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Why Was Hypercard Killed?
theodp writes "Steve Jobs took the secret to his grave, but Stanislav Datskovskiy offers some interesting and illustrated speculation on why HyperCard had to die. 'Jobs was almost certainly familiar with HyperCard and its capabilities,' writes Datskovskiy. 'And he killed it anyway. Wouldn't you love to know why? Here's a clue: Apple never again brought to market anything resembling HyperCard. Despite frequent calls to do so. Despite a more-or-less guaranteed and lively market. And I will cautiously predict that it never will again. The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place.' Slashdotters have bemoaned the loss of HyperCard over the past decade, but Datskovskiy ends his post on a keep-hope-alive note, saying: 'Contemplate the fact that what has been built once could probably be built again.' Where have you gone, Bill Atkinson, a nation of potential programmers turns its lonely eyes to you."
In the 1970s, one manufacturer made the hardware, operating system and (most of) the software.
Apple wanted to resurrect that model in the 1990s and got beaten back by the "open" architecture PC clones, which were from a more flexible type of system.
Apple finally rediscovered its favorite business model in the iPhone, because cell phone customers haven't yet figured out that phones are little computers with antennas now.
Jobs and his cronies killed Hypercard because it would have thwarted that model. With Hypercard, all software was driven by a powerful database and configured as interface. It would have revolutionized the web and how we make custom software (now done in VBscript) today.
But, it might have let things get out of control, and Apple couldn't allow that.
Futurist Traditionalism
Where have you gone, Bill Atkinson, a nation of potential programmers turns its lonely eyes to you.
Bill Atkinson: ... and that is how HyperCard works. Sir, HyperCard stands to transform most of your average users in application developers. It will be liberating and put the world at their ... ... okay ... ... ... ... ... ahhh that takes your photos and sends them to people ... ahhh over the goddamn internet ... with very few buttons. ... ...
Steve Jobs: People don't "want" to be liberated. People don't want to think. People don't want to have the burden of imagination placed on them. They want my imagination superimposed on top of theirs. They want what I tell them to want.
Bill Atkinson:
Steve Jobs: Nobody knows what to do with your 'HyperCard' program, look at all those buttons. All those buttons screaming at me, all night long. Pushing me into the lockers. Stealing my lunch money. NO MORE BUTTONS.
*hurls a paperweight as hard as he can several feet from his desk*
Bill Atkinson: Um, we can change the UI
Steve Jobs: More than that, trim it down. Just a few options. 'Applications' is too broad -- too many branching factors.
Bill Atkinson: Well, we could limit it to just database applications
Steve Jobs: No, you know what people like? Photography. Make it make photos! Hold on a second
*Jobs snorts a huge line of cocaine off his desk*
Steve Jobs: Oh jesus that was good. Wait, wait I'm getting something ahhhh ahhhh la la la la la ahhh I'm getting something. Write this down: Postcard making application
Bill Atkinson: Sir, you're throwing away such a powerful application for mere postcard func
Steve Jobs: Goddamnit Atkinson, this is exactly what HyperCard -- I mean PhotoCard -- needs to make it out there. Now go forth and do!
Bill Atkinson: Yes my master
And that's where Bill Atkinson has gone!
My work here is dung.
The spirit of hypercard was easy content creation/scripting by users. Over time that became Geocities, and now it's Facebook. Very few people want to program as an end in itself, and it's not like hypertext went away, the tools just became progressively less low-level and geeky.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Great conspiracy, all it needs is any rational evidence that HyperCard was ever going to do any of the things TFA claims it would've. I don't see anything along those lines in the article, but then its hard to hear anything over the sound of the author grinding his axe...
Look, the average user is not us. The average user doesn't want to program their computer. The average user is, in fact, in the market for an expensive video telephone that also plays Angry Birds. That's why HyperCard was killed, and why the company that killed it went on to make literally unimaginable amounts of money. I don't like Steve Jobs or the direction Apple has gone in the past twenty years but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that "what I like" is "what everyone wants and needs"; there are enough people here already doing that.
Supercard didn't flourish. The market was just too tiny. In many ways, Filemaker and similar apps filled the niche.
If people REALLY wanted a Hypercard-like program, there were alternatives.
I played around with Hypercard back in its earliest form, and as far as I can tell, the spiritual successor to it is PowerPoint and all its clones.
