{"id":5976,"date":"2024-12-09T09:53:17","date_gmt":"2024-12-09T08:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/?post_type=news&p=5976"},"modified":"2024-12-09T09:53:19","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T08:53:19","slug":"cd-rom-and-hypercard-revisiting-histories-of-interactivity","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/news\/cd-rom-and-hypercard-revisiting-histories-of-interactivity\/","title":{"rendered":"CD-ROM and HyperCard: revisiting histories of interactivity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In their exploration of CD-ROM histories, the CD-Hist project<\/a> team interviewed Florian Brody<\/a>, one of the first users of CD-ROM drives in Europe, the head of The Voyager\u2019s Expanded Books project<\/a>, as well as both a practitioner and a theorist \u00a0in digital media. The interviews, conducted on July 29 and August 22, led Alina Volynskaya<\/a> to investigate deeper in how Apple\u2019s HyperCard<\/a> application played a crucial role in the development of early CD-ROM projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HyperCard allowed users to create \u201cstacks of cards\u201d, each containing different types of media\u2014text, images, sound, buttons, and menus. Users could navigate between different media and follow their own paths of exploration.\u00a0For instance, the well-known CD companion to Beethoven\u2019s\u00a0Symphony No. 9<\/em><\/a>, one of the first interactive CDs released by the Voyager Company in 1989, allowed users to freely navigate between different sections of the symphony and switch between the music and the accompanying commentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often described as a \u201chypermedia construction kit,\u201d HyperCard was one of the earliest technological implementations of the visions surrounding interactivity and hypermedia. However, a single application was not enough to make interactivity a widespread practice; a substantial storage solution was also required\u2014something that computers of the time could not provide.\u00a0This is where CD-ROMs came in, offering 650 MB of storage at a time when most computers had hard drives of only 40 MB or less. The combination of HyperCard and CD-ROM technology afforded the creation of some of the earliest\u201cinteractive\u201d and \u201cmultimedia\u201d digital artifacts, which have now become classics, including\u00a0Myst<\/em><\/a> (1993), the Voyager\u2019s interactive projects,\u00a0The Whole Earth Catalog<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>CD-ROM (1988), and early multimedia encyclopedias. Revisiting these classic CD-ROMs and examining the technologies that made them possible offers new ways to think about histories of interactivity and histories of computing at large.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further reading on HyperCard:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n