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Wherefore Art Thou, HyperCard?
gwernol writes "Macintouch is running an interesting section on the end of HyperCard at Apple. The original discussion was on alternatives to HyperCard but several ex-HyperCard engineers have come forward to describe the 'Steve-ing' of the project. It's an interesting insight into the workings of this company and the fate of Bill Atkinson's revolutionary piece of software." And lamz writes, "Thousands of people still use HyperCard but it has stagnated under Apple's stewardship. Is it time for an Open Source HyperCard? Great article at Wired." My first Mac programming was in HyperCard. Those were the days ...
That was definitely my first "programming" exoerience, on an old SE I think it was, with a 5MB internal drive and a 20 MB external.
I guess it's the end of an era...
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
I didn't know it even ran on today's computers, let alone still used. What is so attractive about HyperCard that prevents people from using things like PowerPoint, or Director, or web-based solutions, or any other number of things?
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Here is a link to the apple site on hypercard.
Hypercard is basically a way to make slideshow like presentations and animations.
I remember using this back in elementary school to make some quite impressive presentations. Those 10 year old presentations are still more impressive than the stuff powerpoint does.
There's no sig like SIGSEG
... is a way of creating hypertext docs with embedded logic. Like a scripted web site, only less accessible.
ASS (AppleScript Studio) is Apple's replacement for HyperCard. It uses Cocoa to do must of its job.
'Wherefore' means 'why'. "Why art thou, Hypercard?" Perhaps the worst grammatical mistake in slashdot history. Perhaps you meant "Where art thou, Hypercard."
Shakespeare. Nifty new author. Worth a read. Heck, even the Mel Gibson movie of Hamlet might have given you a clue on this one.
(OT, Flame, Troll, bleh)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I remember using HyperCard, what a joy. It was, at the time, the most rewarding time I had spend with a computer. It was as close to 'Do what I mean mode' as I believe to be possible with computers.
It was even able to correct much of the damage to my would be programming career that years of BASIC had inflicted.
(Although it remains to be seen if for the better.)
:)
My first computer was a Macintosh LC, and it wasn't actually mine. It was, of course, my father's (purchased at a steep discount, as he is a teacher, and the post-Boxing-Day sales crush was on) and was the first modern computing device our family could afford. We even bought the deluxe version of the '_L_ow _C_ost' Macintosh, whose extra ram bay had been stuffed and whose second floppy drive was now, at 40 mb, a veritable ocean of space. With the extra RAM and hard drive, it was capable of running -- if only just -- the shiny-new System 7.0, which came with a 'HyperCard Player'.
I quickly mastered the ins and outs of every aspect of the UI. I knew how to set the colours of the window borders, the desktop background; I knew what to do when the sad Mac appeared; I was even friends with the mysterious and labyrinthine ResEdit, by whose agency one might transfigure the very type of a file.
But I did not know code.
Then, one autumn night, at around ten thirty --- I remember this clearly --- I was thumbing my way through an early edition of famously lighthearted tome called the 'Macintosh Bible',
which casually (or in this case, perhaps 'causally') mentioned, somewhere in the back pages, that although System 7 ostensibly differed from earlier versions of the OS, which had come with 'complete' copies of HyperCard, Apple engineers had in fact been too lazy to write a 'read-only' Hypercard interpreter. The 'Hypercard Player' of System Seven was simply their most recent Hypercard development environment, saddled with an initialisation routine (a 'stack', in HC parlance) that perversely greyed out most of the interesting menu items. But even this paltry scaffolding of occlusion could be removed by clicking on the appropriate panel in the appropriate corner, and typing the following words in the resultant dialog box:
'go magic'.
System 7.1 came out a few months later, with a fully lobotomized 'Hypercard Player'. Had my parents held off just a few more weeks to buy that computer, I doubt that I would ever have taken up programming, and would neither know nor care about Slashdot or its comment forums.
- undoware.ca
Could someone with knowledge of Hypercard and HyperStudio comment on how these two projects relate to each other? I've been out of the Apple loop for a few years, and the school where I work has HyperStudio.
I assumed that someother company bought the rights to HyperCard and changed the name. But I guess that's not the case. What's the difference between them?
"Wherefore" isn't a "ye olde English" way of saying "where". It means, what is the purpose or reason why? Thus, Juliet wasn't asking where Romeo was, but why did he have to exist, because their love was complicating her life.
Therefore, this article title is inadvertently asking "Why Hypercard? What is the purpose of Hypercard?" Clearly Steve Jobs asked the same thing (likely with more expletives and in an upraised voice).
Thus today, some people are left asking the question, "Where is Hypercard?"
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Too much of the rest of the computer revolution has not followed that promise.
People frequently use the word "wherefore" in an attempt to be poetic, inquiring where something is. Wherefore, however, does not mean "where", it means "why". When Juliet was lamenting "Wherefore art thou Romeo", she wasn't asking "Where are you, romeo?", she was asking "Why are you Romeo?", as in, "Why did you have to be a Montague, my family's sworn enemy?"
This is an error I see all the time, and it's understandable. I'm no Shakespearean scholar by any means, but it still irks me.
rooooar
All of the advantages of good 'ol hypercard, and a universal model for I/O.
the bastards will manage to screw this idea to hell, using XML and XSLT and all the latest word-salad acronyms that serve to distance ordinary people from approching these technologies.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
My first major project in Hypercard was in high school computer class (back in 1992). After learning Basic, Pascal and C++, in our final year we were allowed to choose any platform for our group work. We took a TV, a laserdisc player hooked up to an SE/30, a disc of the San Francisco earthquake and developed an interactive tool for teaching geography to Grade 9 students (our client was the geography dep't).
