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HyperCard, What Could Have Been
bobwrit sends us to Wired for a look back by the author of HyperCard, Bill Atkinson. Quoting: "HyperCard is a programming environment that can create applications as diverse as utilities and games by linking 'cards' arranged into 'stacks.' Commands are executed through a natural-language scripting language called HyperTalk... The software has been phenomenally successful and highly influential. But Atkinson feels that if only he'd realized separate cards and stacks could be linked on different people's machines through the Net — instead of cards and stacks on a particular machine — he would have created the first Internet browser."
Cudda shudda wudda.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Okay, so calling HyperStudio "programming" is a stretch, but it was definitely a gateway drug for it.
Playing Doom on my uncle's computer may have got me interested in computers, but using HyperStudio in elementary school was my first experience with programming and is probably what started me down that path.
.... he missed the mark.
This is not even a hindsight article as the hindsight is still based on speculation.
Of course as things at Apple have evolved in this vain, We have Automator and its phenomenally (cough) successful.....
Of course Hypercard and Automator are platform specific (mac only) but as a comparison to platform agnostic and network-able relatively easy scripting, there is REBOL and specifically REBOL VIEW (if you want to discuss web browsers). But how successful has REBOL become?
What Automator generates under the hood in teh way of files, when a person creates an automation, is incredibly massive. Especially in comparison to the incredibility small scripts of REBOL.
I'm not promoting either here, just presenting a comparison that is relevant to the speculated hindsight of the WIRED article.
That is nothing compared to what happenned with Mac Basic. This is an early case of Bill Gates bullying another company with gross tactics.
In 1989, Arthur van Hoff developed a HyperCard-inspired system called GoodNeWS, written in PostScript, for James Gosling's NeWS window system. Arthur later went on to work at Sun on Java, wrote the Java compiler in Java, the AWT gui toolkit, and the HotJava web browser.
GoodNeWS was later renamed HyperNeWS, then later HyperLook. I went to Glasgow to work with Arthur at the Turing Institute, to develop HyperLook into a product, and I used it to develop the first Unix version of SimCity.
HyperLook was really wonderful, because it combined the strengths of HyperCard with the superior graphics and programmability of PostScript, and the network communication model currently known as AJAX.
I've written down some Ideas for Sugar development environment from HyperLook SimCity, with lots of links and illustrations, relating it with many different programming languages, user interface systems and applications that have inspired me.
Here is just the stuff about HyperLook -- the article goes on further to discuss and compare other technologies I think are interesting and applicable to the OLPC's constructionist education project.
Ideas for Sugar development environment from HyperLook SimCity
I love the ideas behind Smalltalk, EToys and HyperCard, and would like to combine them with ideas from visual programming languages like Robot Odyssey, KidSim, Klik-and-Play, SimAntics, Body Electric/Bounce, Max/MSP/Jitter, etc.
Here are some ideas about HyperLook and other systems, that could be applied to Sugar:
HyperLook was a PostScript-based user interface development environment for the NeWS window system, which Arthur van Hoff created at the Turing Institute in Glasgow. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/
I helped develop HyperLook into a commercial product, with a editable user interface development environment, as well as a redistributable non-editable runtime, and I used it to port SimCity to Unix, and develop other components and applications . http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/ http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity.gif
HyperLook was inspired by HyperCard, but it additionally provided a client/server programming model, and more powerful graphics and scripting based on NeWS's object oriented dialect of PostScript. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/TalkInterfacing.gif
The NeWS window system was like AJAX, but with:
1) PostScript code instead of JavaScript code
2) PostScript graphics instead of DHTML graphics, and
3) PostScript data instead of XML data.
It had a unified programming/graphics/data/networking model based on NeWS's extended multi-threaded object-oriented dialect of PostScript, instead of a hodge-podge of accidental technologies. (Although I will be the first to admit the X11/NeWS merge was quite a hodge-podge and huge-kludge!) NeWS had an object system based on the simple dynamic ideas of Smalltalk, implemented with the PostScript dictionary stack, supporting multiple inheritance and runtime modification of objects and classes. http://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/hyperlook/HyperLookInfo10.g
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Not if he restricted it down to all Apple machines. They could and did interconnect with local-talk.
