re market of the Amiga (with which it directly competed), and the Microsoft Windows phenomenon of the early 1990's.HyperCardIn August 1987, an Apple engineer named Bill Atkinson (also the developer of MacPaint) introduced a new type of software development tool - HyperCard. HyperCard was unlike any previous software development tool in two key respects: it was interactive rather than language based, and it was geared towards the construction of user interfaces rather than the processing of data. As such, HyperCard made an ideal tool for rapid prototyping and the development of in-house applications.HyperCard was loosely based on the hypertext idea of links between pages (in this case screens called cards). Building HyperCard applications (called stacks) required almost no programming skills, so even end users could produce useful and interesting applications. A simple language called HyperTalk was available "behind the scenes" to build more complex stacks. HyperCard was a godsend to researchers in the field of Human Computer Interfaces, since it made experimentation with new user interface styles exceptionally quick and easy.Apple distributed HyperCard free of charge with every Macintosh sold (until 1992, when it became an extra cost product). Similar tools became available for other platforms over the following decade.The Sun SPARCstationThe Sun SPARCstation 1 was the machine that brought RISC performance to the masses. It wasn't the first RISC workstation. It wasn't even the first SPARC based Sun system. But the SPARCstation 1 set a new standard for price/performance. It churned out a whopping 12.5 MIPS at a starting price of only $8995 - about the cost of a fully configured Macintosh.The SPARCstation 1 was introduced in 1989. It was based on a SPARC processor running at 20 MHz, and a typical configuration included 16 Mb of RAM, a couple of hundred Mb of hard disk, and a fast and extremely high resolution (1152x900) color graphics sys...
