Comment by jcynix
1 day ago
> The idea that information can be hyperlinked together.
HyperCard was really cool and I miss it. Its most important feature IMO was to enable non-programmers to rather easily author useful software. As happend with Excel.
The idea that information can be hyperlinked is much older than HyperCard. Check out Ted Nelson and his https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu which predates HyperCard by more than a decade.
And then there was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics_Document_Examiner, or GNU Texinfo and its precursors besides many other attempts.
I'm pretty obsessed with these 'branches not taken' concepts in computing. Like, everything is the same today. And there's good usability arguments that things shouldn't be different for the sake of being different. But, there are so many forgotten concepts of the past that were arguably much more powerful, simple, expressive ways to interact with machines.