There is a direct line from HyperCard to where I am now.
I started programming as a hobbyist on the Apple //e in BASIC and 65C02 assembly language. But, I released a much better version of Eliza written in HyperCard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) and submitted it on AOL and to the freeware FTP archives around 1993. It also used an XFNC that let me use the original MacinTalk text to speech engine and the newer PlainTalk.
A professor at another college had been looking for an Eliza HyperCard stack to use with his HyperCard based Gopher server. He reached out to me on AOL and that was my first paying side gig.
Having some freelance software under my belt in college at the no name school I was attending helped me stand out and get an internship my junior year in 1995 in the much larger city where I still live.
That led to my first job when I came back a year later at the company where I interned.
Side note: Writing the Eliza clone has been my go to “Hello World” program for years. I’ve written versions in AppleSoft Basic that used SAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth), GW-Basic, DEC VAX DCL, VB6, C# on Windows Mobile, JavaScript, and PHP.
I started programming as a hobbyist on the Apple //e in BASIC and 65C02 assembly language. But, I released a much better version of Eliza written in HyperCard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) and submitted it on AOL and to the freeware FTP archives around 1993. It also used an XFNC that let me use the original MacinTalk text to speech engine and the newer PlainTalk.
A professor at another college had been looking for an Eliza HyperCard stack to use with his HyperCard based Gopher server. He reached out to me on AOL and that was my first paying side gig.
Having some freelance software under my belt in college at the no name school I was attending helped me stand out and get an internship my junior year in 1995 in the much larger city where I still live.
That led to my first job when I came back a year later at the company where I interned.
Side note: Writing the Eliza clone has been my go to “Hello World” program for years. I’ve written versions in AppleSoft Basic that used SAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth), GW-Basic, DEC VAX DCL, VB6, C# on Windows Mobile, JavaScript, and PHP.