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 Ma

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.