Who says you HAVE to be mulitplatform to be useful?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
hypercard did connect to networks by way of developer written "xcmds". There were usenet, gopher, rpc, ftp, telnet, wais xcmds. There was a project called "spider" from ATG that did link hypercard across a network. However, the ecosystem of network computers was so small in the mid 80's it did not flourish.
Sorry to break this to you, but ALL computer programming languages are "made up". First you make up a language, then you implement it, then you use it. It's not like they just dig programming languages out of the ground like coal.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
It was so easy to use and the program language was incredibly flexible and you could write almost english like statements with it.
I did some amazing stuff with Hypercard when I was in high school. I created several games, though I didn't have the net then and was unable to release them. One of the games was a full blown RPG game (icon like, think early Ultima games) where you moved using arrow keys. I even implemented fake windows using fields so you could select spells and the like. Monsters could cast back at you as well and there were flying fireballs/iceballs that were animated using hypercard script. Another neat innovation was making the card bigger than the screen size (I was a on a Mac Plus at the time). When you neared the edge of the screen it would scroll the viewport with you. There were other neat things like you could walk behind treasure chests and columns if your guy's middle point was above their middle point, or in front if he was below their middle point on the screen. It could also save games out to disk separate from the card and load them in to continue. I wasn't able to finish it, but it was working extraordinarily well. Unfortunatly, my old Conner 80MB drive got corrupted and I lost everything. Months of work blown away thanks to the fragility of System 7.
So that project ruined, I went into making a multiuser home stack since I found the home stack with it kinda of useless and boring. I implemented the ability to have hypercard users and each would have to log in and then would be set permissions to use stacks (scripting, authoring, etc). It also had email that would tell you when someone read your message and later I was able to exent that to network email and even instant messaging when I got a copy of an XCMD that let me send data over the Appletalk network. This was before things like email and instant messaging were available to anyone but college people and researches who had access to this thing called the "Internet". The main screen after logging in had your email, make important notes (Quick notes I called it) and also a "Quick Connect" section that let you launch favorite applications and stacks from the control panel. Lastly, there was an administration application that would let you manage users rights as well as reset passwords and lock or unlock accounts. You could even run reports on their log ins and activity. I still have an earlier copy of the system, before I had networked email and I think I still have the IM test stack I made as well.
The rest of my stuff, including an attempt to recreate the old RPG was lost when I entrusted them, including my copy of the Hypercard application to a Zip drive. Click of death brought back the pain of the original losses and now I have no more copy of Hypercard and I cannot find a replacement or my original disks. Then college came and I was pulled into C programming and what not. But I never forgot Hypercard and many times while working in C, I would lament about how easy the task was to do in Hypercard, and what a grind C made it into.
What I do have, I am tempted to email my stuff to Atkinson, if he still has a public email, to show him what a 14 year old kid was able to do with this thing. Mainly the early version of my multiuser stack, the admin too, and if I still have it, the IM app. I did make one more thing, but it's probably better I never give it to anyone... I made a hypercard virus stack. Not a C virus, it's written in hyperscript and basically it tries to find your other stacks and infect them with itself rendering them useless. I never released it and it was made just to see if it was possible. So yes, Hypercard was extremely powerful and really, I wish it had become the web because it is so freaking easy to use, even compared to web tech we have today.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Strangely enough, HyperCard didn't crush the corporations like Kevin Kelly promised it would:
"HyperCard is uniquely suited for activist causes. It goes without saying that its great ease of use and flexibility favors the underdog. Activist groups have often relied on people power and maneuverability to counteract the brute economic and political force of various Powers-That-Be; HyperCard can enhance both of these advantages."
This quotation is from page 164 of "Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age," Kevin Kelly, editor. Foreward by Stewart Brand. A Whole Earth Catalog. Point Foundation, 1988.
