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HyperCard Gone for Good
Second to Last HyperCard Goddess writes "HyperCard has finally been removed from the Apple website. Read some comments about the passing. I read about HyperCard's demise on the RunRevolution list. It's pretty sad; the unexpected part was that it remained for sale at the Apple Store for six years without an update. Although we've all moved on, we'll certainly miss it." I won't.
What killed HyperCard? Shunting it off to Claris, where it languished. Lots of good applications with plenty of future potential were killed at Claris, not least of them being MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw. Damn shame.
While I used it all the time in middle school, I had managed to completely forget that this application ever existed. All of a sudden I wish I could look at all the games and stuff I used to make with this. I think after learning basic this was the next 'programming' language/tool I ever used.
Don't know anything about it - just followed the links.
Well, I'm clueless, what is/was it?
Apple should really think about releasing the source code and letting the OS community take it over. HyperCard was a great development environment, and I really think it influenced the way current environments work. HyperTalk was the first language that I learned on the Mac, and it was my second overall language, first being AppleSoft BASIC. Rick
There may be others...
It's pretty sad; the unexpected part was that it remained for sale at the Apple Store for six years without an update.
Being in the market for a new PowerBook (and waiting anxiously for new revisions), this is a truly terrifying statistic.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Rolodex/Programming tool Hypercard was found dead in it Cupertino, California home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its output, there's no denying its contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
you followed diligently for 6 years! and didn't give up hope that it may be updated!
i'd say you are gonna have a tough time moving on... good luck. :D
The only "software" I ever created from scratch was HyperCard-based. I built a guitar tuner and a lotto game player (input state rules to a randomizer), both of which got a decent number of Compuserve downloads back in the day. I also used to hand out a version of my resume as a browsable stack, which was kind of cool and helped me get a few Mac-related jobs as well.
Of course, I stopped writing stacks entirely by about 1991 or so, and haven't written more than a shell script since. But I still have fond memories of it as a tool and environment. It's a pity that HyperCard died when it did (really about 10 years ago), but it was always the "neither fish nor foul" of Apple products.
That and Pippin.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
On a side note, my good friend recently joked about a 'skinny' port of Hypercard for the iPod. GID input might be a pain, though scrolling through buttons/fields might work?
I hate Grammar Nazi's
we'll certainly miss it." I won't.
*sigh*. It's easier to be negative that positive isn't it? And so I'll be likewise: maybe we don't care if you do or not Pudge. I certainly remember it fondly. And as someone who uses "classic macs" for fun, find it a very convenient tool to still use. So let the rest of us have our say.
I was surprised while reading about the death of Hypercard (like 3 days ago, way to stay on top of things Slashdot) to find that Myst was written in Hypercard.
Not that Myst is anything special, I hated that damn game. But still, its interesting to note.
HyperCard was waaaay ahead of its time. Years before the common user knew about HTML, JavaScript, or Wikis, all those concepts were already beautifully united in HyperCard. Well, the network was missing, but it was already WYSIWYG (en contraire to today's Wikis).
Seriously. I learnt to know HyperCard like 15 years ago and developed some nice applications, and I haven't used it again until recently, and then I was like saying: Wow, shit, it was all there already!
It wasn't perfect though because only a few people had macs, and I think it was too intuitive and required too much creativity from average Joe (OK, mod me down for my arrogance, come on, come on, give it to me, yeah)
--
Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography.
Not to mention Claris/AppleWorks itself, which hasn't had a real update in more than three years...
Thank goodness FileMaker got spun off into its own company before it was nixed, too!
I can't believe that Hypercard was still was just recently killed. I always thought that Hypercard was WAY more powerful than people let on. It was really the Mac OS of programming. On the surface level, it was an easy to use, fairly limited, programming environment. What most people didn't know though is that Hypercard was capable of just about anything any other language could do at the time. The "guts" of Hypercard were hidden from the user (and most programmers), but with some effort you could have a tool that was flexible as hell.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
I had a teacher when I was in 7th grade (1990?) that used a Laserdisc player, Hypercard and a projector to teach us life science. All of his lectures revolved around that setup. That was my first major exposure to a Mac. He had the Mac controlling the Laserdisc player and everything. Hypercard will be missed.
The closest I ever really saw to Hypercard on the PC was IBM Linkway. I played with it briefly, and it just couldn't compete with Hypercard.
It always struck me as odd that Apple kept hypercard around all these years, after all even Appleworks got more updates, and given that when Apple moved to OS X, they killed off a lot of calssic stuff (and steve's declaration of the death of classic) it seemed odd they would keep it arround.
