Having mainly followed developers on Mastodon, I haven't been surprised to find a few ecomiums after Bill Atkinson's death this week, shared by his family.

A commonality seemed to be prudence not to over-emphasize HyperCard, since Bill contributed singularly to the original Macintosh in other ways too, and did plenty else. His personal site remains a personal photo gallery; seemingly his latter major interest. But I find myself fearing that I don't under-emphasize HyperCard.

As I explored and played with it in my fifth grade classroom, this primitive program changed and shaped my life and my mentality. My original "Dungeon Escape" was just a simple set of super-sketchy cards representing overhead views of rooms in a "dungeon" with button-looking buttons that would take you through whichever "door." The ending of Dungeon Escape 3 (even a grade-school developer can apparently achieve success in game design) was a short animation that must have made basic use of HyperTalk. I don't remember exactly how I began learning to program in that language – perhaps it emerged from the classroom environment with other enthusiasts exploring and playing – but I wound up dealing with simple 2-D physics and point-and-click logic before moving from my rural home in Ontario and starting high school. AmigaBASIC was my first big step in programming, and HyperTalk was the second.

HyperCard predated even the Web by years in its central use of the hyperlink to move between screens or scenes. It was the software shell that enabled Myst and its predecessors. The extent of its role as a creative building block in the history of technology is difficult to guess, but I guess it's staggering in a way that barely occurs to people.

There are some people to whom a whole part of life or the world as you know it in childhood, turns out to be owable. Bill Atkinson had just been hanging around ever since. Even now, it seems too humble, too extraordinary.