If you read all the way through the section about creating a Concentration game, you can sort of get an idea of what it could do. It doesn't really give you a very good feel for what it was like, though. Nobody used SK8 in the sort of stilted one-action-at-a-time-in-sequence way that the the tutorial describes; that's an artifact of technical writing. You have to write it that way in order to clearly explain each step and each tool used without misleading ambiguities.
In actual use, it was more like working with HyperCard or a Mac drawing program. The difference from HyperCard was that you weren't limited to five predefined graphical widgets and only strings for representing data. You could build arbitrary data structures and assemble arbitrary widgets interactively from graphical primitives.
You might be able to find a copy of the SK8 Technology release by googling for something like "SK8 Apple technology release". The Wikipedia article has two links that purport to offer the SK8 sources, though neither link seems to be working this morning.
I think Rainer (lispm) at some point posted a link to an archive of the SK8 technology release; maybe he still knows where it is. Good luck running it, though. You'll need a very faithful emulation of a specific range of Mac System releases on a specific set of 68K or PPC hardware.
The Wikipedia article also has a screenshot of the SK8 environment:
The weird look of the windows was intentional. It provided visual distinction from the normal Mac user interface. SK8 projects often involved creating normal Mac interface elements, and n true Lispy fashion, absolutely everything in the SK8 environment could be cracked open and edited, including SK8's own UI, so SK8's windows were made to look very different from normal Mac windows so you could easily tell them apart while workingon a project.
That weird look is interesting in itself. It was achieved by writing WDEFs in Lisp. A WDEF was a code resource in the old (pre-OSX) mac system, used for rendering windows on the screen. You could customize the apperance of a program's windows by supplying WDEF resources that the program used to render its windows.
WDEFs were usually written in assembler or, in latter years, C. With Macintosh Common Lisp, though, you could write them in Lisp. In fact, you could write them in a mix of Lisp and assembler, using MCL's built-in interactive assembler.
(Approximately the first time I met him, Dave Vronay, who wrote much of SK8's graphical infrastructure, waxed eloquent about how wonderful it was to have an interactive assembler that could wrap machine code in convenient higher-level code. He had previously hacked on arcade games.)
Since you are someone who seems to have been in on this in the heyday, I'll share my story with you (I think it is, in a way, telling).
In short: I was a Hypercard kid. It's strange to look back on it this way, but the early/mid 90s seems like a completely different kind of computing. It was in that period where I first started seriously using computers, writing my first stacks probably at about 9 or 10 years old. I was inspired by all of the compelling stackware and, as you might guess, Myst, which was a pretty big deal at the time.
Back then I saw Hypercard as "serious" for the following reasons:
- You made "programs" that looked like the rest of the system (OS), and hence were the "real thing";
- You could make games in it yourself, but so could professionals, so it had to be "serious"
- It was not just for doing one thing, but most possible things
What happened as the years went on was that the outside world continuously told me that Hypercard was, in fact, not the real thing; it was not "real programming." Materially this became even more clear as the software was left to die on the vine by Apple. One of the reasons I did not pursue CS in college (and I'm very happy I didn't) is because I didn't like all this C++ stuff that the other kids claimed was "real programming" -- if that was the real thing, I didn't want any part of it ("how in the world do you make a button with that?").
Only in recent years have I started to read up on PARC, Alan Kay, and some of the genesis of the ideas about personal computing systems. I've realized that my younger, initial instinct was probably correct: Hypercard was more like "real computing" than anything else I've encountered. It's a shame that what I expected to happen back then didn't come to pass -- that the whole future Mac OS, as presented to the user, would be a kind of Hypercard (inspectable, adjustable, open to limitless tinkering and creation, and able to be learned by interactive live examples).
I hadn't heard of SK8 until this exchange. It is very heartening to see that the grown-ups were thinking along the same lines. On the other hand, it's easy to become crestfallen at the state of computing today by comparison.
HyperCard was pretty great, and it rapidly developed a devoted community. It had some fairly severe limitations (only about five built-in widgets and a scripting language in which the only data structure was text strings), but people still managed to make a lot of cool stuff with it--sometimes by writing extensions called XFCNs and XCMDs, generally in C.
SK8 removed HyoerCard's limitations, but it never really made it out of ATG. Well, there were a few technology-sharing projects with universities and industry.
But Apple's management had no idea what to do with HyperCard, much less SK8. They couldn't figure out what marketing category to put it in or how to charge for it. Heck, the only reason it existed at all was because of a promise they had made to Bill Atkinson to try to keep him from leaving.
I hear you about the current state of computing. I do miss the tools I was regularly working with in the early 90s.
In actual use, it was more like working with HyperCard or a Mac drawing program. The difference from HyperCard was that you weren't limited to five predefined graphical widgets and only strings for representing data. You could build arbitrary data structures and assemble arbitrary widgets interactively from graphical primitives.
You might be able to find a copy of the SK8 Technology release by googling for something like "SK8 Apple technology release". The Wikipedia article has two links that purport to offer the SK8 sources, though neither link seems to be working this morning.
I think Rainer (lispm) at some point posted a link to an archive of the SK8 technology release; maybe he still knows where it is. Good luck running it, though. You'll need a very faithful emulation of a specific range of Mac System releases on a specific set of 68K or PPC hardware.
The Wikipedia article also has a screenshot of the SK8 environment:
The weird look of the windows was intentional. It provided visual distinction from the normal Mac user interface. SK8 projects often involved creating normal Mac interface elements, and n true Lispy fashion, absolutely everything in the SK8 environment could be cracked open and edited, including SK8's own UI, so SK8's windows were made to look very different from normal Mac windows so you could easily tell them apart while workingon a project.That weird look is interesting in itself. It was achieved by writing WDEFs in Lisp. A WDEF was a code resource in the old (pre-OSX) mac system, used for rendering windows on the screen. You could customize the apperance of a program's windows by supplying WDEF resources that the program used to render its windows.
WDEFs were usually written in assembler or, in latter years, C. With Macintosh Common Lisp, though, you could write them in Lisp. In fact, you could write them in a mix of Lisp and assembler, using MCL's built-in interactive assembler.
(Approximately the first time I met him, Dave Vronay, who wrote much of SK8's graphical infrastructure, waxed eloquent about how wonderful it was to have an interactive assembler that could wrap machine code in convenient higher-level code. He had previously hacked on arcade games.)