If I remember correctly, the only reason Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is because HyperCard was discontinued. He was apparently writing CRC cards and storing them in HyperCard (which seems like a completely reasonable thing to do...) He wanted something that was as convenient for doing that kind of thing.
In his own words: Ward Cunningham, Inventor of the Wiki
WikimediaFoundation https://youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4 at about 3:00 and on for a minute. There was a release of hypercard in ‘98 - four years after he was working on the wiki.
That's interesting. I find the wiki concept truly transformative. One of the first things I've done with almost every job I've had is set up an internal MediaWiki wiki. It's always been worth the effort even if I was the only one who bothered to contribute it for the most part.
Playing with this, I was trying to figure out a practical application for it. Is it fair to say it has largely been obsoleted by things like wikis?
Back in the olden days, I was actually paid to work on a couple of HyperCard applications. One that sticks out in my mind was training material for using the university's astronomical observatory. My job was to write a plugin to show an actual star field animation so that the students could practice finding objects in the classroom before they got to try on the real equipment. The HyperCard stack had a whole interactive simulation where you could walk into different rooms, see the control panels, click on buttons and activate knobs, etc.
I'd have a hard time thinking of anything current that's general purpose and would be able to do something of that scope. Probably Flash would be the thing you would use, but without Flash I'm not sure. The nice thing about HyperCard was that the vast majority of the work could be done by people who weren't programmers. Even for my bit, I was still a student and it wasn't really that difficult to write the plugin (stupid Mac Pascal compiler bugs aside... :-P).