I wonder if we may see the next generation of hypercard from Apple in the near future? Something like that would be an awsome addition to OS X, and it seems to me like it could be Apple's iLife version of Keynote.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
FreeCard is intended to be a drop in replacement for HyperCard with a lot of nice new updates that people have been hanging out for since HyperCard stopped being updated. Unfortunately the project is struggling due to my not having enough time to work on it.
If you're a Java programmer and want to see an opensource HyperCard clone come to fruition, please drop me a line or jump onto the FreeCard-general mailing list and start hacking away.
I don't think Apple has killed Hypercard at all. :)
:)
I think the fundamental principles behind Hypercard have been translated into Objective-C, Cocoa and many of the MacOSX technologies relating to these - Applescript, Delagates, outlets, forward chains, the runtime message lookup, object introspection, cocoa bindings, and most of the current Mac OS X frameworks are based on or around the principles and OO patterns of Hypercard.
These architectural principles have been available in other languages for a while, but Apple has paid careful attention to the designs of MacOSX, and I think they've learnt from the Hypercard experience of yesteryear, and brought that experience into the new age of software development for the Macintosh.
The difference between the development environment that Apple provides today (xCode), and what it used to provide (HyperCard) is that today's tools give all the seasoned C/C++/Java programmers the ability to develop however they want to AND in addition, Apple provides the opportunity to use the frameworks MacOSX provides (which, to labor the point, I think are Hypercard-like in principles, hence the elegance of Cocoa app designs) So we get our cake, and get to eat it too!
While everyone debates about the fact that Apple has given Hypercard the flick, I disagree. It's fundamentally there in MacOSX if you look beneath the surface.
Software development is about learning from your experience and using that to your advantage, and this 'experience' is what software engineering using systems of patterns is all about. The developer documentation is pretty heavy on the patterns, architectures and designs inherent in MacOSX because they want people to use them and benefit from them, beacuse, in turn, Apple benefits.
I think Apple has combined both the business and programming experiences they got from the 'Hypercard days', with the culture and benefits of the opensource community and that's why they are steadily gaining a strong foothold in the marketplace with MacOSX and their products.
Hypercard still kinda-sorta lives on. At least, that's what I rekon.
Cheers!
I have always seen HyperCard as a great opportunity lost by Apple.
;-). Coming from a Mac-dominated environment, we also discovered that you could use these tools on PCs too- perhaps not as elegantly, UI-wise, but with the price differentials in hardware, many grew up creating content on PCs for PCs. That can't have helped Apple at all.
I had my first development job in 1993 producing university teaching materials using Hypercard & Quicktime. Back in those days developing using a Mac only product wasn't a problem, as the majority of our labs were Mac anyway. As Apple as a platform slumped in the mid-90's people's expectations changed- they wanted things to run on PC too.
All that needed to happen was to produce a Windows runtime, and Apple could have maintained a stranglehold on straightforward multimedia creation. No-one's saying it was a great tool, but as a simple mechanism to convey rich content to users, it couldn't be beaten.
Why Apple never dedicated the resources required to do this I will never know- perhaps it was so tied to Quickdraw that a port would have amounted to a complete rewrite... there were rumours too that playback was going to be built into QuickTime, but perhaps that was just wishful thinking.
Anyway, it never happened, and it was pretty obviously after a few years of point upgrades that it was never going to.... the lame way that colour was bolted onto the original 1 bit code (using a plugin or XCMD) didn't bode well for where the product stood in Apple's priorities.
I tried SuperCard, which at least natively supported colour and multiple windows, but the end result could still only be run on a Mac. The product changed owners so many times, it never boded well, and a Windows player or, better still a plug-in (Roadster, anyone?) were always just around the corner.....
So I, and many others I imagine, moved to MacroMind Director v4. It was clunky as hell back then, interactivity strapped onto an animation package. But it has got better
I've used HyperCard since 1987 when it was introduced, and bundled with all Macs. That was the same time that Mr. Jobs was ousted out of Apple.
Actually, Apple's new leadership in 1997 killed HyperCard.
When Mr Jobs returned to Apple, it was no surprise that he hated HyperCard. He hated all things Apple and launched the "think different" campaign that killed off all things "Classic". His job was to deliver on what Apple paid for, bringiing the NextStep OS to Mac OSX.
I can't say why Mr. Jobs hated HyperCard. It always helped sell Macs to educators in the same colleges and universities Mr. Jobs was trying to woo over to NexT. The Macs were selling because of HyperCard to these educators, it was easier for a scientist to mess with HyperCard on a project than with NextStep.
