(2018-06-18) Atkinson The Psychedelic Inspiration For HyperCard

Bill Atkinson: The Psychedelic Inspiration For HyperCard. In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD.

I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars

It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive

But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them

The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.

Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team. How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper. It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom.

This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.

I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. (WebsOfThinkersAndThoughts)