Hypercard, a precursor to the World Wide Web, was an authoring tool for interactive content in the form of “stacks” of cards that could be navigated by creating hyperlinks between cards. The first was Hypercard, the brainchild of Bill Atkinson, who had written the Macintosh’s QuickDraw graphics routines and the MacPaint application. Three key technologies combined to make the Macintosh the premier multimedia platform by the early 1990s. “Multimedia” in the late 1980s was still an amorphous category of loosely related graphics, animation, audio, and interactive technologies. But moving from still text and images that would be output to paper to time-based and interactive media was a big next step, one that John Scull would pursue after leaving Apple to become the CEO of Macromind, the developer of the animation authoring tool Director (a forerunner of Flash). Desktop publishing had made sophisticated use of the Macintosh’s natural advantages over IBM PCs in graphics, and graphical software such as Microsoft PowerPoint debuted first on the Mac. According to John Scull, the product marketer who created Apple’s desktop publishing strategy, multimedia-the combination of interactivity, text, audio, still images, and eventually video-represented the logical successor to desktop publishing as a killer app for the Macintosh. Apple’s Macintosh, the first widely used personal computer platform to feature a graphical user interface, became successful due to the advent of desktop publishing, which, when paired with a laser printer, allowed individual users, for the first time, to inexpensively produce graphically sophisticated print media from their own homes and small businesses. QuickTime was a key moment in the development of multimedia, an area of recent research activity at the Museum’s Software History Center.
CHM Live | Press Play: The Origins of QuickTime, February 28, 2018.
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