Still is easier to use HyperCard.
There are no similarities between Cocoa or AppleScript with HyperCard. On the surface, many languages advert they are object oriented. Under the hood, HyperCard simplified a lot of things for beginning users. Unintimidating, the language looked like plain-English, and the software used a message-passing heirarchy between objects that I have not seen in any other object oriented environment, save "xTalks".
Before the G3 appeared, all software was getting slow. HyperCard on modern Macs runs like a fine tuned watch, it is very fast. And if I had to pull something out of the tool chest to write code that would translate spreadsheet data into uploadable ASCII for any mySQL server database, I'd use HyperCard. and get the job done in a fraction of the time. The HyperTalk language excelled at munging text, much easier to write a utility (in minutes) with HyperTalk than BASIC or C any day.
What else have I used HyperCard for? Just about everything Apple might wexpect me to do with Apple Script Studio or Cocoa with much greater effort. HyperCard made creating interactive CDs child's play. I managed employee benefit plans with it; excellent for creating input data forms, posting and reporting. Also creating many stacks that produced clean HTML code, and more recently have written scripts that translate a stack's data to XML and other formats.
HyperCard died becasue there has been a real shift in what the computer companies are willing to develop and bring to users. Their decisions are now based on demand-driven technologies. The companies know that people generally are not interested in computing, they want products that perform tasks at the click of a button and require little or no thought.
Today, there is no need to "open up the box" for users to learn and understand what a computer is all about; few want to anyway. Back in 1987, that was an important part of marketing a computer, and HyperCard fit in very well. This environment no longer exists today.
So what was once a computer renaissance in the '90s has digressed to a rather dark age for computing, as we are no longer seeing tools that let us expand how we understand the technology, tools like HyperCard. I do see a lot of tools that let us do things that the programming factories "think" is best for us, best for what we want to to with these wonderful works of technology. Many of the iApps looked like remakes of things I had already created with HyperCard.
Think of what we've seen for progress in software since 1997. The only software that has appeared works basically the same as it did five or more years ago, only retrofitted to run on the new OS. Still the same MS Office or Works, Quicken, web browser, games mix. I thought speech recognition would have arrived by now. The only software innovation I've seen has not come from computer companies, but from the open-source community as so much has become web-centric.
The reas
Hypercard was the wonderful creation of Bill Atkinson, along with MacPaint and Quickdraw. Although Bill spends most of his time now as professional photographer, and not actively programming for Apple, he still uses Hypercard every day. Rumor has it that Bill has the certain retained rights to at least a good sized portion of the source code of Hypercard, which become active if Apple does not actively sell Hypercard. While more recent features of Hypercard such as Quicktime 3.0 might remain Apple's property intellectually, I would be interested to see if Bill Atkinson would be interested in putting Hypercard core code out in the Open Source area for development. It would require at least some grudging cooperation by Apple. So, the fact Apple has dropped it from its active inventory may actually set part of Hypercard free sometime in the future.
The Hypercard environment suited a very iterative development style, perhaps more so than anything else that I have worked on since then. Data was automatically persistent. Switching from running a program to editing a method handler was just clicking on a graphics palette. You could be using a program, see something you don't like, click on a selection tool, click on something, and fix it.
... for each card in ... for item in .... set the script of it to ...." and it was all done.
It very much had the feeling of being able to tinker with the engine while the car is running. I suspect that working with Lisp Machines and Smalltalk environments was similar, but unfortunately I missed those boats. (except for being able to play around with Squeak now.)
My first professional software development job was writing a series Hypercard stacks. I remember one time realizing that I had hit an architectural dead end, and needed to refactor a bunch of methods (although I didn't learn the term refactor until much later.) I was lamenting having to make those changes all across all the code base until it suddenly hit me, I could write a hypercard script to make the changes. I put something home stack that said "for each backgroud
HyperCard 3.0 and Quicktime 3.0 were previewed about at the same time. Hypercard projects (known as "stacks") would have become Quicktime movies playeable on any QT player on Mac OS, Windows and that also in a Web Browser. Evidently that meant full color support and things like wired sprites and QT movies in stacks without add-ons. Somehow thats about where Hypercard got an accident and went on life-support. Maybe backward-compatibility became too much of a puzzle when they asked themselve what to do with xfcn and xcmd's support(native code add-ons). Maybe they were also pressured by Macromedia as they were pushing flash and shockwave for interactive web content. Ironically, Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio originated from VideoWorks, a linear sprite animation program on the Mac. Macromind (that's how they were called at the time) took VideoWork, renamed it Macromind Director and added "Lingo" wich was more or less a carbon-copy of HyperTalk, HyperCard's own scripting langage and messaging structure. Director had persistent data too, fields and buttons, but it had color, native sprite supports etc, but it cost 1000$. Until version 4.0, it was a Mac only app and I guess Apple lazyness in upgrading Hypercard to support color and multimedia features had ,among other things, something to do with Macromedia even before HC 3.0 was planned. Hypercard 3.0 +Quicktime 3.0 on the web was probably too much for Macromedia. Mr. Gates had probably something to say about it too, in a way QT 3.0 would have become too much of a "trojan-horse" in Windows. It should be noted that Quicktime for Windows already contains some parts of the Classic Mac OS API to emulate Quickdraw in PICT files and other things.
