Shipping HyperCard for free on Macs inspired a whole generation of programmers with the power of hypermedia, even if it didn’t generate any significant revenue for Apple. In 1989, University of California at Berkeley student Pei-Yan Wei played around with HyperCard and was impressed with Apple’s giveaway tool. "HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac . . . and I didn’t even have a Mac."
Wei liked the program so much he replicated it and created a version that ran on the system that was standard for tech types of that era—a UNIX workstation running in the X Windows graphical environment. Wei called it Viola, and when released in 1991, it had all the same type of functions as HyperCard— hypertext at first, and eventually hypermedia, clickable pictures, and multimedia elements.
The university setting allowed Wei to experience the Internet earlier than most. He of course thought of extending Viola not just to link to other cards in the same stack, but to other places on the Internet. Just before creating a "networked hypertext" system, he ran across Tim Berners-Lee’s announcement explaining an implementation of a World Wide Web and standardizing everything around something called a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. It was exactly what Wei was looking for, and he immediately started adapting Viola into what would become ViolaWWW, an Internet-capable hypertext system.
"The URL was very, very clever, it was perfectly what I needed," said Wei. He contacted Berners-Lee about writing a Web browser himself and got a positive response. Four days later, Wei emerged and announced to the World Wide Web community that he had made ViolaWWW.17
HyperCard was a product ahead of its time. And even though Apple stopped development and support for it, HyperCard’s influence would be much more profound. Its visual interface and hyperlinking were the inspiration for the first popular Web browser, and even twenty years later, after a dot-com boom and bust, people are still trying to replicate the simplicity and power of HyperCard.
