I was stunned that I could be playing with PageMaker and doing work -- laying my galleys, stuff I'd done in the real world with real objects -- and when I went home at night and remembered what I'd done that day, I remembered working with my hands. I didn't have this image in my head of this digital text block being moved by a cursor. In my mind, I was grabbing galleys and sticking wax on them and laying them down. To me, working with a good interface is working with my hands.
Kevin, someone who doesn’t think of himself as a computer guy, somehow ended up the in-house sage on matters digital. Periodically, the boys would ask him, “What is this icon on the desktop, HyperCard?” To which he would always answer, “That is a black hole from which we will never return.”
Intrigued, I found the original Mackerel Stack at archive.org/details/hypercard_the-mackerel-stack-154 and loaded it up in HyperCard running on macos8.app. The stack is filled with long transitions composed of dithering effects, inversion, random sound effects, but the real treat is this TV dinner that I am stuck on. I also found a HyperCard memoir by the subject of both of those quotes, of course with it's own stylistic flair.