Why bemoan the loss of a particular implementation of an idea, when the niche is still filled by something else?
bring back Cyberdog, which made it easy for users to do their own web mashups.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Or, it could be that all those fond memories of Hypercard are exaggerated. I can't recall even one such application that was useful apart from simple educational games. The challenge in creating a GUI-based development system has been tackled many times. The most recent one that I have used is the default Mindstorms programming environment LabView, which I quickly discarded for a gcc-based environment.
The one killing blow that keeps me from really using these environments is that they are fundamentally incompatible with version control. This means that they cannot be large projects, or have much collaboration -- relegating them to trivial systems, which are all I remember Hypercard being.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
AppleTalk and Automator are included with OS X. Hypercard was killed by HTML.
What I'd really like to see is a merging of the capabilities of system level and interface level scripting languages. The interface guys are all in AJAX-y Javascript land, while system-level scripting (at least on a Mac) is through AppleScript -- HyperTalk for the OS -- and well-formed apps. Reintegration would be awesome.
Remember this? http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptOSA/
App Store and iPhone locking notwithstanding, I don't think it's a nefarious user-cannot-be-developer intent (though I'm sure many Slashdotters will disagree), I think it's simply where the market went and Apple's over-extension got the better of it.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Probably because spreadsheets and PowerPoint solve most of the same problems, but in a fashion that PHBs and MBAs are more comfortable with.
People tend to see conspiracies whenever something doesn't go the way they'd like. "Why didn't you do what I wanted you to do? It must be that you have a secret plan and you're out to get me!" In reality, I doubt that it was about Jobs wanting to make sure people can't do [whatever] with their computers, but because various people don't want to bother with it. In spite of the article's claim that there were "frequent calls to [revive Hypercard]" and a "more-or-less guaranteed and lively market", there probably wasn't enough actual interest to warrant development.
See here's the thing: there are lots of things aimed at allowing people to script/automate things. There's Applescript and Automator, and some of these sorts of "programs" can be made with Filemaker products. If you want to get deeper, you can get Xcode for free. It's not as though there are no tools available.
I think the real problem is that there's a lot of people who don't want to deal with the complications of making their own applications, even if it's as simple as Hypercard. Then there are people who do want to make their own applications and are willing to learn Xcode. There isn't a lot in between, and for those people, Automator and scripting serves well enough, and Apple probably thinks those are better solutions than Hypercard.
Ok, so maybe AppleScript and Quartz Composer aren't 100% exactly what Hypercard was, but they're still there, and there's Xcode if you want to do "real" development. Not to mention that you've got all the usual *nix tools available if you're that kind of power user.
To pretend that Apple killed Hypercard because it interfered with the Mac "walled garden" is just a conspiracy theory. If that was the reason it was killed and remained dead then Mac OS X wouldn't ship with python and Bash. Apple wouldn't have been giving Xcode away (and recently selling it as a download for $5). Nor would they have provided Quartz Composer and AppleScript.
But yeah sure, walled garden, ooooh, spooky...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Doesn't the relative failure of LiveCode and SuperCard in the market show its a non-starter?
Also I have no interest in developing for a proprietary language. Having one company in control of the lang and its distribution is just obsolete. So bye bye.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Apple didn't kill Hypercard, the WWW did.
But by the time they actually stopped selling it, it hadn't been updated in many many years. All the people who were really into Hypercard had long since migrated into two different technologies: Supercard, which is still being made I guess (most versions of Myst were built on it), and this little technology called... oh gosh, what was it now... "HTML" or something like that.
Seriously, just about anything you could possibly want to do in Hypercard could be done just as easily in HTML with the advantage of being accessible to the world at large. There were a few exceptions, but those were taken care of at first by plugins and now by HTML5.
Mind you, I say this as someone who ran the Hypercard SIG at one of northern California's largest MUGs.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Look, the average user is not us.
But that doesn't mean Apple has to actively hinder the average user from becoming us.
Any cancelled project that was *truly* useful has several open-source versions of the same idea. So, where is hypercard for linux?
LiveCode imports HyperCard stacks and is pretty much the continuation of HyperCard. It is multi-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Web) and many apps sold on those platforms today are written in LiveCode. The company that makes LiveCode is www.runrev.com
why hasn't someone made an equivalent product? I took an education class, and the professor (a former EE) was nuts for it. There are plenty of competing word processors, spread sheets, video editors, etc. If the market is too small for a commercial version, why isn't there even an OSS project run by the geeks who loved it in their youth?
I dove heavily into HyperCard and quickly got frustrated by its limitations. Plus it violated the user interface guidelines for the Mac in many ways. A neat concept, but it honestly sucked.
