A NoteCards project for the RetroChallenge 2024
Team Lisp is ready to play: I'm entering the RetroChallenge 2024 (RC2024) with a NoteCards project targeting Medley Interlisp.
The RC2024 announcement explains the point of the challenge is to do something new, learn, and have fun with retro systems:
In a nutshell, the RetroChallenge is a loosely disorganised gathering of RetroComputing enthusiasts who collectively do stuff with old computers for a month.
The goal of my RC2024 project, WebCard, is to extend NoteCards to visit sites on the World-Wide Web. The project logo borrows the NoteCards card box icon and its nice retro vibes:
NoteCards is a pioneering hypermedia system developed at Xerox PARC in the 1980s as a Medley Interlisp application. Since it's a pre-web system, NoteCards runs locally and never interacted directly with the web. So I'll develop an extension to open sites using the web browser of the host operating system Medley Interlisp runs under.
However, WebCard is not meant as a WebView or anything like that. Although it will just open websites by calling a modern browser, the feature will expand the hypertext capabilities of NoteCards in interesting ways.
My main motivation for the project is to continue the learning and fun I'm having experimenting with NoteCards.
This is also an opportunity to bridge the past and present of hypertext. And, since I'm in the Medley Interlisp project team who comprises some of the original developers, including NoteCards co-creator Frank Halasz, I'll be able to discuss and learn the system from its own implementors. Which, again, is a way of bridging the past and present of computing.
I will host the code on the WebCard repository, publish reports on the project blog (feed), and post short but more frequent updates on my @amoroso@fosstodon.org Mastodon account under the RC2024 hashtag.
This idea is a crazy frankentext but it can work. I look forward to clicking the start link.
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