The Beginning

Originally, this idea was hatched the old-fashion way... a discussion amongst friends, in this case, at a restaurant. There was lots of talk that day about where the web was headed and pretty much everyone agreed that the future was all about giving everyone, not just technical people, a way to do increasingly cooler things with the web.

The two co-founders, Josh and Ted, had previously worked together for a few years at a financial software company in Dallas, TX and during that time they had the great experience of designing and building the ThinWire Ajax Framework, a web programming framework for building large interactive business applications.

Throughout the late nights and endless hours they spent hacking on that framework, Josh and Ted would often find themselves talking about how things could be done better, more elegantly and ultimately in a way that made the programmers life easier. At the time, they hadn't yet envisioned anything like TileStack. It wasn't until both of them had separately left the company that they started talking about the next big thing, the killer app that would give everyday people the power to create amazing things.

A Simple Idea

When TileStack was first taking shape, we figured out pretty quickly where we wanted to take it. The idea was simple. Create an online playground where people of all ages would be free to create cool things. To accomplish this we knew that the creation of these "cool things" had to be really easy. Basically something close to using a simple paint program, but with added abilities such as allowing people to capture and organize information. Keeping with that idea, we decided that unlike the single canvas you get in a paint program, you should be able to paint on multiple canvases and you should be able to link the canvases together to make a loosely connected slideshow of sorts. We decided to call each canvas a "Tile" and a collection of them a "Stack", thus the name "TileStack".

HyperCard and Duke Nukem

For those of you who know what HyperCard and Duke Nukem are, please pat yourself on the back for being a mega geek! Of course, the real question should be what do both of them have to do with TileStack? Well, interestingly enough, as we headed down the path of building TileStack, we realized that like all great ideas, something like TileStack had been done before in the past. In fact, the cool guys at Apple Computers (excuse me, they are just Apple now) built something like this back in the late 80's and they called it HyperCard. For about 10 years, HyperCard was actually a very popular and useful program that many Macintosh users of all ages enjoyed. You might not know it, but great games like Myst were actually created in HyperCard. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the technology languished and eventually it was discontinued by Apple (I won't point fingers... *cough* Steve).

Once we realized that we were creating HyperCard for the web, we decided to embrace the idea 100%, so we set out to support and be compatible with good old HyperCard. Well, that explains the HyperCard reference, but you're probably wondering what this all has to do with Duke Nukem? Hmm... well, truth is, I just wanted to bring that classic game up for the sole purpose of concluding as follows. In the words of the infamous Duke Nukem "It's time to kick butt and chew bubble gum... and I'm all out of gum." HyperCard, you've been pwn3d!