Anybody old and perverted enough to remember the infamous "HyperCard Smut Stack"?
I still associate nipples with the "ping" sound.
Years ago I was recounting how cool HyperCard was to a group of people at some dot-com trade show, and when I mentioned the HyperCard Smut Stack, one guy (Chuck Farnham) said "oh, I wrote that". My jaw dropped and my eyes bugged out, not only because I happened to run into the author after all those years, but also because he would actually admit to it!
But as it turns out, Chuck has no shame. He used to do bizarre live stunts on Live 105, a San Francisco Bay Area radio station, on the shock jock Alex Bennett Show. He's infamous for some of his other exploits (this is just the tip of the iceberg, most of the other stuff is really not safe for work, let alone live radio):
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
There's still no one tool that replaces everything that HyperCard did. The genius of HyperCard was that it brought application development to the masses.
I was back in college in the early 90's, and taking a couple of language courses (not computer language). I would download stacks that would quiz me on my vocabulary. When I needed something more specific, in one evening I sat down and put together my own drill stack and, as a bonus, inserted the MacinTalk speech synthesizer to correctly pronounce the words.
HyperCard filled in the software gap for what you couldn't purchase off-the-shelf. When my PC friends used to point out how many thousands more titles were available for the PC, I used to point out that HyperCard filled the gap; if you couldn't find the HyperCard stack you were looking for on a Mac-friendly BBS (and there were tons of stacks out there), then it was a simple matter to author a stack.
Apple never understood HyperCard. At first they gave it away, and then they tried to sell it, which was a mistake. The beauty of it was that everyone had it on their Mac, and everyone eventually opened it up and said, "What the hell is this?" and started poking around with it. Once Apple/Claris shrinkwrapped it, you had to already be sold on the concept of what it was in order to purchase it.
HyperCard encapsulated a lot of pieces that are separate today. It could have been the first web browser because of the hypertext links that allowed you to move between pages within the stack. It was a great animation program, as a precursor to Flash. It was a database. It was the first introduction to scripting that most Mac users had, and professional developers could write extension modules for their stacks to push them further.
It's interesting that SuperCard, the competitor to HyperCard which gained popularity when HyperCard development languished, is still available for the Mac and still being developed. However, at $179, it's not exactly "for the masses".
Its open nature was (as far as I am aware) a major benefit of the WWW, and probably helped it take off pretty quickly. Thus, it's *not* a foregone conclusion that a proprietary NetHyperCard with very similar capabilities would have taken off in the same way.
In fact, it's quite probable that had NetHyperCard existed and been released in the mid-to-late 80s, it would have been been Mac only and tied specifically to AppleTalk networks (rather than TCP/IP). This is already partly implied by what you say above; but I also think that NetHyperCard would have *remained* proprietary and Apple-centric- and hence a niche product- until (or *if*) a clearly successful open product persuaded Apple to change their mind. Which likely would have been the WWW anyway!
But by the time it was visibly successful enough to force Apple's hand, the WWW would likely be the established standard. My guess is that- allowing time for the company to action it- Apple would have released a pseudo-open, multi-platform, TCP/IP-friendly version of NetHyperCard circa 1997-99. And since everyone would already be using the WWW, NetHyperCard would still be ignored.
To cut this long story short, even if it had been invented long before the WWW, I still think it's unlikely that we'd be using NetHyperCard instead of the WWW today.
Of course, had NetHyperCard been invented before the WWW, it's quite possible that Apple could have taken legal action against it in some form; but even if successful, I think that this would be more likely to stifle things overall than make NetHyperCard a success on the scale of the web. In that sense, I'm glad that it never came to fruition.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
He wrote an application to measure the volume of a Megapodes nest using it.