Programming couldn't have been easier. I used ResEdit to pull the laserdisc commands from a HC stack which came with the player. To drive the disc we just called up the routine with timecodes in the argument to play the appropriate sessions on the TV. Plate tectonic theory diagrams were created in SuperPaint and pasted in. Adding a quiz was very simple, with the addition of a few randomised cards and a scoring routine.
Considering that the school lab was otherwise full of 386s, it's hard to imagine how any of this would have been achievable given our timeframe and programming experience. It was a perfect example of how a quick&dirty interface tool can produce impressive, economical results.
In another project, I used HyperCard to create a limited-access computer interface (a la Minifinder). I created a standalone HC stack, called it Finder and threw the real Finder out. This forced the stack to launch at startup. It then loaded a Mac/GUI tutorial and a card with buttons that launched the various applications on the computer. Quitting apps returned you to the stack. Quitting the stack restarted the computer. You could, of course, override it with a boot floppy but the tool was actually used by the school to help lock down the computer.
These two uses show just how versatile the deceptively simple application was (is). Unfortunately that's also its big weakness, since Apple has always had such a hard time explaining just what the program does.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Seems to me that both Macromedia Director and Revolution are offspring of the original Hypercard.
As a matter of fact, I believe that Revolution can import Hyper/Super stacks with pretty decent accuracy -- plus dig the development and deployment platforms: [snip]
[/snip]Compare that to the Win32/MacOS Classic support in Director. Yeah, yeah... there was an OS/2 runtime environment for Director 4. But it never worked as well as running Dir 4 executables in Win compatibility mode.
Having used Director as my primary development platform during my "budding" years as a programmer, I'd be willing to bet that most people have absolutely no idea how powerful it is. I never came across a project that required more than it could deliver -- with the exception of the odd Xtra/Xobject.
In recent years, Director has started getting WAAAY too bloated, and the performance is down to a crawl -- on the Mac platform at least. Does anyone really use the 3D extensions that 8.5 provided?
I'm not even going to talk about how slow MM has been to carbonize Director, either.
Nope. Not gonna talk about that.
I've played with Revolution a bit recently -- specifically because it doesn't require the purchase of the authoring environment for multiple platforms if you wish to deliver on multiple platforms. I've been pretty impressed by it, and the company.
There's something to be said for supporting small Scottish companies with a sense of humour.
I have to say -- if I'm writing data-parsing utilities for my own/internal use -- I can get the job done in a fraction of the time (minutes vs. hours/days) using one of these tools vs perl/php or full-blown C projects.
This class of tools (and now Flash with Actionscript, and RealBasic I'd assume) is responsible for being the "training wheels" for oodles of budding programmers and shareware authors -- and the community support for this type of tool is awesome. Comparable with the PHP community.
Definitely worth a look if you're wanting to learn the basics of programming without having to deal with OS-level display toolboxes and the like.
I think AppleScript in its current incarnation with OSX provides the basic-level programming support for most any user out there. If decent texts and a watered down IDE for building apps in AppleScript is made available than more non-programmers will be able to venture into the hypercard like atmosphere.
I have to say, I probably wouldn't have my $50/hour programming job if I hadn't discovered HyperCard in 6th grade. My friends and I would spend hours and hours making whole interactive games on it. It got me interesting in programming. It was fun, and as it turned out, profitable.
quoted from the Apple store page for Hypercard.
Many, many years ago, when I was wandering through Xerox PARC for the first time, this one guy insisted on showing me this hack he'd put together in LISP (probably Interlisp) for filling out his Travel Expense Reports. He hated TERs because they're fussy and boring, so he'd created a system that let him create blank reports with rules, sort of like a generalized spreadsheet.
He called them Hypercards. Apparently this grew into quite something later, at Apple. Not bad for a hack for Travel Expense Reports.
I'm all for it. I loved hypercard and still occasionaly dabble with my old copy of it. I would love to see it opensourced (though it was fairly open in terms of people being able to develop ad-ons) and given back the mac community beefed up and ready to go.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Director 8.5.1 will make OS X projectors. You can't author in X, but at least your projectors won't start the dreaded 'Classic'.
I think the best idea has just surfaced here on slashdot. Like the 300 people before me, a group should get together and write an open source hypercard. Particularly if the resulting program is compatible with a flash player perhaps? I know flash is turning more and more into a Hypercard replacement as it is. Unfortunately, my Hypercard programming experience did not teach me how to code another hypercard app...
Meet on sourceforge, anyone?
...the beauty of Hypercard, which Director utterly, completely lacks, was the ability to just riff on simple applications. The Hypercard interface was set up so that you could be tweaking interface gadgets (in Fatbits!) and sending commands CLI-style through the message box, and dropping complex scripts in behind the scenes with such ease and intuition that it was sheer joy to work on Hypercard.
....(and I'm not even going to mention the fact that you used "powerpoint" and "director" in the same sentence) :P
Yes, if you invest the time and energy to map your brain to Macromedia's fussy interface, and are able to bridge the conceptual gap between the timeline and lingo control, and if you can wrestle away the demon of the "movie" metaphor, and if you can master the ESL-style gibberish of lingo, then you might be able to riff.
I guess I would summarize as follows: Director is like a saxophone -- it makes lovely music, but has a steep learning curve and is a serious instrument. Hypercard was like a little casio keyboard -- anyone could pick it up and be riffing on the presets and the funny little keys in no time.