4.3.3.1 Adaptability for Hypertext
ESCAPE was ported to the Sun Sparc workstations to be used in a hypertexting
tool called HyperNews. To allow for transparent portability and accessibility
from two platforms, technical considerations regarding interchange formats and
automated utility programs for conversion were addressed over the course of
the years 1991 to 1992. To prepare ESCAPE for the Sun environment,
Hopper and Tillotson restructured the entire system. The following
description by Tillotson (personal interview, June 23, 1992), described
this process and an example fo the type of problem encountered along the
way that caused the need for restructuring:
Tillotson: Convert-It was intended to convert stacks from
HyperCard to Toolbook. The first step was to run the Convert-It stack,
which converted your stack into a HIFF file. The HIFF file was an intermediate
text representation, which you could then download to your PC. Then,
the other part of Convert-It would create a Toolbook stack from the HIFF file.
Of course, the conversion would not be complete and you would clean up the
resulting stack by hand. In this case, I was taking the HIFF files and moving
them to UNIX. I wrote a program to take the data out of the fields in a HIFF
file and convert it to a database. The main problem I encountered was with
the original format: in the original HyperCard stack the fields were not
in the same order on every background, even though they were visually in
the same locations on the cards.