Stillborn Fruit

Further to last night's scribble, I'd just like to add in a few thoughts I've touched on in the past as a kind of superscript - can't call it a postscript as that implies some kind of finished article - to the vague meanderings that I put out here on a daily basis. Thinking on about all of these amazing notions and schemes about knowledge accumulation, management and retrieval still always brings me back to those seminal days at Apple in Cupertino, when geniuses - I don't use that term lightly - produced some of the most potentially transformative software of the twentieth century, pointing towards future developments that could, indeed should have transformed our interactions with the machines in our daily lives for the better; but which were either left to wither and die or were summarily axed from the corporate thinking of the company that spawned them in the first place.

Three technologies always stand out in Apple's history for me, particularly as two of them I used and employed in a personal capacity in software development: these of course, as I've written elsewhere in this blog, were Quicktime and HyperCard. The third, which pretty much was killed off before it got started, was OpenDoc. All three were revolutionary in their own ways. OpenDoc actually did foresee the future of containerised, atomic processing thirty-odd years into the future. I have to admit, that at the time, I really didn't get it, as my thinking then was still very much standalone desktop bound and personal application based. Quicktime was, and still could be, the most significant file format/API that exists [for it still lurks deep in the Apple software ecology, now sadly unsung and largely neglected except in its most trivial sense]; a travesty of corporate neglect and testimony to the lack of vision of a once great and innovative company.

Lastly, there's Apple's HyperCard: the greatest achievement of this once great innovator in my humble opinion [hat's off to its creator, Bill Atkinson, et al]. Free with every Macintosh - at least in the beginning - this brought a level of everyman computer programming within reach of all its users. Out of the box you could use it to create personalised card indexes - even simple databases - storyboards, diaries, schedulers, calendars, animations, picture galleries, etc. You name it, and you could use HyperCard for just about anything you wanted: customised application software needing zero programming experience. Crude its graphics and sound capabilities might have been in those early days, but the principles and the paradigm still hold today; and the world might be a better place if more people learned to use software such as HyperCard to produce their own applications, however limited, rather than be spoon-fed stuff on corporate feeds as we are now. HyperCard's raison d'etre was an interactivity not merely passive in nature, but in a truly authorial sense, where the user experience could be created and curated by the user. Needs revisiting, methinks...