HyperCard Prince Of Apple’s New Era

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Amsterdam’s Second Exposition

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The second edition of MacWorld Expo has seen the success of the HyperCard. In fact, one of the busiest sections of the exhibition, held in Amsterdam at the beginning of May, was precisely the Hall of Stacks, organized by the Benelux Macintosh Club users. Nestled among other trade booths, this sort of temple to the HyperCard exhibited the heat surrounding Macintosh. This new tool is creating the same new wave of enthusiasm, behind which fans thronged, similar to that created by the users of the first machines in the Basic Apple II and MS-DOS. There were about 1,600 information stacks exhibited and one was able to copy the most interesting one by buying a diskette from the heads of the stand for a few thousand dollars. Let us remember that a stack is a kind of program whose listings produce on the screen a series of graphic cards that are linked in a linear fashion, so as to be able to simulate the turning of the pages of a book. They can also be seen in a hierarchical manner, so as to allow for the consultation of general information, enabling one to envision the image details of the initial authentication. Another feature of the event was the presentation of the Macintosh as an optimal tool for graphic and publishing applications. Throughout the corridors of MacWorld Expo, there were often seen high-resolution images projected in black and white or color, on large video screens. Retailers and manufacturers showed these fantastic monitors using them in video applications and for layouts of pictorial graphics (projection of films produced on computers using the artistic creation of freehand images or the processing of digitized photographs). Some of these monitors were governed by modern 24-bit display video cards capable of hundreds of thousands of colors. Especially impressive was the sharpness of the images produced by the RasterOps Colorboard 104 card shown at the booth of the company of the same name (RasterOps, 10161 Bubb Road, Cupertino, Ca 95014, tel. 408 4464090). This card is capable of displaying,with good quality, simultaneously 786,432 colors (taken from a palette of 16.7 million) on a 19 inch screen with a resolution of 1024×768 pixels. In particular, the Mac II appeared wherever it was necessary to show the graphic power of new application packages, such as spreadsheets and Lotus Wingz Modern Jazz, both of which are capable of producing color graphics, which in the case of Informix Wingz could also become three-dimensional.

Roberto Mazzoni