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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
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.
"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?"
The simplicity of the whole thing.
Back even as few as 5 years ago, I was using Hypercard as a front end to some of my C(++) projects. Myst is a good example of this, it is a hypercard frontend with extensive C++ programming in the form of XTNS (extensions). I used this to create a good deal of student testing applications for betas of computer adaptive testing (lots of intensive code that was VERY slow in scripting...probably run in perl or something else these days with ease though).
Hypercard was one of the greatest programs I ever had the opportunity to use. Its far more than PowerPoint or Director. Its Powerpoint mixed with Director and then filtered through Access / MySQL / Whatever and then given an object oriented language that was very easy to use and understand even if you didn't have the manuals in front of ya.
To be honest, until I started doing everything on the web, I used Hypercard as the frontend to all my softwares. Even after the web became useful, I STILL used it for CGI programming with Webstar on the Mac until I taught myself Perl and a half dozen other 'web' languages I use currently. With a few tweaks to the software, this COULD have been a contender with CGI programming on the Mac, but it was just confusing enough that the paradigm that HC users were use to was broken.
clif
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
Director is incredibly powerful and versatile, but it is not simple. indeed, there have been many tools built into its interface in an attempt to make it immediately useable. however, there still exist countless anomolies in the interface logic, in Lingo (Director's scripting language), and in general workflow that cripple Director significantly.
i am a Director developer, but more importantly, i teach an intro level Director class at the Art Institute of California. trying to communicate to undergrad art students what Director is and how it is used has shed much light on these problems for me.
from what i understand (in terms of capabilities), Hypercard falls somewhere inbetween Director and powerpoint. i've heard accounts from other Director developers praising how intuitive they found Hypercard to be. i suspect that its gentle learning curve would make it an attractive alternative to someone unskilled in the field of multimedia.
but i wonder how many folks who don't possess multimedia development skills would be required to develop something more complex than a powerpoint presentation.
for those of us who develop complex multimedia apps, rapid dev software (prototype, etc.), and games, there is no viable option to Director. the steep learning curve is just a fact of life.
"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.
Actually, wherefore is a more specific word than our modern "why". My source for this is the book "Brush up your Shakespeare". Why can be used in two situations: to ask "For what purpose" or to "From what cause". The term "Wherefore" only means the former.
I'm not sure about the entymology, but I belive it comes from Where = "At what location/time" and Fore = "In the future". So it would literally be asking for what time in the future was it necessary to name him Romeo. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
So there I was, juggling apples and small animals, when I accidentally bit into the wrong one...
I had good English teachers in high school. Every time we did Romeo and Juliet (twice in English, once in drama, I believe), the first thing out of the teachers' mouths was "Wherefore means why."
And this wasn't some fancy prep school. Just a plain, public high school in rural America.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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
As far as I remember HyperStudio is nothing to do with hypercard and superficially looks a lot like hypercard.
But deep down, it doesn't have the flexibility. but it does have lots of candy coating.
SuperCard is a much better heir to hypercard's throne
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
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..."
The simplicity of the metaphor was inded the source of its power.
:-)
I myself never used HyperCard. But I *did* use a clone called "ToolBook", from Asymmetrix, which was launched pretty much in parallel with Windows V3.1. The differences between the two were: HyperCard's metaphor was a stack of cards, while Toolbook was a book of pages. Toolbook also dealt with graphics in a different way, using color and beeing slightly deeper in terms of GUI object structure.
Toolbook was wounded mortally by the introduction of Visual Basic...but before that happened I wrote some kick-ass medical writing assistant code in Toolbook that parsed a National Library of Medicine MedLine search into a set of cards...I mean...pages, let you tag, sort and search them in various ways, and pull the data on a page into a properly formatted bibliographic reference in a Word document, with the option of pasting the abstract in.
So it wasn't just the Macinfolks that were having fun with this kind of stuff Way Back When.
Toolbook tried to recast itself as a "multimedia tool"...I'm sure there's still folks using it somewhere too. But Gawdalmighty I'd rather be writing ToolScript on a web page than JavaScript.
-=Maggie Leber=-
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
Well, not to tread on anybody's Macromedia advocacy, but if I'm not mistaken, Director wasn't even a gleam in the milkman's eye on Intel platforms at the time I was using Toolbook to develop applications. The Toolbook runtime was bundled with Windows 3.0 in 1990. There wasn't even a Director implementation for Windows until 1994, although there was a player for Director movies (which had to be built on a Mac) before then.
Originally Director and Toolbook were targeted at rather different application domains. When VB blew Toolbook out of the ad-hoc applications language box on Windows, "multimedia" was one niche Toolbook fled to. So was "courseware".
But this just shows you how tenuous life as a "business partner" to MSFT can be. Even if you're Asymmetrix (which was founded on the proceeds of a MSFT stock sale by Paul Allen, as I recall)
-=Maggie Leber=-
interface builder. you use that with applescript studio to create gui applicatio9ns with applescript
HyperCard was unveiled at the Boston MacWorld Expo (I was there), I believe it was in '87. That's still the only environment in which I've ever successfully written a releasable application. I wrote a lotto picker that could be customized for various state games, and I wrote a guitar trainer. They were crude, but nifty.
I also used it to do a multimedia resume which I used to send to prospective employers on a floppy disc - there were a lot more Mac-based offices back then.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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.
HyperStudio was (is?) a colorized imitation of hypercard. For the most part, it was much harder to use than hyper card, had a rather cryptic scripting language and wasn't quite as versitile. I prefer Hypercard with teh color toolkit.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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
...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.
I remember doing Novell CNE course material on Toolbox. I'm not sure if this was Novell sanctioned or just some 3rd party company. Probably the later.
Toolbox was a server admin tool packaged as an NLM. Had nothing whatsoever to do with Asymmetrix Toolbook.
-=Maggie Leber=-
I meant TOOLBOOK. You were talking about Toolbook, I was talking about Toolbook. However, I made a Freudian slip. Please forgive me.
My previous comment stands.
'Wherefore' means 'why'. "Why art thou, Hypercard?"
I suggested the title of this article, and know full well what "wherefore" means. (I have a dusty old English degree.) Furthermore, I think that paraphrasing Juliet is entirely appropriate. I suspect that the relationship between Mac OS X and HyperCard is doomed, as was Romeo and Juliet's love.
Perhaps the worst grammatical mistake in slashdot history.
That's perhaps the most misdirected outrage in slashdot history!
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
I suggested the title of this article, and know full well what "wherefore" means. (I have a dusty old English degree.) Furthermore, I think that paraphrasing Juliet is entirely appropriate. I suspect that the relationship between Mac OS X and HyperCard is doomed, as was Romeo and Juliet's love.
Okay, so the relationship is doomed. But I was always taught (and came to agree) that Juliet's question is why must my love be a Montague (or was it Capulet? It's been a few years.) Why not a Corleone or Smith? Then things would have been okay.
As I see it, an understanding of your title in this context would be something like Apple saying "why does this great program come from us?!" (which is a rather incestuous version of Romeo and Juliet:) There's also the fact that while Juliet knew there was a great love that was doomed to fail, Apple's love seems to be long gone, and not something they much care about. Unfortunately, I'm not conversant enough in the bard to be able to offer up what I think is a more appropriate quote for my view of the situation.
Perhaps the worst grammatical mistake in slashdot history.
That's perhaps the most misdirected outrage in slashdot history!
If tongue weren't planted firmly in cheek, I'd certainly be inclined to agree with you:)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon