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From: webber@athos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber)
Newsgroups: news.groups,comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Call for votes: comp.binaries.hypercard
Message-ID: <1059@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 29 Feb 88 06:25:47 GMT
References: <454@stech.UUCP> <960@athos.rutgers.edu> <42857@sun.uucp> <43313@sun.uucp>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 118

In article <43313@sun.uucp>, chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
> [In general, I refuse to have battles of wits with unarmed people. So I'm

You are much too cautious.  I would give you 50-50 odds in a battle of wits
with an unarmed person.  Of course, against an armed person, you haven't a
prayer. ...

> I suggest strongly that rather than evaluate HyperCard by its reference
> manual, you evaluate HyperCard by playing with HyperCard.

I already spent $20+ just to find out what Hypercard is all about.
How much to buy a copy of HyperCard and a Mac with enough memory and disk
space to make it usable?  Perhaps we should start The Webber Education Fund
(a great mind is a horrible thing to waste).  [These days I target my spare
hardware cash for homebrew projects -- commercial computer makers add too
much overhead for my tastes given the current chip market and availability
of system source.]

> The weakest point of Goodman's book is the graphics. He basically shines it
> all on. Not surprising, since Goodman is an author and primarily text

Ah.  So there are people other than Webber who have this wierd view that
graphics and sound aren't the key parts of Hypercard?  [Believe it or not
I was not impressed by your example of scanning book covers and recording
author's pets for each book in a bibliographic index -- I guess there are
some things you just won't understand until you have had to use a Mac for
a few years.]

> good way to evaluate the wonders of Unix. Your knowledge of the system is
> too limited to make a reasonable judgement.

Regardless of my judgement of the utility of HyperCard as designed, there
still remains the issue of the vote at hand which is: Should net resources
be targetted to encourage people to distribute information (be it
textual, graphic, or sonic) in formats that are not freely available?
I SAY NO.

> Go find a Mac at Rutgers. I know there are some there. find hypercard, and
> work with it. Especially grab Laura's story, the stack Bill Atkinson wrote
> for his daughter. then tell me Hypercard is textually oriented. 

Macs we have plenty (used to be one in my office -- I saved the box, scrap
cardboard has its uses).  I checked in our MicroLab and no one had heard
of a HyperCard manual -- (previous experience with other Mac software has
taught me not to go near anything that doesn't have a manual).

> is very Mac specific. How are you going to play this stuff with your awk
> script?

If it is barking dogs, I will just manage to live without it.  If it
is something worth listening to, I know someone who has a Kurtzweil 
hanging off a Mac who might be prevailed upon (but so far I have heard
of nothing that leads me to believe this will be necessary).

> Very. Do what's good for the Macintosh people, or do what's good for Webber.

Do what's short-term good for a portion of the Mac people on the net
or do what is clearly long-term and short-term good for all the non-Mac
people and perhaps long-term good for the Mac people?

> Usenet happens to be a transport device that Mac people use to transfer
> information and programs. If you look at the numbers, there are about as
> many people reading Usenet for the Mac as for Unix these days. 

You forget to factor in the relative states of documentation of both systems.

> This is a loaded comment. First, HyperCard stacks are open and completely
> accessible to the user. The only reason they qualify as a 'binary' is
> because they aren't limited to printable characters. 

They qualify as binary ONLY because their format is not publically available
and hence unusable to any one not owning a copy of a system that they were
generated.  All binary postings I have seen have consisted of printable
characters.  Most binary postings have this same flaw (and I have already
earlier protested all binary groups), but HyperCard binaries differ
from other binaries in that they have the potential to contain information
useful to non-Hypercard users.  As stated before, most people tolerate
the other binaries because they really have no interest in the information
that is hidden within them.

> you. And, personally, I'm here for the general good, not the good of a
> single selfish individual.

Ah, where have I heard that before?  It is lines like this that give me
hope that people will see through your mascarade behind the cloak of
presumed expertise.

> This is your bias. If you want to talk about only posting stuff that is of
> use to the widest populations (Hmm. Webber, are you a Marxist? What a
> concept....) then we should get rid of the Unix groups, and only allow
> softwaare and soruces on the net. 

All the talk and soc and misc groups distribute information in publically
available formats.  Of the sci groups, only in sci.crypt have I seen 
information in a non-publically available format (i.e., someone posted
a couple of encryption puzzles).  Except for the comp.binaries groups,
everyone else distributes in publically readable formats.

> This, of course, is insane. All Webber is really saying is "I can't use it,
> so you can't do it" -- I'm not particularly worried. It's been a long time

True.  Fundamentally that is the objection to proprietary formats,
they are useless to people who aren't paying tribute to their
inventors.  Think what things would be like if Usenet news and mail
formats were proprietary.

> Webber, if you want HyperCard stuff on your Unix box, I suggest you go and
> write something that'll read a HyperCard stack and pull it out for you.
> Don't force us to do your dirty work for you, especially when all it will
> really do is make the stacks useless to everyone else. 

Well, at least we agree trying to make HyperCard binaries usable is dirty
work.  Give me the specs for the binary format and I will write utilities
that extract useful data from them.  However, I don't have time to develope
a working knowledge of Mac internals to be able to reverse-engineer hypercard
stacks just because the some irresponsible people want to use it as a format
to pass around images of their pets (in full stereo sound).   

------ BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)