One day in the late Eighties, a Hypercard road tour rolled through town. It changed my head. Every once in a while, I ask Google about Hypercard. Hello Cardicle...
+wiki
Road tour? I'm guessing this is a little ironic fun with the idea, and if not, I'm sorry I missed it. When Hypercard came along, I thought it was seriously cool and tried to play with it and some similar tools whose name I cannot remember.
Wiki takes this to another level, being born near the beginnings of the Web Era, and Wagn takes Wiki to a new realms.
Welcome to the party.
Had to Google that phrase to make sure it didn't just pop-up. Although it did not, what did come up started me thinking more deeply about this legacy. Where we have been and where we are going. It's hard to remember the time when there was no Internet and world wide web. The pioneers of computing had enormous machines barely more powerful than a pocket calculator, and yet some of them imagined interactive machines connecting webs of information. I don't know that there was much thought about how technological development curves would bring us to where we are today and then beyond.
It is obvious now that those webs of information are being implemented as networked clouds connected to shrinking interactive, multi-media personal computing/communication devices. Products like Hypercard are bound to flame out eventually because it was just a product for Apple and not an open development platform. Wiki and Wagn and Decko are developing the vision of a web of knowledge co-created of a technologically connected humanity.
It was actually a generic Apple evangelism tour bus that was parked in front of the Hilton Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska. (Yes, we had electricity by then :) I wasn't much interested in anything hardware but I guess I'd already heard about Apple's "database" project. So I skipped out of work for a bit and went inside. Later on I bought a Mac Classic just so's I could play with Hypercard.
We need some motivated javascript programmers to put the WYSIWYG front end on it, but we have the platform that can really do it well. There are some networking components that we've done a lot of thinking and design on, and those are key as well. We can manage without the pretty front end, but it sure would extend the scope of who can do these things with relative ease to have that too.