Maybe Apple won't bring it back, but others have taken a shot at making similar products. For a while I used a tool called "Runtime Revolution" which as I understand it is very similar to what Hypercard was. Even has the same terminology like "cards" and "stacks". It was also cross platform for Win / Mac / Linux.
It looks like the company has transformed this product into something called LiveCode now.
The somewhat tricky part about programming with it is the thing is basically always running, no compile step involved, although there were buttons to halt message passing so it could basically be paused for when UI work required to UI to stop doing stuff.
Fear is the mind killer.
lol.... that made me laugh
Supercard didn't flourish
What do flash cartridges for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS have to do with HyperCard?
Oh wait, you meant that SuperCard.
Any cancelled project that was *truly* useful has several open-source versions of the same idea.
Then what's the open-source version of the English translation of Nintendo's Famicom game Mother? Or perhaps you exclude games from "truly useful".
I loved hypercard, and am sad that it is gone, especially as an educator. It's sad that most student's interaction with computers these days is web surfing, word and powerpoint. Some people have mentioned the failures of hypercard like software, and I don't think that's fair. When I tried supercard it felt like it was trying to clone hypercard... just as it was years ago, not accounting for advancements in the world.
The thing that feels most like hypercard to me today is game development engines, like Unity3D. Basing navigation around hyperlinking is downplayed (as it is everywhere these days) but the idea that you can have graphic and text elements, in 2D or 3D, and then interactions facilitated through simple scripting (use javascript, C# or Boo) makes it feel like the spiritual successor to hypercard. NASA has done some awesome stuff using Unity. I think Unity might be missing out by calling it a game engine--it can do much more.
HyperNext, HyperStudio, LiveCode, and SuperCard are all available and based on the Hypercard model, which is at least mentioned in passing in the article (but not the post, above). When I RTFA, I noted the author states: "All of (the programs based on the Hypercard model) are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard". Wow, adding more features and making programs more capable makes them a failure? Uh, no. In fact, Hyperstudio is really just an updated clone of Hypercard with lots of color and multimedia features added. The fact is that the Hypercard model had its place as an education tool, but was not that useful for most applications. The article, and the person who posted it here are not really talking about Hypercard, their rant is more a platform to spread conspiracy theories and Apple bashing, which is fine, enjoy yourself, but call it what it is.
Supercard was expensive, it's not the sort of thing a parent would buy on a whim. The beauty of Hypercard is that it came with the OS so kids could discover the joy of coding on their own. The language was designed so a person reading the source could start to figure it out quickly. It was the perfect gateway language.
Unfortunately, Hypercard gave way to Hypercard Player, which then became a specialized commercial product, and at that point Hypercard as phenomenon was dead.
I read the internet for the articles.
Used it. Loved it. Hit the wall on the limitations and went elsewhere.
When I wanted a plane database I used Filemaker, then C++ with SQL, then Java wth XML.
When I wanted an app to share data between users I used Filemaker then HTML, javascript and PHP with all the trimmings.
When I wanted a business app others could edit I used Excel (because other people 'get' Excel)
I killed Hyper Card because making HC into something more powerful and more flexible would have changed it into something common users couldn't use. I killed it (and so did YOU).
Does this count?
http://www.ardi.com/exe_lin_hypercard.php
maybe this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
I don't know, just did a quick Google on Hyprecard linux.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
A) Steve wanted world dominance and couldn't stand the thought of users doing actual programming ...
OR
B) Hypercard basically sucked as an application and wasn't going to make any money
Hypercard was more killed to make way for Filemaker Pro, which, at the time, was wholly owned by Apple.
There was always a limited attraction to the fairly inflexible way that Hypercard worked. But the user friendlyness of it was kept in Filemaker. The biggest reason that MS Access was never released for Mac was simply that Filemaker was too good.
Ward Cunningham's first prototypes of the Wiki concept were built using a hypercard stack. Hypercard didn't adapt to the network (and most specifically the Web), and was replaced, not by something better, but by something different.
So are you saying that Joe User should not program for business, or not at all, even at home? I see the argument for business, and in the beginning you say it's OK for the home. At the end, though, you say Joe User shouldn't be making programs even when they can. Is the "even when they can" directed at business uses, or for even home users?
If you're talking just business, that's fine. If you're talking people at home fooling around, then you are being snotty, since everyone has to start somewhere.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
As someone who was directly involved with HC2.0 and to some degree HC3.0, I can say with zero hesitation that HC did not die, it committed suicide.
