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From: thom@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (Thom Gillespie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: Re: HyperCard sellout
Message-ID: <39031@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 6 Oct 90 07:22:46 GMT
References: <1990Sep22.224859.20395@hayes.fai.alaska.edu> <10388@goofy.Apple.COM> <38814@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1990Oct4.175541.17442@midway.uchicago.edu> <62350@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
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>>In article <38814@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> thom@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Thom Gillespie) writes:
>>>
>>>HyperCard was supposed to make the Memex come true.
>>What's the Memex?
>
>This really *bugs* me...HyperCard was *not* supposed to make the memex
>come true.
> ...
>The memex was an device envisioned to organize and associatively link
>a vast amount of information (microfilm was proposed in this concept,
>first ventured by Vannavar Bush in 1945).  
> ...
>Just when hypertext and hypermedia became such buzzwords in the late
>80's Apple marketing decided to rename WildCard to HyperCard...and
>there we are.  HyperCard can do some wonderful things and it can work
>for developing certain hypertext/hypermedia documents, but it wasn't
>supposed to be a memex.
>
>(...sigh...)
> Jon W. Backstrom             Interactive Multimedia and Electronic Publishing

A couple of corections Jon. Aple marketing didn't decide to rename WildCard to
HyperCard, they had to since there was already a product on the market which
used the name Wildcard. I think it was a firmware board for the Apple 2 to
defeat copy protection.

It's true that "...HyperCard was *not* supposed to make the memex come true" but
there is an obvious historical line of development from Bush's Memex thru
the Augment system, the hypertext/media concept, the Dynabook, to HyperCard.
All this development is to organize information: visual, aural, textual, etc in
a way that has some cognitive fidelity to the way people think -- remember
Bush's article in the Atlantic Monthly [ As we may think, July 1945, 101-108 ]
was a reaction to the death and destruction of World War 2 -- people don't
think like Library of Congress subject headings of ISBNs, we associate things
in strange fashion: size, color, time, smell. Bush had no idea how this was
going to work anymore than he had any idea of the media which would be used. He
used microfilm because that was the 'current' technology in 1945.

If you hook up a a color mac with Mac Recorder, a flat bed scanner, a laser
disk, a worm drive, and HyperCard to provide the associative link-to-ness then
you have a working version of the Memex. The only thing missing are the direct
brain links...next year maybe :->

Stop s-i-g-h-i-n-g Jon

--Thom Gillespie