Anyhow HyperCard 3.0 never saw the light of the day and only some basic interactivity and the wired sprite feature was brought to QT 3.0. There is a single 3rd party app that can exploit all of the interactive features of Quicktime and its called LiveStage. Still, its very far from HC 3.0 could have been.
Another thing I have rarely seen mentioned about HC, is that it was used internally for many years by Apple so the interface designers could prototype their GUI without having to know about memory pointers and A-traps. Specialised Pascal and C++ programmers would then reproduce the layout and behavior using Mac OS APIs. Many widgets, dialogs and control panels in Mac OS 6-8.x were designed and prototyped in Hypercard. I guess than Interface Builder and AppleScript Studio (please rename this Apple) fulfill the same goal today internally for Mac OS X interfaces.
As for Myst, not only Hypercard was used to build the first Myst, it was the inspiration for the game itself. One thing so easy to do with HC right from the start were point and click adventures. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to have started to build (and never finished) a point-and-click black and white adventure game in HC before Myst was out. I guess the Authors from the start had the idea of doing an "hypercard point and click adventure using rendered graphics and qt movies". Hypercard limitations made the game what it is (for better or worse, but mostly the better). Also precursor to Myst and inspired by HyperCard is Cosmic-Osmo, one of the very first cd-rom game (also from Cyan). It ran on HC with a Macromind VideoWorks extension for animation. For those who don't know Cosmic-Osmo, it's a fun wacky adventure game with no goal where weird things happens when you click on things. You can go thru mouse holes and water drains and warp from place to place with secret passages. Oh well tha post is getting wacky too, let's end it here. HyperCard is Dead, long live HyperCard!
Buzzy Beetle
Ugh. too many people think of it as a game or presentation tool.
HyperCard had REALLY powerful features that made it ideal for building ledgers, contacts databases, tools to run Scout Troops, take computerized tests in schools, etc.
My dad still runs his business on HyperCard, he designed the stacks he uses back in the late eighties, and the format is so amazingly extensible.
You culd write front-ends for very complex things easily and without knowing much more than natural language. Today the tools that let you do thing that Hypercard could do are much more complex and expensive, and require MUCH more development. Very few database engineers would have jobs today if HyperCard took off like it should have.
Apple should have made HC web-enabled, and let people run a 'HC Player' plugin written in Java. My job would be an order of magnitude simpler and more efficient if HC were properly fed ten years ago.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
We had a HyperCard product that filled a niche. It was perfect. It sold like hotcakes at the state fair on a sunny morning.
We kept getting inquiries: when is the Windows version coming?
We'd been told by Apple that a Windows version was in the works, and that the way they were going to do this was to build on top of QuickTime, which was already cross-platform. It was about a year overdue and we were getting anxious, so I cornered one of the main HyperCard guys at WWDC and asked him (1) why he was presenting on technologies other than HyperCard and (2) what was up with the QuickTime-based port. As you've probably guessed, the two were related.
The company lasted another six months, then we closed the doors because HyperCard just wasn't keeping up with what people expected. It just languished away.
If Apple had come through with a cross-platform HyperCard which made QuickTime programming accessible to non-programmers, it might have been killer. Might have been.
From their site:
What is Squeak? Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks. Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling network access support that allows simple construction of servers and other useful facilities it runs bit-identical on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others) a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers efficient bulk-mutation of objects Squeak is available for free via the Internet, at this and other sites. Each release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and network access, with complete source code. Originally developed on the Macintosh, members of its user community have since ported it to numerous other platforms including Windows 95 and NT, Windows CE (it runs on the Cassiopeia and the HP320LX), all common flavors of UNIX, Acorn RiscOS, and a bare chip (the Mitsubishi M32R/D).
What it is not
The Squeak Smalltalk system bears no relation to the "Squeak" language designed by Rob Pike and Luca Cardelli in 1985, nor to its successor, "Newsqueak".
