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."

Comments

But can we make new stacks?

[marvelouspatric]

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.

Re:But can we make new stacks?

[PHPNerd]

Oh yes. You can create new stacks. I was in the beta program, and it was really easy to use too.

3.5 inch floppy

[jamesl]

Now all I need is a machine that can read a 3.5 inch floppy.

Re:3.5 inch floppy

[J'ai Friedpork]

At least it'll be easier than trying to use a 5.25" floppy. (Or god forbid, one of those old 8" floppies...)

Re:3.5 inch floppy

[david.given]

Now all I need is a machine that can read a 3.5 inch floppy.

It's worse than that. Apple floppy disks were written with constant linear velocity --- i.e., as the head moves towards the centre of the disk, the rotation speed goes up so that the magnetic medium still passes the head at the same velocity.

PCs, and therefore all modern hardware, use constant angular velocity floppy disks --- the disk spins at a constant speed, so that the speed at which the magnetic medium passes the head varies depending where the head is. Yes, this is clearly a bad idea, but that's PCs for you.

This means that no modern hardware can read old Apple floppy disks. It's just not possible. You'll need an old Macintosh floppy drive and (probably) an old Macintosh floppy drive controller to plug it into, which basically means you need an old Macintosh. You still have yours, right? Right?

Have fun!

Re:I'm new around here...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

HyperCard is an old application that allowed you to create files that were "stacks" of cards that contained text, media, etc and linked to one another. Consider each card to be a Web page and each stack to be a Web site, Intranet, or Web app rolled up into a single file. This all predated the Web, of course, but was pretty powerful and had a really, really easy development tool that could be used by complete novices.

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).

Re:I'm new around here...

[ColdWetDog]

Could someone please tell me what in the world Hypercards are?

Have you accepted Google as your personal Search Engine.

Salvation is at hand!

It is like magic.

[freenix]

Yes, because in the magical free software land, file formats never change and become incompatible, even over the course of time between hypercard and now.

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.

Re:Freaky.

[pimpimpim]

As someone who used HyperCard as a 10-12 year old, without using the manual ever, I realize only now that I never realized that by using HyperCard I was actually programming. The program must have been made in such a way that you could perform pretty complex operations with it, without even knowing that what you are doing is complex.

Years later I tried to do similar simple interactive animations for adobe flash. It faced me with multitudes of concepts, each with their own drop-down menus and rules, before I could even start drawing something. Maybe it was more easy as a child because I had no idea of what I was doing, but more likely HyperCard was just designed very elegantly.

Re:HyperCard had a really cool syntax

[nuzak]

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.

Re:why?

[AKAImBatman]

You're the guy Spock nerve-pinched on bus, aren'tcha?

Re:3.5 inch floppy CAN read old 400/800 McFloppys

[dsmall]

      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 ... but it was wonderful to learn.

      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

So easy a child could do it...

[mgmirkin]

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