Macintosh, 1987. The authoring tools were already installed.
User Level:
When the user level is set at Authoring or Scripting, a new menu title, Objects, appears in the menu bar.
Apple, HyperTalk Beginner's Guide, 1989
Button Name: Next
Card button number: 2 Card button ID: 2
Style: Round Rect Show name: yes
Click the buttons. They work.
How to spot 1-bit Macintosh.
#000#fffThere are no grays
Every shade is a checkerboard of black and white pixels at the pixel level. If you see a flat gray, it is not System 6.
Buttons invert, they do not depress
Pressing fills the whole button solid black and flips the label to white. Two CSS declarations, and it is the entire feel of the machine.
The title bar is horizontal pinstripes
, with the title sitting on an opaque white block that knocks a hole in them.
512 × 342The card is 512 by 342
, the full screen of a compact Mac, so the document had no chrome around it at all.
12HyperCard24Chicago is a bitmap face
It only looks right at its native size and whole multiples of it.
Not in a plugin. Not in a developer account. In a text box that was in the software the whole time, on a machine you already owned, in about four seconds.
The dial did not unlock a purchase. It was already set to whatever you set it to.
HyperCard was free on every Mac because Bill Atkinson would only give it to Apple on that condition. Then it was sold, then it was Claris's, then it was nobody's. The last version shipped in 1998 and Apple stopped selling it in March 2004. Ward Cunningham has said the wiki began as a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s. The idea got out. The dial did not.
Now try it where you are. Look at the buttons in any app you use daily and find the one that opens its script. There isn't one. The Objects menu is on their side of the glass, and you rent access to it.
Becoming an author was a setting, not a product tier.