I found the source on the web a few years back, it's probably around for those of you who want to have a play.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Connecting stacks through dial-up modems was probably the logical development path, and I think there was a commercial extension for HyperCard that negotiated a modem connection. However, it only sent text across the modem connection (rather than an entire stack). And, of course, modem speeds were a limiting factor because the stacks tended to bloat rather quickly once you started adding images to it. Web pages only had to load one at a time, whereas a HyperCard application might require the whole stack to load at once. Even LocalTalk would have choked, since LocalTalk's speed is equivalent to a 28.8k modem.
IIRC, there was a HyperCard-based BBS server available, but since it was only serving up text and file downloads, it wasn't truly delivering the HyperCard experience.
hypercard isn't a language. HyperTalk is a language. HyperCard was a combination of runtime environment and IDE (like Flash or GUI Designers) witha graphic editor thrown in.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
My tech skills have never (and I mean never) been inclined towards programming. It was always by far my weakest point. Anything more than a simple shell script has always been beyond me (despite that, I've managed to have a decent career in IT because there are a lot of things other than programming I can do well, fortunately).
Then HyperCard came out. It is still the only programming environment that I understood immediately. Within a few months, I'd produced several applications of varying usefulness (a guitar tuner, a lotto application that automatically tailored to each state's game, and a train layout app) that I happily posted around for downloading and even got a few dollars for. I re-wrote my resume as a stack, and sent it around on a floppy when I was jobhunting (This was before the Mac ghetto era of the early '90s). I could do things with HyperCard that I never was able to master with conventional languages.
Basically, in my eyes, HyperCard was the best chance ever at a programming environment for average people. It had plenty of flaws, and never even properly made the transition to PPC (let alone today's era), but it was an amazing tool - especially for the era. I do still miss it now.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Hypercard was slower than cold, frozen, Arctic molasses. We could demonstrate a peppy-seeming way to accomplish some serious text collecting, but by the time our client had entered so much data that re-entering it would be prohibitive under deadline constraints, the Fatal Flaw in this stupid equation had emerged: Getting data back OUT in a useful format, even merely the useful task of editing it, was hair-pullingly, exasperatingly, blue air and cusswords SLOW. Hypercard was, in short, a hot app, especially for our unfortunate sales team. The next year we completely rewrote our "prototype" Hypercard stack from scratch as a plain, ordinary Macintosh C program, discovering event loops and everything, and recovered some good will from Sales, but many of those first-year clients had been burned so badly they never came back, and since the community of users tended to talk to each other, we had about two years to get our new programming right before it had to to matter again; to this day, I still regard Caroline Rose and Inside Macintosh as my personal saviors.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Bah! You are forgetting LISP, which was not made up, but discovered! Like fractals or the Pythagorean theorem, an artifact of math, no more man's creation than the integers! LISP, the language from which the gods surely wrought the universe!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You refer to Harry Chesley's HyperBBS which I used to run as my first BBS, before switching to Coherent.
HyperBBS would 'read' every page of a stack to the modem-connected user, buttons would be menu items, editable fields would be inputs, and locked fields would simply be read.
Choosing a menu item would take you to another page..
The modem user didn't see it, but the home menu (IIRC) looked like a house, the cards for logging in were embellished for the benefit of no-one but the sysop.
This is, arguably, one of the most idiotic posts I've ever seen modded up to +5. I can't believe you actually thought he meant that he believed that most programming languages have been refined through millions of years of evolution. I can't believe at least 3 dudes with mod-points came by and completely missed that, too. Wow. Just... wow. Basic reading comprehension FAIL.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
That virus sounds interesting; I remember there were a couple of viruses out there for HyperCard; I remember dissecting one of the disinfectant programs and realizing that it worked by trapping the "set" command which (as I recall) was used to infect other stacks or change the info in them. For someone who knew little about computers it was amazing to be able to figure out what an application was doing and how, and even make your own. I made an application to help with writing papers that could store little bits of information (mostly quotations) along with bibliographic citations to use by copying and pasting into a word processor. (I probably should have been just writing the papers at the time but writing the program was way cooler).
