Читать книгу Timeline Analog 4 - John Buck - Страница 8

As the world adjusted to the Black Monday stock exchange collapse, Apple announced new products at the 1987 MacWorld Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts.

Apple debuted Mac System 4.2 and System Software 5.0 which supported the new color Macintosh models, added the MultiFinder (allowing switching between running applications) and background printing with the LaserWriter printer.

Bill Atkinson’s WildCard, now called HyperCard, drew most interest. Atkinson described HyperCard (above) as:

'...an attempt to bridge the gap between the priesthood of programmers and the Macintosh mouse clickers.'

Apple CEO John Sculley went further:

'In many ways, HyperCard is just as important as the personal computer itself'

HyperCard was designed to let users combine various media elements called stacks into one. The Wall Street Journal described HyperCard as:

'...a major development in the industry, changing the way information is organized and used.'

In time schools created interactive learning materials with it while industrials like Renault used HyperCard to build inventory databases.

Matthew Laser explained HyperCard in Art Technica:

HyperCard allowed you to create "stacks" of cards, which were visual pages on a Macintosh screen. You could insert "fields" into these cards that showed text, tables, or even images. You could install "buttons" that linked individual cards within the stack to each other and that played various sounds as the user clicked them, mostly notably a "boing" clip that to this day I can't get out of my mind. You could also turn your own pictures into buttons. Before the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything.

Atkinson realised much the same, later.

I missed the mark with HyperCard. I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser

HyperCard wasn't going to be the first web connected application nor was it the best way to deliver animations, video and audio in future. Apple need a different way to deliver media elements. And it needed to pivot away from hardware to software. Both seemed unlikely to happen.

Tyler Peppel oversaw product concepts that included optical media, CDROM, video hardware, SoundManager. His group created a sports wristwatch, a desktop phone with touchscreen and portable electronic book with Toshiba.

Very few made it to market because it was something of a Darwinian development environment at Apple. Out of 40 product concepts maybe then 5 get prototyped and maybe 1 got to market. We did make 200 hundred or so of the Toshiba touchscreen CDROM book device but we had issues with bringing the battery life and the price point together in a package that made sense.

The work had led him to see a key flaw in the Mac OS.

In a sense the catalyst for change at Apple came from the fact that the time-based concept called multimedia was becoming popular and it should have been a natural area for Apple to be in but we had nothing. John Sculley told me, “We need to get into this”, but of course it wasn’t that easy. I started looking at how we could leverage the company’s multimedia potential.

The Mac was extremely popular as a graphics layout and publishing tool but the OS had been built quite a few years earlier with the paper/folder/file metaphor in mind and as a result there was nothing to account for time-based events in media.

There were crude timers that just measured cursors moving across but nothing for data. There was no way to start unless we had a way to address time based events in the operating system, so we had to address a pretty sophisticated challenge from day one.

Andrew Soderberg, later a QuickTime hardware evangelist:

For good reason everyone thinks of QuickTime as being all about video and audio, but from the start of development, it was all about temporal data. Events happening in time, in a sequence. It could just as easily have been famous for the underlying technology to home security systems.

Managing when things went on or off. Like HomeKit is today. Or Notifications on your iPhone is today. In QuickTime you can have multiple ‘tracks’, and they can all do their own thing as long as they are all in this one temporal QuickTime container.

Everyone now imagines ‘tracks’ as meaning video or audio tracks but that wasn’t necessarily the use case behind the development. It really didn’t matter ‘what’ was on the track, as the software came along and saw an event on the track, it reacted as programmed at a point in time. It was a ‘document’ over time, with no start and no end.

But as Tyler says, this was going to be a big deal. A big deal to change for Apple. And proof of that was when we later released QuickTime for Windows, it wasn’t just a plug-in that was added to Microsoft’s operating system, we practically created another time based environment inside Windows to allow QuickTime to run.

Peppel created a product specification for an extension to the Mac OS to handle time based multimedia elements like video, graphics and audio. Middle management’s disdain for change echoed that of Ampex in the 1950s. Charlie Ginsburg’s development of Ampex’s videotape machine was stalled or stopped several times in favour of the company's existing audio products.

Peppel’s time based software idea was put to the side. For the sake of hardware. Within Apple’s in-house Advanced Technology Group (ATG), Steve Perlman was working on hardware supported video compression. Perlman christened his hardware compression device, QuickScan and John Sculley showed an interest:

We had a very talented engineer named Steve Perlman, who also having challenges getting along with the mainstream engineers and so I moved Steve over to my office and so he sat outside my cube. Why was this all significant to me? Because to me it was just another step along the way to the Knowledge Navigator.

Duncan Kennedy recalls:

For about three to five years there was a major effort within Apple to develop hardware based video projects.There were projects trying to leverage HyperCard or projects like QuickScan but no one was really doing software based video.

Around the same time, Bruce Leak graduated from Stanford and applied for a job at Apple Computer.

I had 4 interviews, got turned down in three of them but finally found a job in System Software. It was a dream job for me. The Macintosh was the most interesting computer out in the world.