BillAtkinson
Latest
Recommended Reading: Jeff Bezos' Everything Store, Twitter's tumultuous history and more
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store by Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek Brad Stone's book on Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos is set to be published next week, but Bloomberg Businessweek has offered an extensive look at what's in store with this cover story/excerpt from the author, including one of his biggest revelations. Drawn from interviews with hundreds of those who know or have worked with Bezos, the piece offers the most in-depth look yet at Amazon and its evolution into what Stone describes as the "Everything Store," as well as what Bezos himself is like to work for.
Ars looks at 25 years of HyperCard
Ars Technica has a wonderful writeup today about Apple's HyperCard, which would soon be celebrating its 25th birthday if it was still around. HyperCard was a wonderful tool; it provided a way for non-programmers to link "cards" of information with simple scripts and a variety of common Mac user interface elements. A button could play a sound, link to another card, or even perform calculations, so it was everyman's way of creating "stacks" of cards that could do amazing things. How important was HyperCard to the world? Although we don't hear much about it today, it was the first implementation of what Ted Nelson proposed as early as 1960 as "hypertext." Many of the early Web browsers borrowed heavily from the design and functionality of HyperCard, with Mosaic and Netscape being the progenitors of today's modern browsers. HyperCard was developed by original Mac team member Bill Atkinson and made it to market in 1987. Reading blogger Matthew Lasar's writeup on HyperCard brought back many memories for me. I can recall attending a seminar at an Apple office in Denver about HyperCard and its core scripting language, HyperTalk, shortly after its release. Author Danny Goodman ran the seminar and copies of his "Complete HyperCard Handbook" were handed out to everyone in attendance. That quickly became my favorite reference, and I began to create HyperCard stacks by the dozen. I actually made money selling HyperCard stacks through Heizer Software's "Stack Exchange," where I sold a variety of reference stacks I had created. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I gave a number of talks at the Institute of Gas Technology's annual Chicago IT conference talking about the use of hypertext and HyperCard in business. While HyperCard hasn't been included with Macs for quite a long time (it used to come on a set of three floppies with every new machine), its descendants live on. The World Wide Web, SuperCard, and RunRev all owe a lot to Bill Atkinson's brainchild.
Computer History Museum makes original MacPaint source code available to public
With all the tricky Photoshoppery we do 'round these parts, it's easy to forget that once the only way to get Justin Bieber into a shot with Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson involved an X-Acto knife and rubber cement. For a peek into that dark and distant time (the 1980s) check out the Computer History Museum website, which has recently posted the source code for both MacPaint 1.3 and the QuickDraw graphics library. It's pretty amazing to consider that software this cutting edge consisted of a single, 5,822 line Apple Pascal file (in conjunction with another whopping 3,583 lines of code in assembly language). If poring over twenty-six year old code isn't your bag, the museum's website also contains an oral history of the development of MacPaint and more. Hit the source link to check it out.
TUAW review and giveaway: Bill Atkinson PhotoCard for iPhone
When it comes to famous names in the Apple pantheon, Bill Atkinson ranks very high in the list. The brains behind MacPaint, HyperCard, the Mac OS menu bar, and a host of other innovative software applications has been a professional nature photographer since 1996, but now he's melded his development mojo with photography and released his very first iPhone app, Bill Atkinson PhotoCard for iPhone. At first glance, the US$4.99 app looks like yet another postcard app for the iPhone. But when you actually start looking at the details of PhotoCard, you realize that it's much, much more. To start with, the app comes with 150 of Atkinson's fabulous nature photographs that can be used in the creation of postcards. That takes care of the front of the postcard, but what about the back? Like many of the apps of this genre, PhotoCard has a space for typing in a message to the recipient. It ups the ante with 150 stamps to add to your card (more on these later). There are also 325 little stickers that can be added to the back of your card. Once the card is ready to send, you have your choice of either sending it to the recipient via email or having the card printed on an HP Indigo digital press and then sent through snail mail.
Found Footage: The Story of Macintosh
Denver-area Mac consultant Mike Kimble is no stranger to Apple; he worked at an Apple reseller prior to the introduction of the Mac in 1984, and he's been involved with Macs and other Apple products ever since. Mike recently found several old Apple tapes that were sent to his business back around the Mac intro, and his description of one of them says it all: "I found this VHS cassette while cleaning my office this week. This "Found Footage" comes from a video tape I received from Apple back in 1984 when the original 128K Mac was introduced. It was part of the authorized dealer training videos given to each store to help them become familiar with the Macintosh. You will see a very young Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Phil Gibbons, Mitch Kapor, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You really get a good feel for how proud and excited these people were for the creation of something special. Little did they know how much they were about to change the world..." My personal favorite scene is the one where Bill Gates is sitting with a 128K Mac on his desk. The video is divided into two parts; the second can be viewed by clicking the "read more" link below. Enjoy this trip down memory lane!
