had as the climax (poor choice of words as you will see) a woman whose breasts inexplicably grew and grew until they exploded and wiped the card clean. My only excuse is that I was a 19 year old white male, lame as that is.
I still cringe every time I think of it…
As others have said, any superlatives said about Atkinson somehow still fall short of the man’s genius and influence.
Hypercard was so far ahead of it’s time. Not only was it a hypertext web precursor, it was an early rapid development platform, it was (in my opinion) a no-SQL precursor as it was a GUI to a flat-file persistent changes database. It’s a Turing-complete language.
But honestly… I’m glad it didn’t become the web standard. It was so powerful it would have made Flash seem secure. Hypercard + network connectivity would have been a security nightmare.
The threads of Atkinson’s legacy are in my early education and career. I remember digging through the original mac docs and watching vids from Apple featuring Atkinson and other Apple team members while learning to dev on a mac in their version of OOP Pascal. Had many macs over the years staring with a 128 which was ultimately hotrodded into a 1 MB 68030 with a color display (all using various commercial and custom kludges).
I learned Smalltalk and Objective C in one of the languages classes I took. I wrote a SmallTalk interpreter as part of that class and fell down the rabbit hole of Xerox Parc (creators of the modern GUI, word processing, Ethernet, laser printers, VLSI design tools, graphical editors, silicon design tools, digital whiteboards, laptop computers, and so much more tech that is used in our modern world.) Apple toured the Xerox labs and were demoed a running Xerox workstation the tech from which was licensed by Apple and became the prototype Lisa.
Bill Gates and a bunch from Microsoft also toured Parc and proceeded to cobble together early windows.
A class project involved porting Minix (pre Linux) to a 128 mac at university.
Messed around with HyperCard, but couldn’t really get into it much.
I had a Next computer (like the one used to develop httpd and hypertext by Berners Lee).
Next was a computer company and system developed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple. Apple ultimately bought Next and used the underlying operating system NextStep as the new Apple OSX.
The legacy of Atkinson will live on for decades IMO.
I got my start as a graphic designer using Mac Paint on a Mac classic black and white. If you did something fancy such as using a gradient it took awhile. As in- go get some coffee and come back and it was done.
I was almost certain the next word on the screen was going to be pornography.
The driver of so much modern technology.
I was a COBOL programmer back in the day, so this Apple stuff was foreign to us IBMers.
I’ve heard of Bill Arkinson many times over the years. A pioneer. Rest in peace.
JT, you’re speaking my language. I learned Hypercard in junior high computer class and I ran a BBS from the late 80’s to early 90’s.
I bought a Fat Mac, a second 400K micro-floppy drive and an ImageWriter (Okidata) printer in early 1985. I built HyperCard stacks in 1988 to make a speedy cyber-Rolodex for my work contacts when I got promoted to middle-management in a TV newsroom.
That was a long time ago and I haven’t thought of HyperCard in decades.
I have been schlepping the Apple gear and a 20 MB SCSI hard drive around the country ever since. My guess is that it wouldn’t boot up if I plugged everything in and together. The hard drive was cranky back in the late 90’s and the Mac itself went through power supplies disturbingly and expensively back then.
I knew about Bill Atkinson back then. I always pictured him as being an older, wise man and it’s humbling to realize he was only six years older than me.
Thank you for honoring him and coincidentally dusting off some old brain cells.
Oh god… SCSI cables and interfaces. That brings back memories and rituals involving voodoo.
You’ve not lived until you’ve written assembly and C interfaces for Adaptec scsi cards so they can communicate with your new computer running Linux.
Compiling the kernel over and over is such fun!
Then do it all over for your nvidea and ATI video cards.
At least it kept me out of the bar.
The rituals worked even better with the Voodoo2.
Accounting: Why do you have a line item for “live goats” in your IT budget?
It just goes to show how cool of things people can come up with when there isn’t a defined box that we’re all trying to think within.
Jason, I’d just like to mention, I have my original c.1993 CD of MYST, my original 5-CD set of Riven — the one that came with cardboard-sleeve CD-holders in a cardboard box. Both are in pretty good condition, both still work. No, I am not offering to part with them.
Also I have a working Commodore 64 and 1571 disk drive and I sort of know how to use both.
I have my Myst CD somewhere, though my Riven CDs are missing while I still somehow have the box. I have been kicking myself for years for having sold both my Commodore 64 and Mac IIe at a garage sale back in the mid-90s.
Not only do I still have my original MYST and Riven CDs, I still have the little journal that shipped with MYST.
Good education for people like me, who were “tech adjacent” and have distinct memories of playing on the Mac of my parents’ wealthy friends because that was probably the only Mac within a 50-mile radius. Many a penis was drawn on MacPaint and saved. I’m sure they never even knew who did it! /s
I mean, the man not only had FALCON, but also a control stick and throttle for it. Meanwhile, I was just flying a Cessna 172 into a wire-frame Sears Tower on the Commodore 64 using keyboard keys. World of difference.
Myst was the game that made me give up computers because it was always wreaking havoc on our Gateway machine. I got sick of editing Autoexec and Config.sys to reallocate memory, and more RAM or better graphics cards were incredibly expensive at the time. Expensive paperweight.
I’ll fire up a four-stroke engine in honor of Atkinson.
Pour a large one out for Bill.
It is hard to overstate the genius of Bill Atkinson.
Mostly unknown outside of Silicone Valley, Bill was a visionary and software artist. He imagined and developed the foundational ideas that all current software is based on.
The world is less interesting and certainly less brilliant now that he has passed.
Don’t you mean Silicon Valley? Or aer you talking about Calabasas?
It is jaw dropping the sheer amount of genius that rolled out of Apple back in those days. Take Burrell or Susan Kare and numerous others. The workd is darker with out people like Atkinson in it. Hats off to him
That must have been a fascinating place and time – wow.
I remember seeing references to HyperCard stacks in the 1990s but never really knew what they were, so thank you for that.