The genius behind MacPaint, HyperCard, and so many other groundbreaking creations has left us. I like to think that Bill Atkinson is now in a better place—one where HyperCard was never discontinued, and its legacy lives on, evolving as it always should have.

#billatkinson #macintosh #hypercard #macpaint #retrocomputing

I’m sure we will hear a lot about Bill Atkinson (RIP) over the next few days, but I want to point out the huge influence of #HyperCard on the Web. @timbl himself mentioned it in his original WWW proposal (https://cybercultural.com/p/1990-programming-the-world-wide-web/), early web browsers like ViolaWWW were modeled on HyperCard (https://cybercultural.com/p/1992-web-vs-gopher/), and even JavaScript owed a debt to it (HyperCard included an object oriented scripting language called HyperTalk; https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/).