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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."
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.
With free software though, I can almost always manage to download an older version of the program to open it 100% legally, or if for some reason the site is down/dead I can get a copy from many other sites again, 100% legally. If I want to open a document created in Office '97 and for some reason MS doesn't let you open Office '97 documents in Office 2010, the only way to legally get it is by buying a (presumably) used copy off of E-Bay of Word 2007. And if optical media degrades to unreadable in say 20 years, by 2030 you won't be able to access your documents legally. Ever (now granted Office '97 documents are openable in a text editor to salvage at least some of the info...)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A lot of early games, especially choose your own adventure style ones, as well as multimedia presentations, and educational tools were created as HyperCard stacks. This Web site is just allowing people to dig them up, dust them off, and play with them again (without paying for one of the commercial HyperCard programs still out there, or using a VM).
Have you accepted Google as your personal Search Engine.
Salvation is at hand!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
http://www.koffice.org/krita/
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.gimpshop.com/
http://www.getpaint.net/
You can even get an Alpha of Krita 2.0 for Windows these days. All of those are free.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
What? My god you're full of crap (I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Twitter, I recognise that rabid "non-free" hatred and insistence on changing the subject line of replies).
This is only because HyperCard actually was able to make some real neat stuff - entire games were able to be made in it. Some people want to play with those still, so someone else decided "hey, let's make a way to run HyperCard stacks". Good on them! Far from being some kind of "non-free" agenda like you believe, it's more just evidence of why we have Open Source - because people just want something, so they up and make it.
And don't go thinking that Open Source software is never abandoned, leaving users of it in the dust (hint: not everyone can just "fix the code" - that requires skills that relatively few people actually have).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The problem with HyperTalk/AppleScript is that they still have rigid syntax that's intolerant of ambiguity, but now it's merely verbose and expressed in a language where you might expect some constructions to work, but they don't, because they're English, not Hypertalk.
A perfect example is "the location of me". You can't say "my location", which is a far more common idiom.
Of course the saving grace of HyperTalk was that it was also a pretty darn good language for its time, aside from the syntax.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Bah,you kids and your little baby cassette players and girlie iPods. When i was growing up we had REAL portable music players--Big honking RCA 8-tracks! One giant 12in speaker, TEN D batteries, and weighed a good fifteen pounds! Carry THAT around for awhile,why don't ya! I had mine duct taped to the handlebars of my Yamaha 125cc and since I laid it down mudding one day it could only play the 8-track that was in it,which was the first tape from KISS ALIVE!II,and we LIKED it that way! Now get off my lawn!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You're the guy Spock nerve-pinched on bus, aren'tcha?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
What's more, even the original Myst was a set of HyperCard stacks.
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