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HyperCard Comes Back From the Dead to the Web
TedCHoward writes "On the heels of the recent mention of HyperCard comes the launch of a brand new site called TileStack. Cnet's Webware blog writes, 'The idea behind it is to bring old HyperCard stacks back to life by putting them on the Web, meaning you can take some of those long lost creations from the late '80s and early '90s and make them working Web apps. You simply upload them to TileStack's servers and they'll be converted and hosted for just you or the entire world to use once again... Since the service runs without Flash... TileStack is perfect for the iPhone and other devices that run on the Web.' They also have a video showing the upload process."
Wow, like 10 minutes ago i was looking for a spare phone in this box and found a case of floppy disks from my middle school computer class. If the disks are good i think there are a couple of hypercard stacks on there... Weird.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
OMG WOW! I want to run some software from the late 80s, because it is obviously superior to modern software ~
i clicked the links, and it's a good chance i'm just an idiot, but I couldn't tell if there was going to be anyway to create new stacks. The beauty of hypercard, from what I recall, was that it had a pretty simple interface for creating the stacks. I remember doing an entire multimedia presentation with hypercard back in highschool in the 90s. while everyone else did powerpoint and thought the clip art was cool, i was making stuff move using sound and embedding quicktime video. granted, all that is easy (easier?) to do now, but back then, it was cool stuff.
read my comics, please, at http://www.funfactorycomic.com
Now all I need is a machine that can read a 3.5 inch floppy.
This is about avoiding the intentional waste of non free software. You could run your old hypercard program in a VM but most people no longer have the OS and software required to set that up. They are more likely to have some old notes they want to share with themselves and others and now they can. Free software users don't have this problem.
Could someone please tell me what in the world Hypercards are?
It says that new stacks must be uploaded in MacBinary format or something. Can you get a Mac these days that will read 3.5/5.25/8" floppies?
Radical Castle! Bring on the vorpal bunny.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
i saw more kids get brave and smart on things like logo and hypercard, especially hypercard as you could get an original creation with creamy UI goodness, it did something useful and immediate and creative. the ones who were convinced mpw / pascal was the way to go would sit there like we had just given them a pile of planks and two wagon wheel hoops, waving as we sped off in our trusty gti. don't know if i'm willing to risk uploading a entire voyager expanded book... i have every one of them and nothing to read them on. anyone got an original "manhole"?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
That's about right. Emacs still works the way it did in 1984, despite improvement. GCC, G77, LaTex, ImageMagick, Xfig, gnuplot, grace, StarOffice and just about any software you can think of still works with documents written at the time. Free software rarely wrecks a user's work.
He says that he envisioned the web as a giant networked HyperCard Stack.
Here's its ancestor - quite nice really. http://www.runrev.com/
Don't tell me - I can't download and use their software on my web server; I have to let them host my private data (private meaning, I have to trust them with it).
That's pretty impressive, figuring out how to tether a decades-old application that was designed to run entirely on the user's equipment.
I suppose you could just email the stack to those you really wanted to share it with. But where would they get the stack interpreter?
Doesn't anyone remember how much HyperCard sucked? The only good HyperCard product I remember (out of legions) was Myst, and that was heavily modified.
HyperCard had a really cool syntax. For example to make a button that you could drag around, you would just double click it in edit mode and enter the following script:
on mouseDown
repeat while the mouse is down
set the location of me to the mouseloc
end mouseDown
(not case sensitive)
I seem to remember the original Myst being Hypercard based.
Bundle it with Apple's Time Machine and we can go back to the 1990s to find people who would use this.
Maybe it was the most successful implementation of a HyperText before the Web came along. People built totally diverse applications and didn't even know what they were doing. Heck, it was impossible to explain what HyperCard to someone who hadn't seen it!
Though I find it an innovative way to revive your old stack and share it on the web, I can't help but wonder about security, privacy and copyright. Meanwhile, Runtime Revolution have just announced their revamped web strategy, and demoed a Flash-like browser plugin - which means you don't have to install any special software on your server. Just create your stack on MacOSX, Windows or Linux and then deploy it for the web. For a short introduction of this plugin-to-come: http://runrev.com/newsletter/may/issue48/newsletter1.php - I was there during the announcement and got some time to play with it, and it is indeed a great way to share your stacks over the web.
It'd be cool if they convert and host Myst.
Revolution - http://www.mirye.com/ already has a CGI system, and a browser plugin is on its way.
I miss those stupid walk-around games. They were.... different, if frustrating.
The entry page used in the video demo was http:. There was no indicator (that I could see) that the login process was secured in that http: page. Maybe there is an indicator and I'm just looking in the wrong place because of my limited exposure to Firefox in an OSX environment.
If not, is there any reason that an html-based authentication process not by secured by SSL (i.e. https) in this day and age? The other day I used a yahoo.ca account that I've kept around for years as a throwaway address, and I saw that yahoo has, somewhere in the no so distant past, secured login to their mail service. This was after years of having it default to http, though. Post login, your session reverts to hhtp.
Gmail was similar - by default the auth was secured but the session wasn't, unless you logged in via a particular URL. I'm not sure what the current status is, as the CustomizeGoogle plugin has an option to force https for all gmail activities.
My long-winded point is that all auth processes and data in associated sessions should be forced to https. Why does tilestack.com not do so? It doesn't exactly inspire faith in their attention to detail.
That being said, the whole idea looks pretty cool. Anyone got a non-trivial HyperCard stack out there that can put tilestack.com through its paces?
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
The high density Apple floppies (1.44, etc) can be moved back and forth between PC's and Apples.
The lower density Apple floppies used GCR recording, much like the Apple ][ floppies. Hell, in fact, it was exactly like the Apple floppies, except that the number of sectors per track varied. Apple sped up/slowed down the drive motor while doing disk I/O.
I found out you could read these disks on a standard PC 300 RPM drive with a custom disk controller of about five chips. No speed changing. The disk controller changed its disk I/O frequency. The product we sold to do this (and to run Mac software on the 68000 Atari ST platform) was called "Spectre GCR"), and yep, it would boot Apple floppies, or hard disks, right out of the box.
(This did not make Apple happy.)
The only significant bugs that showed up were noise from the switching power supply near the frequency of the outer tracks and impedance mismatch on the read-data line.
If I had to read Mac 400/800 floppies these days, I'd pick up a Mac on eBay with the "Super Woz Integrated Machine" that could read both formats, and bring the data over.
All of this taught me that Steve Wozniak was one smart, smart guy. His low chip, very elegant solution was wonderful to learn. Writing the formatter was a bitch, yes
One of the problems with the DMCA is that people learn so much about coding by looking at other people's coding. Same for hardware design. I learned a great deal about 68000 coding from Andy Hertzfeld's beautiful Macintosh coding. I learned a great deal about elegant hardware design from John Ridges, who is possibly the best overall hardware and software person I've ever met.
Thanks,
David Small
Yes, Hypercard was simply well-engineered so that anyone from a child to a high-end programmer (familiar with scripts, etc.) could use it from day 1 (more or less). I always like Hypercard. I was sorry to see it go. Newer program have been created that do similar things, but generally not with the elegant ease of Hypercard.
With Hypercard, you could do just about anything from presentations to simple adventure games. It was quite robust.
~Michael
"The purpose of science is to investigate the unexplained, not to explain the uninvestigated." ~Dr. Stephen Rorke