That suicide was due to all of the classic and well known problems in the industry, including but not limited to, monumental feature creep, empire building, left-hand-right-hand, second-system effect and the general craziness that was endemic to Apple before Jobs returned.
HC3 was supposed to be HC2 further improved with real color support. In its last incarnation before disappearing it was a QuickTime module for embedding interactivity into movies. That is all the explanation anyone needs.
I RTFA, I used Hypercard and SuperCard for some quick prototyping for a HCI class. SuperCard was a superset of HyperCard, and I think you could import any Hypercard deck and have it Just Run(TM). It was not controlled by Apple, in fact it's still around. I needed to search for it to see if it still exists. Not saying the audience doesn't exist, but nobody is clamoring for it
The two Steves had radically different ideas for the direction of computing. Woz was a tinkerer, wanted everyone to be able to do anything, even if that meant shorting your board and starting a small fire. Jobs saw a computer as a great tool but as a near infinite state machine, it needed to be simplified and controlled a bit if everyone was to use it. Both models work, for a subset of people, and with some crossover. I'm a geek and like to tinker (Woz model), but sometimes i just want stuff to work (leans towards Jobs model). The removal of a tool that didn't make much money for the company and left some threads showing is consistent with the Jobs model, with no evil overtones.
The average user doesn't want to become us. They want to get stuff done and not have to think about the underlying application or hardware or even HOW they are getting their tasks accomplished.
But that doesn't mean Apple has to actively hinder the average user from becoming us.
No, it doesn't. I figure Apple does it out of benevolence to the human race.
The reason they killed it is because they probably had plans for the app store for many years and in apple math
Xcode + (iOS || Tiger) == App Store Profit
How about a simple one sentence explanation of what HyperCard was that doesn't sound like marketing speak? If you really want people to read what you write might I suggest the use of paragraphs?
I introduced Steve to Interface Builder in 1986 (at NeXT). (It was written in ExperLISP for the Mac - completely OO, and deeply integrated with the toolbox.). His first comments were typical Job's "I've seen much better...". He was referring to HyperCard. By the end of the meeting, he was sold, and NeXT built the Object-C version still in use today. We created an (unreleased) product that was an OO/incrementally compiled cross between HyperCard and IB in '87. I also built a much more powerful tool called Action! for the TI micro-explorer in '88.
So Steve liked HyperCard a lot; he just realized that IB was more powerful. It is surprising to me though that he didn't pursue an easier to use variant... We still need one! Squeak is the closest so far.
That's why XCode is included with Mac OS X allowing the user to code for the Mac, iPhone or iPad or even just futz about with simple C code directly with the Gnu compiler.
Mmmyep.
Oh, wait...
> But that doesn't mean Apple has to actively hinder the average user from becoming us.
They don't.
HC was dead long before Jobs returned. It hadn't seen a major release in years, and the lead develop was the only guy left on the team. I don't even think he was there when they bought OpenStep, let alone when Jobs took the helm.
The only people saying otherwise are the haters here on /. and in an article by someone who admits to not really knowing. This is simply an example of people seeing what they want to see. This is why conspiracy theories are so prevalent.
Hypercard/HyperTalk lived on in the Lingo scripting language that is still used in Macromedia Director (Adobe/Shockwave). Of course, I'm sure it must have changed a lot since v4 (~1992) when I saw it last...
Clearly you never tried to upgrade the ram in an early model Mac. It was extremely difficult and required special tools. Many configuration aspects were locked down too. You also couldn't define your own paper sizes for the printer drivers and many of the OS settings could not be altered without installing 3rd party tools.
There has always been some form of "walled garden" in apple products.
If Hypercard and the concept behind it is so great, why aren't you superior basement-dwellers writing your own? If you've been "bemoaning" its loss for over a decade, why aren't there a hundred open source versions?
Oh yeah. You want Apple to do it for you, at their expense, so you can take it for free while at the same time claiming you invented it and bashing Apple for doing all your research and hard work for you. You want to keep yourselves on pedestals so that nobody can send an email without consulting a Birkenstock-clad neckbeard. Too bad Apple is making all the toys that previously were your domains to "idiots" and "sheep" and anybody else who doesn't think that you should need to devote your life to computing to be "worthy" of using a computer.
No wonder nobody important pays attention to what the "Slashdot community" wants.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
The conspiracy theory isn't entirely unfounded, however. RunRev made something similar to HyperCard, and Apple rejected it from the App Store.