What is Cool about Squeak
To quote from Dwight Hughes, a frequent contributor to the Squeak mailing list, "How is Squeak important? Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy of complete openness -- where everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend for whatever purpose -- to include even the VM. It is a genuine, complete, compact, efficient Smalltalk-80 environment (*not* a toy). It is not specialized for any particular hardware/OS platform. Porting is easy -- you are not fighting entrenched platform/OS dependencies to move to a new system or configuration. It has essentially been put into the public domain - greatly broadening potential interest, and potential applications. The core team behind Squeak includes Dan Ingalls, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, and Scott Wallace. All of this has attracted many of the best and most experienced Smalltalk programmers and implementers in the world."
Squeak stands alone as a practical Smalltalk in which a researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to see or deal with any language other than Smalltalk. Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base, greatly facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. The system, together with an adherance, for better or for worse, to the image model (the entire state of Squeak is manifest in an image file), has yielded a system of extreme portability and sharability. Any image file will run on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely different hardware, with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).
A Brief History of Squeak
Squeak began, very simply, with the needs of a research group at Apple. We wanted a system as expressive and immediate as Smalltalk to pursue various application goals (prototypical educational software, user interface experiments and (let''s be honest) another run at the Dynabook fence). As you can read in the OOPSLA paper ("Back to the Future") we hit on the idea of writing a Smalltalk interpreter in a subset of Smalltalk, together with a translator from that subset to C.
Philosophy
The current Squeak interpreter combines a classical ST-80 interpreter with a simple yet efficient 32-bit dir
Perhaps HyperCard's biggest commercial success was the series of games released by Cyan: "The Manhole," then "Cosmic Osmo," and finally "Myst" (based on a much-extended version of HyperCard).
I was in the room in 1987 at MacWorld Expo when BIll Atkinson announced that documentation for the format of Hypercard files was to be publicly released by Apple. He may have even mentioned the number of the technote. (It was in the low two digits back then). Everyone in the room applauded.
And I remember my disappointment a few months later when the technote with that number was, in fact issued--and consisted of a single sentence, to the effect that "The Hypercard file format is not available."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It has been dead for years they have only just now gotten around to writing the obituary.
In its day Hypercard was an easy to learn and fairly powerful programming language that anyone could use to pump out very Mac like applications.
The problem was that Hypercard did not keep pace with the Macs it was running on. Color was slow in coming as well as support for features that were added to the OS. Back in the day it was the defacto standard for Mac multimedia CD's.
If Apple had kept development of hypercard on the same pace as the MacOS, hypercard would have been a killer program under OS X. Who knows how far it might have gone. Hypercard with access to all the goodies that OS X has to offer like a shell to UNIX, etc. might have been very powerful. Maybe even integration to the Xcode tools might have produced compact, fast, standalone applications without the need for a player app.
Many people have tried to fill Apples shoes with programs like supercard and revolution but none had the knack of producing good programs like Apple.
I am sad to see it go. It could have been so much more than it was. Too bad Apple did not notice the diamond in the rough that it had.
I don't think Steve Jobs hated HyperCard at all. In fact, HC was originally created by Bill Atkinson, who was a good friend of Steve. I think the reason Apple dumped HyperCard was the same as with the Newton. They simply had to prioritize more important things, such as the iMac.
Sig Nature
Hypercard was the tool that drew me into the Apple fold.
It was 1989 and I was managing a team creating instructional material. Our Instructional Designers would write their scripts into a Word document, print them and hand them to the programmers for coding (and re-typing.) I was tired of the programmers having to be responsible for retyping, so I started looking for a new, cheap tool. I knew what I wanted but neither Word or Wordperfect (at the time) could provide what I wanted.
I came across Hypercard and within two weeks of cannonball coding (and learning Hypertalk) I built an application that allowed the Instructional Designers to place text and paste images. Once they were done, the app would generate the code into a single file with the text appropriately placed, leaving the programmers to do the stuff they were good at. We cut our development time from 3 weeks to 1 week per course. We got all the developers Macs and never looked back.
IIRC, there is a product called "Toolbook" which was supposed to be somewhat of a PC version of Hypercard/Supercard.
Claris Organizer lives on...for now...in the Classic MacOS version of Palm Desktop.
I don't know about the MacOS X version...it might have some Claris Organizer code, it might not. I'll soon find out...my blue-and-white G3 will be Pantherized soon.
A lot of Claris developers (developers! developers! developers!) wound up at Microsoft Mac Business Unit. No fooling. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Emailer developers involved in Outlook Express for Mac.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.