Week 3!

This was a fun week, diving deeper into older systems such as Geocities and HyperCard stacks. Some of the “plots of land” that people created were fascinating, many of them serving as time capsules for a specific person, place, or thing. While listening to the Geocities episode of 99% Invisible, I found myself incredibly intrigued to hear how people described the internet and how many struggled to really grasp the concept of it. The creator of Geocities also mentioned that he set up an alert for each time someone registered for a plot and that eventually it essentially became a constant alert noise as SO many people were signing up. I had never heard of Geocities before this, so this is a testament to it’s popularity regardless of how it seems essentially obsolete nowadays. With that being said, it is clearly a building block in the direction the world stepped in terms of growing internet technologies. Here is an example I found of a “time capsule” of sorts on Geocities. As far as I’m aware, I don’t have any experience with BBS systems, but like Geocities, they clearly are part of the backbone of modern telecommunications.

A hypercard stack that I found that really interested me was called “The Couch Potato Handbook,” a book of ratings and general information about over 1000 theatrical and made-for-TV films. It’s a bit of a time machine using this, seeing what were popular films back then as well as classics to people of the time. I had the opportunity to do some more research on HyperCard for class on Wednesday and found some interesting factoids. To begin with, it was released in 1987 and offered all the way up until 2004. The programming language “HyperTalk” allowed for users to program cards and relationships between them and was very intuitive, especially in relation to programming languages of today. After doing some quick research, I designed a poster advertisement for HyperCard, as if it were being advertised today.

Looking forward, I’d like to dig around online to see what I can find on HTML. I’m not exactly sure where I’ll end up getting useful information, but I’ve always been a bit of my own troubleshooter, so I’ve gotten pretty decent at scavenging for good, reliable content. I’ll definitely check out the site that Professor Whalen linked in the Discord, as well.

The link to my retro home page is: http://retro.tillysisland.com/