3 ms·

I'm not familiar with Authorware specifically, but there's a whole lost world where computing was extremely rich in visuality, dynamism, and play, and the strik

I'm not familiar with Authorware specifically, but there's a whole lost world where computing was extremely rich in visuality, dynamism, and play, and the striking thing is that these qualities were expected to enhance peoples' useful output. Some of the early Smalltalk demos exhibit this beautifully, and they're from the 70s. It almost feels like the era of "rich media" embodied by Encarta, "animated storybooks", etc., was the dying gasp of that conceptualization. The common association with computers as mechanisms of boredom, exclusion, and wage slavery is so strong now that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously countenancing the old paradigm that the technology was meant to allow. I don't know whether that outcome was ultimately inevitable or not, but either way, it's massively disappointing.

mekkkkkk 6y ago
I'm not sure were it would be on a timeline compared to Encarta, but I'd add the hay days of Flash on the web to that. Much like you describe there was such a sense of fun in those days. Flash had enough abstraction and was simple enough for anyone to create weird animations and sites with interesting interactions. The website feels like a stale medium today. I guess it's just too important to mess with nowadays. Pragmatism and familiarity rule supreme. PS. I'm sure I'm biased because nostalgia. Flash web was a nightmare in many (most?) respects.
rchaud 6y ago
I too mourn the loss of the "interactive web" for want of a better phrase. Computer programs like Encarta used to be fun to explore and interact with. The same can be said of many '90s and '00s sites that would feature Easter eggs, or a unique method of navigation. Bring any of this up today, and you'll immediately be met with a barrage of critiques about Flash security, or UX dogma like "Users prefer to scroll, not click around or hover on stuff." The end result is the soulless, identikit web we have today, where the only things that display motion are the banner ads. We navigate through websites by scrolling alone, as though we were using a microfiche machine to read a newspaper from 1920.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  I think the biggest issue with the "interactive web" is that we found that interactivity isn't necessarily always a good thing. Sometimes, the simpler, boring, perhaps "soulless" technology is the most appropriate technology for the task. Remember Microsoft Bob? Or 3D filebrowsers for Unix? Turns out, those weren't improvements over the more traditional filesystem browsers that persist to this day. More recently, the tile concept that MS tried in Windows 8 didn't catch on either. When I took a course on information visualization, one of the takeaways was that, even as we're learning about several different techniques for displaying data, sometimes (more often than you'd think!) the most effective technique is a simple table. A well-formatted table, to be sure, but a table can be more powerful than even an interactive graph. More to the point: I'm talking to you with pure text, even less interactive content than a microfiche machine reading a newspaper. But what interactivity would enhance my content or clarify my point instead of providing a distraction?
scroot 6y ago
The Hypercard days were a particularly exciting time. Back then, it seemed like more and more of the computer could be "authored" by regular people. Then it all seemed to vanish.

mekkkkkk 6y ago

I'm not sure were it would be on a timeline compared to Encarta, but I'd add the hay days of Flash on the web to that. Much like you describe there was such a sense of fun in those days. Flash had enough abstraction and was simple enough for anyone to create weird animations and sites with interesting interactions. The website feels like a stale medium today. I guess it's just too important to mess with nowadays. Pragmatism and familiarity rule supreme. PS. I'm sure I'm biased because nostalgia. Flash web was a nightmare in many (most?) respects.

rchaud 6y ago

I too mourn the loss of the "interactive web" for want of a better phrase. Computer programs like Encarta used to be fun to explore and interact with. The same can be said of many '90s and '00s sites that would feature Easter eggs, or a unique method of navigation. Bring any of this up today, and you'll immediately be met with a barrage of critiques about Flash security, or UX dogma like "Users prefer to scroll, not click around or hover on stuff." The end result is the soulless, identikit web we have today, where the only things that display motion are the banner ads. We navigate through websites by scrolling alone, as though we were using a microfiche machine to read a newspaper from 1920.

jcranmer 6y ago
I think the biggest issue with the "interactive web" is that we found that interactivity isn't necessarily always a good thing. Sometimes, the simpler, boring, perhaps "soulless" technology is the most appropriate technology for the task. Remember Microsoft Bob? Or 3D filebrowsers for Unix? Turns out, those weren't improvements over the more traditional filesystem browsers that persist to this day. More recently, the tile concept that MS tried in Windows 8 didn't catch on either. When I took a course on information visualization, one of the takeaways was that, even as we're learning about several different techniques for displaying data, sometimes (more often than you'd think!) the most effective technique is a simple table. A well-formatted table, to be sure, but a table can be more powerful than even an interactive graph. More to the point: I'm talking to you with pure text, even less interactive content than a microfiche machine reading a newspaper. But what interactivity would enhance my content or clarify my point instead of providing a distraction?

scroot 6y ago

The Hypercard days were a particularly exciting time. Back then, it seemed like more and more of the computer could be "authored" by regular people. Then it all seemed to vanish.