Comment by DonHopkins
5 years ago
As far as I know, the first time Bill Atkinson publically mentioned that LSD inspired HyperCard was in an interview with Leo Laporte on Apr 25th 2016, which claims to be "Part 2". I have searched all over for part 1 but have not been able to find it.
Then Mondo 2000 published a transcript of that part of the interview on June 18 2018, and I think a few other publications repeated it around that time.
And later on Feb 4, 2019 he gave a live talk to Brad Myers' "05-640: Interaction Techniques" user interface design class at CMU, during which he read the transcript.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/schedule....
It's well worth watching that interview. He went over and explained all of his amazing Polaroids of Lisa development, which I don't think have ever been published anywhere else.
See Bill Atkinson's Lisa development polaroids:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill_Atki...
Then at 1:03:15 a student asked him the million dollar question: what was the impetus and motivation behind HyperCard? He chuckled, reached for the transcript he had off-camera, and then out of the blue he asked the entire class "How many of you guys have done ... a psychedelic?" (Brad reported "No hands", but I think some may have been embarrassed to admit it in front of their professor). So then Bill launched into reading the transcript of the LSD HyperCard story, and blew all the students' minds.
See video of Bill's talk:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
The next week I gave a talk to the same class that Bill had just traumatized by asking if they'd done illegal drugs, and (at 37:11) I trolled them by conspiratorially asking: "One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ... (pregnant pause) ... HyperCard? Basically, because in 1987 I saw HyperCard, and it fucking blew my mind." Then I launched into my description of how important and amazing HyperCard was.
See video of Don's talk:
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
Here is an index of all of the videos from Brad Myers' interaction techniques class, including Rob Haitani (Palm Pilot), Shumin Zhai (text input and swipe method), Dan Bricklin (spreadsheets, Demo prototyping tool), Don Hopkins (pie menus), and Bill Atkinson (Mac, HyperCard):
https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.a...