I understand that when Tim Berners-Lee was coming up with a language to put his web pages together he almost decided to use HyperCard (I don't know why he didn't, anyone?).
Now imagine a world where HyperCard (available on Macs only) had been used as the development language for the WWW. Then maybe Apple would've kept selling their (then) overpriced Macs for a few more years and Scully would've held onto his job a few more years (do I have the years right?). Steve would've retired early, being embittered by his inability to retake control of Apple... (but I hope he got to see his doctor earlier!) ... and the world would've been very different.
(got to get back into my parallel universe time travel transport! Now to try killing Hitler!)
The average user doesn't want to become us. They want to get stuff done
And when someone wants to get stuff done but discovers that there happens not to be an app for that, what's the next step?
It's nice to have a conspiracy theory but ockham's razor says that Hypercard was killed for the same reason Apple kills most products it kills: the demand wasn't there.
Proof? Hypercard is essentially still available, both as replacement/upgrades like Supercard and through its intellectual descendants and shrapnel, like wikis, Applescript and the web in general. Plus there's essentially no barrier to software development on the mac. And yet Supercard lives at the margins, and even wikis aren't really that pervasive.
Looking back at these old screenshots of HyperCard brings back memories, but it also reminds me of Flash.
Sure, Flash is a lot more complex in many ways but the spirit seems the same.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
For example, the Bento program, by the makers of Filemaker. If anything is the direct successor of Hypercard, it must be Bento. I looked into it. I found it useless even for the simplest problems, because like Hypercard it completely lacks relational abilities. Even a spreadsheet can be made relational, if you really want to go there.
There was a Hypercard game, Whipcrack Jack, that I remember playing as a kid on Mac OS 7.1 or so. I've been trying to dig it up ever since with no luck.
HyperCard was awesome in the days of Motorola 68K-based Macs. I have super-fond memories of "programming" with it on my SE/30 or my IIsi. But the main problem is that Apple really took it as far as it can go before it just no longer became useful, or preferable to other authoring tools out there.
It's clear the Apple did neglect HyperCard to death, but this started well before Steve Jobs returned. But I don't think there was any evil conspiracy behind its demise; I simply think HyperCard ran its course. The neglect is that they hardly made the final version available for sale. If you could find it for sale on their old, "ore-Apple Store" online web store, you could order it. This was the version we had all been waiting for, with full color stack support, and the ability to embed QuickTime media objects (pictures, movies, etc.).
Well, I found it on the site, ordered it...it came on something like 14 floppy disks, which I imaged into the old Disk Copy-style .img files and burned them all to CD-R, so that they could all be mounted at once and the install would go quicker--no floppy shuffle. Turns out this version was slow, bloated, and you know what? By this was point, it was easier to learn a little bit of simple HTML, or use one of the early WYSIWYG HTML editors like Claris HomePage, and build something similar...but faster and compatible with the most of the world that didn't have HyperCard or HyperCard Player installed.
Yes, HyperCard may have helped inspire the web, but the web overtook it. On the Mac, more powerful tools like AppleScript Studio and XCode offered *real* development opportunities, making HyperCard look quaint.
Sure, I get HyperCard nostalgia from time to time, too. So I got me a demo copy of Runtime Revolution, which picks up HyperCard where Apple left off, and adds a whole bunch of modern niceties. Sadly. the whole "stack" concept still seems antiquated and quaint, even with modern tools.
Sorry folks, reviving HyperCard is not the answer. The answer is a new pseudo-development environment and corresponding runtime that is super-easy for non-programmers to pick up. Something we haven't seen yet, not something based on old paradigms.
:q!
Hypercard kill YOU!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
They call someone like us ;)
My family got a Mac when I was 16. We had an Apple IIe before that, and I had taught myself Basic, and later 6502 assembler, while a high schooler. I had a dozen friends also interested in programming (and warez trading, of course, but that was just gravy) and we taught each other the latest tricks from Nibble or Call-APPLE magazines. We made some money writing programs for hire, but it remained a hobby. It was fun and very empowering. And after spending a lot of effort optimizing a naive insertion sort, seeing a quicksort program do in two seconds what my super-optimized program needed two minutes to do was just astounding. It was a moment of revelation, of illumination. I just *had* to learn about algorithms and recursion and asymptotic analysis.
