One night in the 1980s (or perhaps it was the 1970s?) a young computer programmer named Bill Atkinson sat on a park bench near his California home and took a tab of LSD. As he started to trip, he looked up at the stars, those eternal wells of thermonuclear energy blanketing the night sky. Then he looked down and saw the lamp posts lining the street before him. He noticed how the streetlights echoed the stars above, casting little pools of light in a sea of darkness. Two systems speaking the same language, but so separated by time and space that they could not communicate. It made Atkinson think about human knowledge; the ways that physicists know some things about the universe, and biologists some things, and poets and artists and musicians some other things, each contributing their own little pool of light, but not able to connect and see the whole picture. Knowledge, Atkinson realized, lay in the connections between points of information. One might even call them… hyperlinks… in a world wide web. This fateful acid trip ultimately led Bill Atkinson to develop HyperCard, an Apple-based software released in 1987 that would go on to be influential in the development of many computer applications that we take for granted today, from PowerPoint to the World Wide Web. HyperCard stacks were highly customizable, with dynamic and interactive components very similar to HTML components in the websites we used today. Since the Web had yet to be invented, HyperCard stacks were accessed not by visiting a web address, but by downloading files from computer servers or via email. HyperCard’s greatest asset was its graphical user interface that was easy and intuitive to use. Everyone from schoolchildren to artists and educators could create a HyperCard stack to share information.
One group of people who seized the opportunity were the folks of the Environmental Studies Department (known as ESD) here at Dartmouth. They released the first edition of their digital magazine, Sense of Place, on September 27, 1990 by sending HyperCard stacks via BlitzMail, Dartmouth’s homegrown email system. (Hard copies were available for off-campus readers for a fee of $5 a term.) SOP was the successor to the digital newsletter ESD News (ca. 1989-1990) which was distributed in the form of Microsoft Word files sent through BlitzMail. While the Word files included graphics and text, they lacked the dynamism and interactivity of HyperCards.
As publisher Lynne Rainville ‘93 explained in the first HyperCard issue of SOP, this change in format represented a new direction for the publication: “The Magazine has outgrown its original function as a newsletter for ESD, taking on the more ambitious goal of informing and meeting the needs of the Dartmouth Community.” Editor Anne Gore ‘91 noted in her column that establishing SOP as an independent publication had allowed it to make the switch to HyperCard and nearly double its readership “in a matter of a few weeks” and to “gain support and encouragement from environmental groups all over the Upper Valley.”
Read the first issue of Sense of Place in the embedded emulation below. To access the other issues in Dartmouth College, Sense of Place and ESD electronic newsletter records (DO-59), please visit our public Preservica website. To read, simply download the files to your computer and then upload them to the open source HC Simulator at https://hcsimulator.com.
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