Source: THE WIKIPEDIA REVOLUTION: HOW A BUNCH OF NOBODIES CREATED THE WORLD'S GREATEST ENCYCLOPEDIA

As a tool to accomplish this memex function of linking and organizing data, HyperCard had a cult following, as it was easy to use, yet powerful. People could create an interlinked series of documents at the touch of a mouse. This was many years before the first Web browser was even conceived.

Fortunately, Cunningham had early access to HyperCard through a former Tektronix employee named Kent Beck, with whom he had worked. Beck had left to work for Apple Computer and happened to be in Oregon on a visit, and gave his old friend Ward something to see.

“Kent Beck showed me HyperCard, which he first got his hands on after joining Apple. It was called WildCard then. I was blown away.”¹⁴

In HyperCard, Cunningham saw a tool that could help him with his knowledge-sharing project. “I wanted something kind of irregular, something that didn’t fit in rows and columns.” HyperCard used the idea of a “stack” of virtual index cards, in which the user could easily create new cards, create links between them, and place content on them. Putting a picture, sound, or video onto a card was as easy as inserting it and dragging it around on the screen. You could also put virtual buttons on cards that could respond to clicks and other commands.

The brainchild of Apple programmer Bill Atkinson, HyperCard was originally given away for free in 1987 and became incredibly popular with seasoned computer programmers, novice users, and educational institutions. It was easy to understand, easy to program, and incredibly powerful for creating content. No programming experience was necessary, and even kids were getting into the action, creating their own “stacks” of fun content.

Ward got his hands on HyperCard and started a simple database of cards to store written text and diagrams. He started to see the “stack” grow with information about personnel, their experiences, and descriptions of their projects. It became a multimedia scrapbook of company practices.

But there was something Ward didn’t like about HyperCard. It was too cumbersome to create new cards and link to them. In the middle of his thinking process, the technical clicks and keystrokes of getting ideas organized in HyperCard got in the way.

To make links between cards, you would bring up the first card, then go to the destination card and tell HyperCard to make a button leading there, then go back to the original card and drop the new button in place.

“In those three simple steps you would have a hyperlink,” recalled Cunningham. “But the part I didn’t like is you had to go to the card you wanted to end up, because I wanted to write about all these ideas and people and projects, that kind of had no boundary. There was always another idea, always another person. It was a big company. So there was not going to be any completeness. There was going to be this frontier where I was referring to people I hadn’t described yet or to projects that I didn’t know what they were.”¹⁵

Even though the mechanics of creating new cards and links was simple and straightforward, it was still cumbersome. Even a slight interruption during the creative process meant ideas were lost, as the different steps were disrupting the free flow of thinking and writing.

Cunningham wanted a solution that was transparent and quick—something that wouldn’t disrupt his stream of thought.

Because HyperCard was also programmable, he could write new computer code that could extend the functionality of the “stack” of cards beyond what Apple provided. Cunningham decided he could do something better. He created a box on each card into which the user could type a list of titles. Creating a link to a page was as simple as typing the new word or phrase into the list, such as “Project X” or “Joe Smith.” Clicking on “Joe Smith” would bring up the card of that same name. You didn’t have to manually create a link or even know if that card existed. You simply named the card you wanted, and it would transport you there.

In creating this simple mechanism, Cunningham enabled individuals to get their thoughts and ideas into the stack in the quickest way possible. Around the hallways of Tektronix, people started to hear about Ward’s fun hyperlinked experiment. He got more and more visitors.

“I heard you had that cool HyperCard thing,” a colleague would say, appearing at Cunningham’s office doorway.

Coworkers would sit in front of his boxy Macintosh II computer and wade through his stack of cards, adding and correcting things on this new fast tool, with nothing more than minutes of training. It was natural, fast, and addictive. “I couldn’t get them out of my office.

“We’d get to poking through people and projects and so on when my guests would invariably say, ‘that’s not exactly right.’ So we’d fix it right then and there. And we’d add a few missing links and go fix them too. The stack was captivating. We were often late for lunch.”¹⁶

As Cunningham worked more with HyperCard, it became clear that he had come up with a fast and easy way of organizing this interlinked information. He described his creation as “densely linked,” as having multiple paths to arrive at the same data, which made it a powerful tool. The problem was, it remained an island—the “stack” of linked information was stranded on that one computer. This was still the early days of the personal computer; networking was not something widely available.