When we got a Mac, it came with Hypercard. I had read about this revolutionary programming language and jumped in, ready to be impressed. Short story, I wasn't. You know how IBM people said of the 128k Mac that it was just a toy? Well, my Mac SE came with Excel and Pagemaker (warez too, sorry, Aldus and Microsoft), so I saw clearly that it was no toy. But Hypercard? THAT was a toy. It felt limiting. After years of playing with assembler, Hypercard felt like going back to Lego bricks after having been allowed in a real workshop.
I never really hit it off with the Mac. I bought a copy of Think C, found a used "Inside Macintosh" and tried my hand at programming it, but it didn't feel as fun as the Apple II had been. Maybe because I was isolated at the time, and didn't know anyone who was programming on the Mac. (I lived far from urban centers and didn't have a modem as everything was long distance). I didn't start programming again until I bought a 386 computer a few years later and discovered Turbo C. That was a lot of fun, and later I discovered LISP and functional languages, then my mom got scared and said "You're moving with your auntie and your uncle in Bel-Air." I whistled for a cab and when it came near the license plate said "Fresh" and there were dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought, naw, forget it, yo holmes to Bel-Air. I pulled up to the house about seven or eight and said to the cabbie "Yo holmes smell ya later." Looked at my kingdom, I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.
Yes but.... just because they don't want it now, doesn't mean that they wont get a taste for it later. I see no reason to deny them that taste if they want it.
Hypercard was pretty cool. I only ever used the ][GS version, but it worked, it was neat. It wouldn't be my first choice for apps today (even if it was still around) but, if someone without experience wanted to play around or make a quick app to do something specific, I would totally recommend it.
What people want is irrelevant. Ask anyone over the age of 30 if they are doing now what they thought they wanted to be doing 10 or 15 years ago, and well... I don't know many who could honestly answer in the affirmative. Give them the tools, give them a path, and some will walk down it. The easier the path, the more who will try.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Supercard was not an adequate replacement for HyperCard. It increased the level of complexity to where it was competing with other things, like Javascript, Python, Smalltalk. And it was only better than any of those in that it was more like HyperCard.
HyperCard was useful for getting things done *QUICKLY*. That was pretty much it. It got extended in lots of ways, but every extension took away from it's core value.
Additionally, HyperCard was valuable BECAUSE you could count on every Mac having a copy. When this stopped being true, it immediately lost a lot of its value. And that value can't be replaced by anything where you can't depend on being able to run an arbitrary application on any computer it happens to land on. Javascript has pretty much taken this position, but it has severe limitations wrt local storage of information. (Cookies just aren't sufficient.) If Javascript were merged with, say, SQLite... (And have the interface handle the SQL...no user access. This is just a way to persist information.) ... then you'd have a reasonable successor to HyperCard. But note that this would need to be a part of the Javascript standard, because part of what makes this work is having it available on every machine. (P.S.: This might be a *VERY* bad idea, as I imagine that it could be the basis of a reasonably powerful botnet. HyperCard didn't have networking, so it avoided this problem.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
He got tired of the developers running around and yelling "HYPERCARD GO!" while standing in anime and manga poses. Then doing a roll on the floor ending in a new pose yelling "HYPERTALK ACTIVE!". He then knew, it would end in unbearable development environment for people.
... and not because of the natural-language-like syntax. AppleScript is a disease because it's brittle at its most critical task - driving other applications. It's far too easy for application writers to publish AppleScript interfaces that look like they can do a particular task, but actually can't because the creator for your particular object type or the accessor for a critical field is broken.
And don't get me started on AppleScript UI manipulation - if a critical button you need to push isn't connected to the root UI context, you can't access it from AppleScript. Buttons like that are also accessibility violations - VoiceOver can't find them.
(yes, I've been trying to automate stuff in Quicken Essentials, why do you ask?)
AppleScript is too arcane and non-orthogonal to be anywhere near a HyperCard replacement.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
HypeStudio was, and is, a very popular program inspired by HyperCard, and it is still be supported and has extensive further development. It provides that "I can make that" amplifier-of-the-mind without requiring scripting, though scripting-like programming can be done with it. More at http://bit.ly/HSForYou
You talk about Supercard as if it were defunct. It still exists, and is still used by an extremely small minority.
HyperCard really "died" when Apple stopped bundling the editor with every Mac. Once you had to purchase it, it became just another "programming language" option.
