Would anybody be so kind to enlighten me with some context?
observationist 7 minutes ago [-]
Proto-websites - technically called hypermedia, it was basically a locally stored website, and pioneers were trying things out like putting books and information and functionality in them. In this case, it's the Wintermute trilogy by William Gibson in Hypercard format, so this is also a retro computing discovery.
lobf 8 minutes ago [-]
What exactly are you unclear on?
newsclues 49 seconds ago [-]
"The Expanded Books Project was a project by The Voyager Company during 1991, that investigated how a book could be presented on a computer screen in a way that would be both familiar and useful to regular book readers. The project focused on perfecting font choice, font size, line spacing, margin notes, book marks, and other publishing details to work in digital format."
latchkey 1 hours ago [-]
wow. .sea suffix, haven't thought about that in a long time.
steve1977 32 minutes ago [-]
Good old StuffIt. Or well, let's just say old StuffIt.
techknight 1 hours ago [-]
Once in a while I remember .arj
caidan 33 minutes ago [-]
And .ain which was even better but now seems to be half lost to time (no Wikipedia, just a few links repeating the same fragments of info like http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/AIN)
scroot 1 hours ago [-]
Imagine if computing had continued down the path laid by systems like HyperCard
aldousd666 35 minutes ago [-]
Hypercard is really kind of like the first implementation of HTML5. With applescript instead of javascript.
jandrese 4 minutes ago [-]
I mused about the idea of a version of Hypercard where you could load cards from network resources, or even just stacks. Ultimately though it would have been an even bigger security nightmare than the original Javascript. Hypercard was developed long before security was even a consideration on consumer hardware. The only thing it had was 5 different access levels, from a view only mode to full developer support.
It's as much of a fantasy as the one where Apple released a version of Hypercard for Windows 3.1 and blew Qbasic out of the water. It's a real shame Apple just chucked one of the most interesting beginner programming environments in the trash just as so many new people were getting interested in programming.
TuringTest 59 minutes ago [-]
We're finally getting there. The model of web notebooks look a lot like Hypercard stacks in terms of usability; there's only missing someone packing them in and easy-to-use distribution and sharing environment that does not depend on users installing their own web server.
And if that package includes some reasonable local LLM model, creating simple programs by end users could be even easier than it ever was with Hypercard.
trvv 25 minutes ago [-]
PWAs could have been so good. redbean/llamafile might be the closest, though.
- Collected media https://the-next.eliterature.org/collections/2
- A catalog introducing this software to a print audience https://archive.org/details/voyager-360-catalog/mode/2upa
https://web.archive.org/web/20230307111053/https://macintosh...
It's as much of a fantasy as the one where Apple released a version of Hypercard for Windows 3.1 and blew Qbasic out of the water. It's a real shame Apple just chucked one of the most interesting beginner programming environments in the trash just as so many new people were getting interested in programming.
And if that package includes some reasonable local LLM model, creating simple programs by end users could be even easier than it ever was with Hypercard.