HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like.<p>It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these syntactically-sugared programming languages. HyperTalk reads just like English; it very much seemed like the next generation of the niche BASIC aimed to fill. Because computers of that era typically opened right into a development environment (e.g. a simple BASIC interpreter), there was even brief discussion of HyperCard potentially replacing Finder as the default Mac OS environment.
In 88 (I was 19) I was a 'professional mac developer' and wrote a stack in hypercard to convert huge list of points to polygons, and split them with other polygons.<p>The project was to split the parcels of land from Lille to Paris with the track of the TGV (high speed train) to calculate the expropriation the state was doing to the poor guys who'd end up getting their huge field cut in two, and would have to drive 20 miles to go from one side to the other :-)<p>Seriously. Hypercard was pretty cool to throw together something quickly, with a UI and more importantly it gave the client the impression they could go an tinker with it afterward.<p>It was also excellent to mockup UIs and 'processes' and other bits of Mac apps before committing to making them, so even internally at apple, Hypercard (and Supercard) were used a lot for mockups.<p>There was a huge ecosystem around hypercard, and it lasted for a very long time.<p>Oh, and Atkinson is still my hero!
If I remember correctly, the only reason Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is because HyperCard was discontinued. He was apparently writing CRC cards and storing them in HyperCard (which seems like a completely reasonable thing to do...) He wanted something that was as convenient for doing that kind of thing.
I taught myself AppleScript when I was 13, to parse HTML and make 1000-character iPod Notes. I'd used LogoWriter in school since I was 7, but never got a copy of HyperCard. I heard many good things about HyperCard, but never thought it would be worth starting an emulator just to use it.<p>I just opened ViperCard, and the GUI is totally intuitive. The scripts used by buttons share a lot of syntax with AppleScript. This is the GUI for AppleScript I always wanted. Now I know why people love it. If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer.
I wrote a program called Virtual Journal 1.0 that was simply an infinite paged, password protected text journal app.<p>I put it into AOL's ftp area as shareware and got checks from around the world for $2. I was about 8 years old!<p>EDITED: I'm offering a $100 reward if anyone can find a copy of this software in an archive or old shareware disc somewhere! I'd love to find it again. Also, bonus points for finding my OneClick Palette called "AOL ROVER".
HyperCard was about empowering users, the opposite of what many tech companies want today, including Apple. It was a "predecessor" to the web (hypertext, HyperTalk scripting language), of Flash (animations, graphics), of user programmable databases (ok, Filemaker is older). It enabled users to smoothly dive into programming, as it not only offered a simple but extremly powerful concept of document-applictions called "stacks", drag-n-drop setup of your own graphical user interfaces, but behind all this a very powerful, extendable object oriented programming language with kind of "real" objects, as every item of your stack could have it's own method. Thankfully we have web technology today, else computer technology would miss its most democratic tool. But still HyperCard was the only way to simply have your own data on your own computer in your own application and not relying to a server, cloud or even paid service.
This is cool, but I wonder if anyone has made a modern, browser-based variation of HyperCard? Something with a model akin to HyperCard's but exporting stacks in a form that can be easily put onto a page.<p>There's Amber Smalltalk, but that's more powerful and the simplicity of HyperCard is part of its charm.
This reminds me of my favorite story about old-school Macs. All Macs shipped with Hypercard after its release for a while. Then, eventually, Apple spun off Claris, who got HyperCard as part of the deal, and Apple decided to ship a nerfed version of HyperCard that had most of the stack authoring tools disabled.<p>However, you could open up a command console in this neutered version of HyperCard, type in 'magic', and you'd be able to unlock the full set of authoring tools.<p>Magic indeed.
For those that like HyperCard, I really recommend looking at LiveCode (www.livecode.com), it is a modern version of it that is able to generate standalone applications for MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and the Web.<p>They have a FOSS version behind that confusing website, the livecode.org site has access to the GPL version, you can download without acquiring a membership. It is just a bit hidden.
I wonder how much material design is influenced by Hypercard. I know the web was partially inspired but it looks like with material design the language is sort of extended. Or maybe it was all integrated into the design language for the web.
I'll show my age here, but back when I took AI, I wrote a (toy, homework-size) expert system as a Hypercard stack. There is actually a lot to be said for Hypercard as a framework for quick UIs.
Wow! This takes me back! HyperTalk was probably my second language after Applesoft BASIC and boy did it seem powerful at the time.<p>Hypercard overall was just great at getting out of the way and letting you get things done. Looking back, if Apple had realised how powerful networking was back then, Hypercard may have morphed into the browser one day, but they missed that boat.<p>I remember reading somewhere a while back that Hypercard plus some XCMDs were used to control the lighting system in Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar... actually here we go: <a href="https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-gone/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-go...</a>
I've always thought that OneNote would be better as some kind of hypercardesque application. Everything I wish my notebook could do it kinda does, but with very poor linking to data or calendars.
As for the problem with languages like HyperTalk and AppleScript being read-only, the solution isn't to change the syntax, it's -- wait for it -- AI! If Google can figure out what you want from a spoken free-form inquiry, then a smart interpreter should be able to figure out what you're trying to say in a line of code, even if you don't get the syntax quite right. And if your code is ambiguous, it can ask you confirm your intentions. Why haven't we seen more of this?
I would think "Hypercard Reimagined" would finally cast off the iron chains of its black-and-white, ancient Mac UI heritage...<p>edit: to clarify, even back in the day those were the two things that I really disliked about HyperCard. No color and no Windows
Hypercard was the inspiration behind much of the early Web. In particular the Viola browser suite.<p><a href="http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html</a>
Considering the enthusiasm at display here, I feel like this project would deserve bit better demo video for people like me who do not really understand HyperCard.
I had a early Mac in 1984 (still have the damn thing - sentimentality). Showing people Hypercard was often the thing that convinced them to purchase a Mac.
I used to make Hypercard stacks back in 7th grade when I was learning from Quantum Link (Q-Link) hackers like Mobeius from the Pan-American Information Network (#hellonearth).<p>And AOL hackers and soical engineers like HappyHardcore, creator of AOL4Free & the Master Blaster, the famous Da Chronic, creator of AOHell and KT (Shameer) who first taught me social engineering in 1995-<p><a href="http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/" rel="nofollow">http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/</a><p>Koceilah Rekouche aka Chron, photo from the 1990s-<p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating/3816111466/" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating/3816111466/</a>
there needs to be ways to jump into code without being bogged down with installing compilers and tools and configuring minifiers and choosing frameworks. just code straight away.<p>something that works for kids but also scales all the way into enterprise.