[extropy-chat] 'Beyond Cyperpunk' on the web !

[spike]

Wooohooo, hypercard stacks!  Thanks Amara, this made
my day.  In 1989 I was working in an area where we
needed a catchy training tool.  I suggested hypercard,
and wrote a few stacks.  The group never did get as
enthusiastic about it as I was, so it didn't go far.  Many
of the stacks were clumsy and poorly written, a lot like
the pages made in the tools hypercard morphed into: 
powerpoint and HTML.

Apple had it together in those days, did it not?

spike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-
> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Amara Graps
> Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 10:25 PM
> To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org; wta-talk at transhumanism.org
> Subject: [extropy-chat] 'Beyond Cyperpunk' on the web !
> 
> I still have my Beyond Cyperpunk stack. Now it is on the Web!
> 
> http://www.streettech.com/bcp/
> 
> 
> {begin quote}
> 
> Introduction
> 
> Frontiers are always fraught with danger, romance, utopian flights
> of fancy and no small amount of madness. When Peter Sugarman and I
> first began talking about creating the Beyond Cyberpunk! HyperCard
> stack in 1990, the frontier towns of cyberspace were tiny outposts
> and the populace was a rough and tumble crowd of hackers, research
> scientists, libertarians, academics, military types and various
> stripes of bohemians. It was a time of great excitement and
> hyperactivity. Cyberpunk science fiction was still a major
> inspiration to the advance teams building cyberspace, Mondo 2000 was
> the hip new magazine and the hacker community was still stinging
> from Operation Sundevil/The Hacker Crackdown. Academia had
> discovered in the burgeoning cyberculture a full-blown example of
> postmodernism, with its decentralized, anarchic structure, its
> virtualizing of the human body, and its use of multimedia and
> hypertexts to socially construct stories and knowledge. Social
> scientists like Donna Haraway began using the idea of the cyborg as
> a perfect metaphor to describe the human/machine hybrids we're
> becoming in the twilight hours of the 20th century.
> 
> When we began Beyond Cyberpunk! (BCP), there was no such thing as
> the World Wide Web. Hypermedia programs like Apple's HyperCard were
> the only way to inexpensively deliver hypertext, sounds, images and
> animations. We saw in HyperCard the opportunity to create a
> compendium of all this cybercultural output. We wanted to map the
> territory, but to do so in a way that allowed the user to explore
> her own links and interests. We tried to cram in as much material as
> we could, covering everthing from high-brow theory to sci-fi lit and
> films to the wired worlds of hackers/crackers and the zine
> publishing scene which was starting to move into cyberspace. The
> result was a 5.5 megabyte "connect-the-dots" cyber-manifesto. In
> 1993, we followed up the first BCP stack with a one-disk update.
> 
> Since doing the BCP project, the online world and the cyberculture
> has reinvented itself several times over. What you're reading here
> is an artifact from a future past. Some of the material holds up,
> some of it is down-right prescient. Other parts make us cringe, and
> it's all we can do not edit out the embarassingly dated parts. After
> continuing to get so many requests for copies of BCP or the
> directions to an Internet version of it, we decided to create this
> site. Right now it only contains a sampling of the original stack.
> We'll be adding more of the original material, and even some brand
> new material, in the months to come.
> 
> {end quote}
> Amara
> 
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