Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
From: doug-merritt@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: How 'Bout HyperCard!
Message-ID: <5123@cup.portal.com>
Date: 5 May 88 18:24:57 GMT
References: <15372@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 36
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.4407


I think it was Bill Atkinson who wrote HyperCard; forgive me if I'm
wrong. Anyway, Bill licensed it to Apple with the proviso that, if
they ever stopped giving it away with new Macs, all rights would
revert to him. Apple will have zero interest in porting it to the
Amiga, or in licensing a port, because the Amiga is a strong competitor
to the Mac(s).

Bill did make one interesting comment in a magazine recently. He said
that, if anyone ever comes up with a HyperCard clone for the IBM PC (!),
then he would release the file format specifications to allow for
stack compatability to machines. He did not say this about other machines,
least of all the Amiga.

I've looked into the possibility of reverse engineering the stack format.
In the process I've developed some tools for dealing with various kinds
of files from the Mac world, that I'll be releasing not long from now.
Anyway, one rumor that surfaced in response to my enquiries was that
they use something like 30 different undocumented compression formats,
and that it hasn't been reverse-engineered because it's so difficult
to figure them all out. A couple of companies have released products
that know about the stack format, but they are apparently licensed
by Apple to do so, and their products run only on Macs.

One key may be Apple's patented image compression method. A friend
of mine has written an article about it for the Fall issue of BMUG
(Berkeley Macintosh User's Group publication). Fall '87, that is.
Odds are that something related to this patent is involved. Apparently
they achieve surprisingly high compression ratios.

Anyone interested in pooling information please contact me. Note that
I don't currently have much information; I'm just getting started.
So it'd be pointless to ask me to post anything as yet.
   Doug
      Doug Merritt        ucbvax!sun.com!cup.portal.com!doug-merritt
                      or  ucbvax!eris!doug (doug@eris.berkeley.edu)
                      or  ucbvax!unisoft!certes!doug