One of the coolest apps I remember reading about was from an article in High Times about a guy who was growing weed remotely; he had his garden monitored by X-10 cameras all connected to a Mac plus. He'd dial into his mac from anywhere and connect to a HyperCard stack; from the stack he could see whichever camera angle he wanted and control when the water and/or lights would turn on. He could tell if a light had burned out or whatever, and there was some kind of motion detector that would tell the stack to call his cell if someone entered the facility. All in all, it was pretty clever app illustrating some of HyperCard's possibilities; I can only imagine what could have been done with HyperCard and the Web.
And of course there's always Xanadu....
Back in the late 1980s, when I was at Bell Labs (not Research), I was on a standards committee for Computer-Aided Logistics Support, trying to standardize computerized documentation formats. The primary directions the committee was working on were SGML for text and some vector graphics standard that I've forgotten for pictures.
SGML was a predecessor to XML, and was an abstract language describing document types that were typically like HTML with whatever markings and objects you needed to define, so we were essentially trying to define a DTD for our documentation.
There were people on the committee who got the "mark up the information content, let the reader's client format it" concept, where objects are things like "a 2nd-level paragraph", and people who didn't get it, and wanted to objects to be things like "a paragraph in 14-point bold-face" or "a page break" because they wanted to electronically represent the typical paper manuals and version control where you needed to replace pages to update the document, even though the manual might be an airplane-engine repair doc that some mechanic is trying to read on a wrist-mounted 24x80 screen while poking around in the engine. You may find this familiar, given the number of people over the past decade who've been trying to make web pages look exactly the way they want even when the user's browser or screen size may not be identical to theirs.
At one point my boss (who was a PhD type, not a Dilbert boss) asked if we needed to be concerned that our presence on the committee might tell competitors the kinds of things we were working on.
My reply was that "Well SGML is an obvious thing to write Hypertext in, so this is the kind of Research they'd expect us to be doing." Sigh - my mental model of hypertext was pretty much Hypercard and similar document packages, and I didn't get the linking-together-multiple-authors bit either
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That would beat the big Yellow Pages it's been turning into lately...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
The real problem with HC was the Cupertino lockin mentality. They have always had this tension between a software group, which would, if left to its own devices and tasked with maximizing the business, sell on all platforms - third party hardware in the case of the OS, or Windows and Unix as well as Mac OS in the case of Hypercard. They've even had the same tension with hardware - if they cut the hardware group loose, they would probably sell millions of designer computers with Windows rather than OSX preinstalled.
You can see the potential realized in the case of Filemaker. When released to Windows, it turned into a real business and did not hurt the Mac at all. You can also see it in the case of iTunes. But with Hypercard, the mania for Mac-only solutions to promote the sale of Macs resulted in the destruction of what could have been a great standalone business unit. In effect, Apple forced the creation of Visual Basic, and then forced people to take it up, by denying them the product they would have bought if they Apple had just made it available. E-World was the same blinkered and doomed thinking. And in the early days of Classic, in effect they forced people who wanted computers to Windows, when they would probably rather have, many of them, had Macs. Apple could not meet the demand, and would not meet the price. But the customers had to have computers, so they bought from people who would sell to them. Who can blame them?
In a typical show of pique, they then killed HC rather than, for instance, open source it. The attitude seems to have been that if we could not make it work, and make it work on our platforms only, then no-one should have it. In case they made something of it?
Apple has done well in recent years. But nothing like as well as it could have done if it had bent its efforts to allowing the really creative groups in Apple to form business units and take their products to market and follow the trail of demand. And if it had stopped spending so much energy on stopping people buying Apple products because their requirements did not exactly fit in all respects with the Cupertino model of what they should be.
If we look at the recent results in absolute terms, it seems a great story. If we look at what could have been, its the record of a company consistently failing to realize the potential of its own creativity. Crippling it, in fact.
The essential conceptual failure is the failure to appreciate that the fact that something is impossible to run on non-Apple systems is not a benefit to the Apple user. It applies to OSX as much as to e-world as to Filemaker. Its a focus on delivering what you think is your prime quality, integration, while failing to see that your real strength is as an innovator and business segment creator.