Really nice walk down memory lane. I remember fidgeting with HyperCard in college. It actually was not released when I got my Mac SE and I had to go back to the campus computer store with a certificate to get the box. It really was the first UI oriented language for the masses, so much it messed up with my mind as I was learning Pascal style programming and this weird notion of resource forks and other minutiae to create a program. So programming was trapped in the realm of the “console” but with HyperCard it was graphical from the beginning. Unfortunately, I had the artistic skills of a rock.
The platform that most makes me think of HyperCard now is not the web but PowerPoint. You can point on objects and they can go to other slides IIRC.
We really haven’t progressed that much more have we?
Author here, I'm glad you enjoyed it. HyperTalk and Pascal are obviously very different beasts, I'm sure it was difficult to context switch between the two! For HyperCard stack developers, that resource fork was kind of a blessing, because we didn't need to wonder, "Where is my data?" It was right there in the stack itself, making it super-portable and easy to share. That comes with all of the downsides you might imagine, as skills and needs increased. But it was also a very welcoming environment for the development-curious.
I never found anything like HyperCard that predated HyperCard; it really did seem to be borne from a special burst of insight. I could be wrong though, because as soon as something is declared "the first" someone invariably finds a earlier protoype from PARC or somewhere.
Presentation software definitely feels similar, especially with its card-and-buttons metaphor. Its intentionality is obviously quite different, but I just did a quick look and it seems like there is VBA scripting available in PowerPoint. Maybe the distance between it and HyperCard isn't the vast gulf I thought. Even if that's the case, then it really only supports your conclusion, "We really haven't progressed that much more." That sense of stagnation gnaws at me, TBH.
You are right. I bought (well my parents did) and it came with a complimentary upgrade. We installed the chip and it was great but the driver was not universal so it printed out with a slow stretch so the lines would go downward on the right side. We took it back for tech support and it turned out it was a software issue. My first lesson in debugging goes up the stack. (I was like 13 I think)
The cognitive non-realization seems very similar to Dunning-Krueger, the ability to comprehend the limits of the own ability to change their actions. The compulsives continue to believe they are doing the right thing despite data to the contrary.
OWI has a lot of robot arms. I built the wired controller version of this. As a software engineer building this gave me a lot of appreciation for making physical things. Trying to create a computer controlled version is tricky since you need something to indicate the current position of the arm.
The clover was a magical device. Andy Rubin, of Android/Danger fame, was a huge coffee aficionado and would have all sorts of coffee machinery in the Android offices at Google. When we were in a partnership with the team, when we had to meet if I could help it, it would be at the Android offices just so I could get a cup of clover brewed coffeee. The most satisfying part of the ritual was after the coffee was brewed, the piston would push up the spent grounds to the top of the clover and you would use a rake shaped squeegee to clean the grounds from machine in a motion that resembled tending a zen garden. Aeropress is a rough approximation of the richness of the resulting brew. But it was a delightful machine. Shame Starbucks could not make it more ubiquitous. Bulk filter coffee is just faster. On an unrelated note, I am surprised the author didn’t mention Philz which is pourover using Mr. Coffee style filters. The volume
Of coffee used for a cup a Philz is epic.
I first encountered Lapham in the Notebook column of Harper’s while avoiding studying in the magazine room at Uris Library. often Learned more about understanding the world from his missives than my coursework. He will be missed, the cliche of understanding the past is key to understanding the future was never more true.
A couple people (myself included) vouched for your comment. You should email the mods (contact link at the bottom) since you seem to be shadowbanned. This was probably because your first actions after creating your account was to submit a link to (your own) substack. You probably got caught by the spam filter.
I created a simple game to explore the nature of information in making a series of decisions to win a game. It's a variant of the game of "war" that I call "Fog".
In Fog, each player is given ten cards of increasing value from 1 to 10. Each player then chooses a card to play from their hand and places it face down. Once both players have made their choices their cards are revealed. The player with the highest card gets the points of lower card. In the event of a tie, neither player scores. The goal of the game is to have the higher score after all cards have been played.
For example, if you play the 7 card and your opponent plays the 1 card, you win 1 point. If your opponent plays the 6 card, you gain 6 points. If your opponent plays the 7 card, you get zero points. If your opponent plays an 8 or higher card they get 7 points.
Question: Is there an optimal strategy or play possible for this simple game?