More likely Hypercard was simply giving too much "DIY" power to normal users and Jobs thought it would harm commercial application sales. As for slashdotters bemoaning the loss - hardly a significant number, it never appealed to real programmers (if it did, where's the open source successor for this oh-so-terrible loss?).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Because it knew too much!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
He's still out there and still coding:
http://itunes.apple.com/app/bill-atkinson-photocard/id333208430?mt=8
Granted, it does then frustrate the hell out of the professionals at work when these amateur hacks somehow metastasize off of their original builder's desktop and becomes a business tool
I believe you just described MS Access. HyperCard front end, worst-possible-DB backend.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Yes, adding features can make a successful program a failure, when the success of the program is based on its simplicity. Also important, however, was that HyperCard came with the OS installed on every Mac. This is not true of any proposed competitor except HTML+Javascript, it's current closest replacement. (And frankly, that "current closest replacement" is shit when attempting to address the set of problems that HyperCard was designed to be optimal for.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I developed a neuroanatomy teaching tool in Supercard, which was an excellent Hypercard clone that was in a number of ways more powerful. The project was successful, using a teaching strategy that was innovative for it's time (although pretty much standard today). It was popular with students and it was used for years by at least a couple of medical schools that I know of. I loved working with Supercard, and I recommend it to anybody with fond memories of Hypercard. However, the fact that Supercard did not take over the world (although it is still available), suggests to me that there is not overwhelming demand for a programming tool of this sort.
Reasons why Steve Jobs might not have been strongly impelled to resurrect Hypercard:
1) Hypercard's heyday was before high-speed internet became so ubiquitous. A great deal of what could be done with Hypercard can be done with standard web design tools to produce web applications that are more portable across operating systems, more versatile, and easier to maintain.
2) Most of the presentation features of Hypercard are now better handled by dedicated presentation software such as PowerPoint and Keynote.
3) Steve Jobs preferred polished software that fully took advantage of the capabilities of the Mac platform. Hypercard was a non-native software environment that was really perfectly suited to little more than "flash card" projects. Using an interpreted language, it was rather slow. Steve may well have preferred to channel developers into a fully-fledged Mac native application development environment, and to devote Apple's efforts toward optimizing those tools rather than maintaining a parallel development system with more limited capabilities.
But that doesn't mean Apple has to actively hinder the average user from becoming us.
And what makes you think they're doing that? They still offer all of their developer tools for free, and some of them (automator, dashcode, quartz composer) are very approachable.
I learned to program with things like hypercard, and sure I miss a few things from those days. But we still have learning tools just as good, if not better. They just have different names.
And as for people writing their own programs in HyperCard? I don't care how many people did it, it's a bad idea. Programming should be done by professionals and kids on their way to becoming pro's. It shouldn't be done by your average Jo, they've got better things to do with their time.
Exactly so. Most users, even from within Apple, didn't get Hypercard. Now granted, this was during a time when Apple marketing thought putting a fancy CD player and some Bose speakers on a low end computer then charger $8k for it would be the key to the companies financial future...so there was a lot of the head up the butt problems the company used to suffer from. (Engineers knew how awesome their products were, but couldn't for the life of them explain why that mattered to customers - and marketing. And of course, since marketing didn't get it, they thought engineering was a bunch of crack pots and did what they thought made sense.)
People didn't get Hypercard unless someone sat them down and showed them this is what you can do with it, and how easy it was to do.
And pay us oodles of money because we are the wizards and they the pages. Works for me. People interested in a craft will figure out the tools. People not interested won't care to learn they'll get someone else to do it for them. Ex. I'm not interested in masonary. When I needed brick work done I didn't say "well I only need a chisel, a hammer, and a bucket to mix motar". I didn't care, it didn't interest me, I certainly couldn't be bothered spending the time to become proficient in the task so I paid a few grand and had someone that already knew what they are doing to do the work for me. Works for me, they got the sunburn while I played videogames.
Not to mention: Bill Atkinson left Apple in 1990 Jobs came back in 1997. So seeing as HC was mainly a Bill thing from what I know, HC was long long gone before Steve even thought of coming back.
It was spun of to Claris. most of the team that worked on it stay at apple. Without the team, it failed.
It came back to Apple and it was brought in under QT.
frankly, you should all be glad it's gone. It basically would have became the 'Access' of the Apple world.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hypercard's brilliant idea was, I agree, blurring the line between using and programming, between creating static and dynamic content. This blurry line was my personal gateway into computing as a kid: I learned to program on the Commodore 64 (another "blurry programming line" system) and then in Hypercard.
