HyperCard and the Monks project have largely passed into digital history now. Looking at its many odds and ends, one might ask questions like Why an e-book reader? There are so many of those! Ah, but not twenty years ago this was one of the first, long before the rise of Amazon and the commercial wave. The project is now available free on the Rivertext website. If Monks Had Macs was a project of breathtaking originality and scope in the late 1980s I was one of many captivated by it, contributing technical skills to support the creative vision of Brian Thomas, the project's architect. He created what I believe to be the first public hyperbook from the English text of De Imitatione Christiby Thomas à Kempis this later grew into a virtual monastery library with diverse volumes from Thoreau and others as well as original art essays and windows on history such as The White Rose and paranoid speculations on the Kennedy assassination. In his rather cloistered life of the time, Thomas imagined a world of information and ideas freely shared, connected in new ways which a few dreamers had conceived before but which Bill Atkinson's HyperCard made accessible to the masses.
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