How my product’s an homage to Hypercard, Apple’s pre-web user delight.
Touchgram Origins — Technical
The stories behind the creative messaging app.
There’s a long history of creative tech behind Touchgram.
I fell in love with Apple’s HyperCard
In my first year of studying engineering, I was also introduced to the world of programming. My fellow engineering student was a member of the deeply-distracting UWA Computer Club. He had benefited from a high-school introduction to programming, rare in the late 70’s. He was an utter language geek. So I learned about BASIC, APL, Forth and Smalltalk all at once. I didn’t get to program in the more exotic languages. But, right from the start, I knew the world of programming included a lot of variety in how to think.
We devoured news of Smalltalk, most from a geekily-famous 1980 BYTE magazine. Even without access to a running Smalltalk, I knew a world existed of programmable tools. I read that important people thought programming should be for more than an elite few.
A more mundane decade of programming business and technical mining applications followed. I learned about accountancy and book-keeping from the inside. In the midst of a chain of tools that calculated how much coal was…
