For want of a lightbulb

A rare opportunity missed by Apple:

Bill Atkinson is the programming genius behind HyperCard, MacPaint and much of the original Macintosh operating system, but these days he’s wistful about what could have been. Like, for example, the first Internet browser.

I’ve long felt that Hypercard was essentially the same thing as HTML, mostly because when I first heard about HTML, I was vaguely under the impression that it was running Hypercard across different machines. This makes me feel a little better about my two biggest failures, as if things had gone just slightly differently, I’d have been the primary player in what turned out to be Media Vision and NVidea.

I’ll get it right this time. Speaking of tech blunders, I actually had one of these. It was almost totally pointless, and no, I didn’t buy it, they sent me one. Ours had yellow highlights and I used it as part of a Halloween costume one year.