🃏 Heads and Suits

In 1987, Apple shipped HyperCard with every Macintosh. It came from the heads — the Bay Area counterculture that built the personal computer, the Whole Earth Catalog people, the crazy ones who thought computers were tools for expanding consciousness.

HyperCard was a stack of cards. Each card could have text, images, buttons, links to other cards. And it had a programming language — HyperTalk — so anyone could make the cards do things. You could build a slideshow. You could build a database. You could build a game. You could build Myst.

A card could go anywhere. Forward, backward, sideways, into a maze, into a dream. The structure was yours.

Then Apple killed it.

And Microsoft built PowerPoint. The suits' version. Same basic idea — a stack of cards — but linearized, lobotomized, stripped of its programming language, its soul. You could go forward. You could go back. That's it. No links. No logic. No labyrinths.

What was once a medium for building worlds became a medium for quarterly earnings reports.

Google Slides is PowerPoint in a browser with multiplayer. That's the whole innovation in thirty-five years. The collaboration is genuinely good — it might be the only thing Google ever got right about productivity. But the creative regression from HyperCard is staggering. We went from Cosmic Osmo to bullet points.

HyperTalk was English-like on purpose. Bill Atkinson wanted put "hello" into card field 1 to read like a sentence. It was the closest anyone got to natural language programming in the 80s.

Now we actually have it. The circle closed in forty years.