And More Again...

Now, there's been a bit of discussion in various sections of the interweb as to whether what Jobs and Apple have delivered us amounts to a revolution, with subsequent sidetracks into whether this was A Good Thing, but from where I'm sitting the response to those questions is fairly clear.

Revolution? Certainly.

The last twenty years have created a completely new avenue of instantaneous communication and while the process of change is nowhere near complete already we're looking at a telecommunications landscape that's very different from what we had twenty years ago.

Admittedly, we're possibly looking at the sort of landscape that might have happened anyway, but I'd question whether you'd have anything like the interwebs as we know them in a command line environment.

While Jobs and Apple didn't invent the point and click graphic user environment, they saw it and spotted where it might lead.

There's also a strong argument that suggests that we wouldn't be where we are today without a little piece of software called Hypercard, which delivered content with hyperlinks in much the same manner as we click our way through websites today.

Hypercard may not have been the first the first hypermedia application, but it was bundled with all new Macs sold after 1987 until Mr Jobs withdrew support for the program, a move that created a number of very pissed off users at the time.

I had a largish Hypercard project that was nowhere near complete and had absorbed a lot of time and effort which was, effectively, wasted, but I'm convinced that what I learned in the process was valuable once I started playing around with my website and blogs etc.

More...

B© Ian Hughes 2012