25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web | Ars Technica

An interesting argument: That Web browsers were designed based on HyperCard, and that HyperCard’s major flaw was a lack of hypertext links across computers.

How did creator Bill Atkinson define HyperCard? “Simply put, HyperCard is a software erector set that lets non-programmers put together interactive information,” he told the Computer Chronicles in 1987.

When Tim Berners-Lee’s innovation finally became popular in the mid-1990s, HyperCard had already prepared a generation of developers who knew what Netscape was for. That’s why the most apt historical analogy for HyperCard is best adapted not from some failed and forgotten innovation, but from a famous observation about Elvis Presley. Before anyone on the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything.

via 25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web | Ars Technica.