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> Thirty years ago these people would have had no options other than to be passive consumers of software other people made. Not exactly: https://groups.google.

• smacktoward 14y ago
  I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where even back in the mid-'90s you could get started with just a text editor and a few bucks a month for hosting. "HyperCard was far more accessible to non-computer scientists than the web is or has been." A simple comparison of the total number of HyperCard stacks built versus the total number of Web sites built would argue otherwise. You can argue about whether HyperCard authoring is more intuitive than HTML authoring (I think it was), but as soon as the Web came along people decided for themselves which of the two they preferred to hack on.
  • pifflesnort 14y ago
    > I'm old enough to have used HyperCard, and while it was an excellent environment, it had some serious barriers to entry. For instance, using it required an expensive development kit, namely a Mac. Back in 1987 even a lowly Mac Plus would cost you $2,500, which in today's dollars is more than $5,000. Contrast that to the Web, which you can author for on the oldest, crustiest commodity hardware you please and where even back in the mid-'90s you could get started with just a text editor and a few bucks a month for hosting. Any computer was not cheap in 1987, much less one that sported a usable GUI environment that could run something on par with HyperCard. That had nothing to do with HyperCard. > A simple comparison of the total number of HyperCard stacks built versus the total number of Web sites built would argue otherwise. There were far, far fewer people actually running computers, much less collaborating on the internet, 26 years ago. > You can argue about whether HyperCard authoring is more intuitive than HTML authoring (I think it was), but as soon as the Web came along people decided for themselves which of the two they preferred to hack on. When the web came along, Apple had already made HyperCard inaccessible by charging a significant amount of money for the authoring tools, rather than shipping it with each Mac. Even still, people were producing "My Favorite Links" and home pages, not apps.
    • smacktoward 14y ago
      "Any computer was not cheap in 1987, much less one that sported a usable GUI environment that could run something on par with HyperCard. That had nothing to do with HyperCard." True, but (1) PCs were significantly cheaper than Macs, and (2) many, many more people already had PCs on their desks than had Macs. So unless you were one of the few who already had a Mac, getting started with HyperCard meant plunking down money for new hardware. "There were far, far fewer people actually running computers, much less collaborating on the internet, 26 years ago." Again true, but irrelevant. We're talking about contemporary mindshare, and starting in the early '90s HyperCard and the Web were competing against each other in real time. HyperCard had a long head start and yet even by 1995 (the year Netscape 1.0 broke out) it was clear the Web had all the momentum. "Even still, people were producing "My Favorite Links" and home pages, not apps." And the buzzed-about HyperCard stacks were always more like presentations than apps. So? I'm not trying to run down HyperCard here, it was a brilliant, revolutionary product. But I just can't fathom how anyone could think it more accessible to newbies than the Web was at the same time. And the Web has only gotten more accessible in the years since.
      • pifflesnort 14y ago
        Your examples all explain market forces that led to the web's rise -- rather than technological reasons. > True, but (1) PCs were significantly cheaper than Macs, and (2) many, many more people already had PCs on their desks than had Macs. So unless you were one of the few who already had a Mac, getting started with HyperCard meant plunking down money for new hardware. In 1987, the web wasn't invented yet, and Windows 1.0 was the best the PC had to offer. This had some interesting results in the marketplace, but doesn't really explain much other than the fact that there's value in cross-platform implementations. Apple wasn't interested in making HyperCard/Claris cross-platform, so they didn't. > Again true, but irrelevant. We're talking about contemporary mindshare, and starting in the early '90s HyperCard and the Web were competing against each other in real time. HyperCard had a long head start and yet even by 1995 (the year Netscape 1.0 broke out) it was clear the Web had all the momentum. I remember that time quite clearly, and until the mid-to-late 90s, HyperCard and the web were in COMPLETELY different spaces. People were building complex enterprise database-backed applications on top of HyperCard; meanwhile, on the web, we had static pages, and post-1993, if you were lucky, CGI-based e-mail forms and visit counters. Even with the introduction of JavaScript in 1995, we didn't see much other than rotating banners in the status bar until much later. Simply put, the web was not being used for applications at that time. By the time the web did "break out" in 1995, Apple had moved HyperCard to their Claris subsidiary, stopped producing updates, and started charging for the authoring tools (a funny thing to do, given that HyperCard had always been Smalltalk-like in combining authoring and consumption). Essentially, the lack of updates and unreasonable pricing led to its demise. These are market forces, not technological ones, and do nothing to disprove that 26 years ago, there were tools accessible to normal humans.
  • chrisdevereux 14y ago
    Your first argument seems to undermine your second argument.