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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.
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..."
Basicaly it was something like powerpoint with scripting and full user interaction. You could write games, animations,and whatever else you wanted tutorials, presentations, interactive demos. Very powerful, very small, very cool. It was also a decent intro to basic programing with seperate functions and such.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
This should help
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
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?
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.
In some ways, HyperCard is (er was) analagous to Logo, only oriented towards persistent data rather than graphics oriented. By that I mean it is an entry level, interactive programming system that encouraged setting small incremental goals and giving immediate feedback (and satsifaction). Since it was data oriented, it was very useful on a day to day basis.
Data was oriented into "stacks" of "cards". Each card was of a certain design (I forget the HyperCard terminology), which basically consisted of a number of layers on which objects were placed. Widgets, layers, cards and stacks had scripts associated with them and could interact by message passing (or somethign like that - it's been ten years now). Layers could be turned off and on providing a rough and ready way to reorganize the interface based on user interaction. Data was kept in "fields" which are UI widgets and represent, roughly speaking something like a table schema. However things were pretty loosy-goosy -- a card in abstract a card is kind of like a hash which has data slots created by the card design's field UI elements. The reason I bring this up is that you could add new fields and widgets to an individual card if need be.
You could put these elements together in various ways. For example you could treat a stack sort of as a database tightly bound to UI (like Filemaker - very good for non-experts although obviously not scalable). In this kind of design each card design was kind of like a table and each card was kind of like a row, and each field is kind of like a column.
Or, you could use the elements in various ways; maybe creating a single card stack whose job was to control a laserdisc, or be a calculator, or some such thing.
My wife used a one card HyperCard stack at work to manage her to do list. Each item was kept on a line of a text control. Being the kind of person she is, she had several hundred lines of things on her to do list, each prepended with a numerical priority. When it came time to sort (on these 16MHz 68000 machines) it took over a minute to sort. I remember replacing the bubble sort with a shell sort to get the sort time down to something like 15 seconds.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
It was actually a nice introduction to object-oriented programming. Everything was addressed as an object, and events were passed as messages sent to objects.
HyperTalk, the HyperCard programming language, was the predecessor to AppleScript. Lessons learned from HyperTalk were factored into the design of AppleScript, in particular the langauge extensibility features. As a result, AppleScript suffered somewhat from second-system effect.
A lot of people also used HyperCard as a database. Many tasks that people use FileMaker Pro for today could be done with HyperCard.
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.
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 learned programming on HyperCard. Everything essential was there: loops, conditionals, variables (local by default, global if you declared it such), subroutines, and a pretty powerful object orientation.
I wrote a stack for the newspaper I once worked for, that took the daily nationwide temperature reports and massaged them into something suitable for printing. I was rather proud of that at the time.
The object orientation even included inheritance, of a sort. There was a handler (HC's term for method) called openCard that was called whenever a new card was shown. If there was no openCard handler attached to the card that was opening, the background's (series of cards with a shared layout and handlers) openCard handler was called. Then the stack's. If it still wasn't handled, the handler in the "Home" stack was called.
If you did handle that somewhere along the way, you could elect to pass the message on and let the "superclass's" scripts take a whack at it.
The Home stack was a superclass of sorts for every stack in HyperCard. You could modify behavior globally from there (it could be overridden, of course, by individual cards, stacks, etc.). You could also insert arbitrary stacks into the search order. Some of Apple's demonstration stacks did that, as I recall.
The search order was the same for pre-defined handlers as well as user-defined handlers.
- Aaron
C'mon! I could whistle the page in morse faster than you're fetching it!
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
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.
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.