The missing link

摘要

No one knew what to do with HyperCard. As best as anyone could figure, the software, created in 1985 by Apple engineer Bill Atkinson, was a kind of virtual Rolodex. You could jump between one virtual "card" and another by pointing a cursor at, and clicking on, underlined text on the first card. It was a neat trick, but Apple had no clear plan for how to use the software. In 1987, the company bundled it with all new Macintosh computers and let users figure it out for themselves. Meanwhile, near Geneva in Switzerland, a young CERN physicist called Tim Berners-Lee was labouring to design a system that could share information with the world. How could he link together the discrete information on the internet's computers?