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This was a very cool read. Programmers were programmers even back in the day of Mark I.
It is cool to see that they dabbled in natural language processing back then. This is years before Eliza and they were working on generating English prose based on English grammar. Very impressive!
The music generation program they wrote is equally impressive. The recording that was playing shows that they were adept enough to time events in the computer so good that they could playback songs. This was back in the early 1950s.
This was also a year before Mad Libs was invented in 1953, using the same template-filling style.
I couldn't help myself:
This is beautiful. What is this?
Decker is a "multimedia sketchpad". It's a drawing program, a database, and a rapid prototyping environment. A "deck" can be exported as a self-contained, self-executing .html file (as seen above), and there's also a non-browser-based native application. It uses a functional scripting language named Lil which incorporates ideas from the APL family. You can learn more and play with some additional examples here:
So an extremely niche and stylized web-based Hypercard.
Odd, but Hypercard WAS damn near the pinnacle of empowering software for normal people.
Aside from the scripting language, a major innovation Decker has over HyperCard is the concept of "Contraptions": user-defined interactive widgets that can be reused by simply copying and pasting them between decks. If you can make a card, you can make a contraption, and then you can share it as a new building block:
https://itch.io/t/2690007/the-contraption-bazaar
Decker users have made a variety of zines, toys, visual novels, and play aids for tabletop games, in many cases without any custom scripting:
hah, awesome demo of Decker!
We've come a long way to get buttplug.io today.