But that spirit isn't dead. Examples:
* Macro languages in computer games (WoW for example)
* Spreadsheet formulas
* Visual Basic in Microsoft Office
* Javascript in web pages
None of these are as awesome or elegant as Hypercard, but the idea lives on.
PS: my best Hypercards from high school: an orbital mechanics simulator, and a 3D perspective maze game. (The walls of the maze were just trapezoids of various sizes that I turned on and off. There was a big smilie face that chased you through the maze.)
Well, why is it so expensive and long to develop ? Is it because the tools suck ?
I'll be perfectly frank: in 2011, I would have expected software development to be a heck of a lot easier than it is. I'm having to deal with a sore lack of RAD tools for most languages and platforms. Does it make me a weenie, the fact that I'd like a nice visual design tool for my GUI-driven apps ? I'm looking at you, Java. Fuck you, Java!
I'm goign to take a wild educated guess, and state that a very large number of us real programmers are stuck writing business apps 40 hours a week. Business apps that, for the most part, do the exact same things: input data, store data, retrieve data, and run reports on said data. Glorified MS Access. So then, why is it that a clever non-programmer can create a fairly complex Access "application" in a half hour, but to recreate that in a proper language takes at least an afternoon, if not a whole day ?
Even Apple with their XCode only do it kind-of half-assed. You get to draw the GUI, but then you have to do all this weird connector-outlet nonsense and a bunch of boilerplate preprocessor declarations to tie it into your code. What ever happed to drawing a freaking button, then double-clicking said button to create its onClick event or choosing from a list of available events ? Yes, I'm talking about VB / Delphi and ther ilk.
Just because we're brilliant programmers doesn't mean we should still be doing everything the hard way. Likewise, just because someone is a non-programmer doesn't mean they should never be creative with their technology.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
But we were happy, even though our computers were shit.
Because they were shit.
Aye.
Aye.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If it's easy enough to be done quickly by a programmer, there probably already is an application for it. If it's a non-trivial app, the expense in time and effort of an average user becoming savvy enough to create the app they want is probably much larger than the cost in just paying someone else to do it.
A combination of simple scripting languages, command line batch scripting, and application macros probably takes care of the vast majority of what users could possibly want to do that isn't already being done.
I knew a mechanical engineer who worked at a university. His team had to create a bunch of large brackets for a bunch of photomultiplier tubes for use in a particle detector. One guy fired up Autocad and started writing a bunch of macros to figure out the optimal way to line up the brackets on the large sheets of metal. After waiting a half an hour, the guy I knew fired up Excel, made a few formulas, and figured it out in ten minutes.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I sure wish somebody would hinder people from getting a quarter of the way there and thinking they are us...
What's that proverb about a little knowledge, please remind me?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Apple killed hypercard fairly early. One of Hypercard's severe limitations was incompetent report-generation. An aftermarket product "Reports" fixed that big time (in a nice way, building reports by moving stuff around the 'page' with the mouse). The Reports author tried hard (over years) to get Apple to accept that feature set into Hypercard (he said he was not asking money) but he said he got ignored. All this in the very beginning of the 90's, well before www.
It became self-fulfilling: Apple stopped mentioning Hypercard so no one new started using it, Claris got it but could not be bothered (AFAIK nothing Claris did was any good). Even the truly committed Reports author got discouraged and gave up.
I rewrote the software in question in Python (so not tied to Linux). A process that took 10 minutes on an Apple MacOS Centris Hypercard script takes a fraction of a second on 3.1Ghz cpu (and the database is twice as big now).
In the latest version of XCode, Apple introduced "Storyboard" ... which bears an uncanny resemblance to Hypercard.
Part one of a Storyboard tutorial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGdELuDMxds
It's your job as an expert. The bare fact is that people who get involved in purchasing services for an auxiliary/support function such as IT are not experts in the same. The "vague generalities" you deride are the performance targets, not the solution - that's your job. Seriously, would you prefer a customer that micromanages you from start to end, complaining about each thing incessantly? And is wrong all the time, to boot? Do appreciate the freedom of being given vague generalities to work on!
Your dream is reality: html5 web storage already works in up-to-date browsers, and can be used with SQL. Not quite as effortless as hypercard, but it's there and it's beginning to see use.
so you are saying that average people should not learn a process of using the tools that sit in their home work and school, and they should leave it to the elite trained which engenders hated of the tool and the trained? every one who feels like it should be able to program script or automate there computers will everyone no but they should all be able to. yes they will turn out absolute drivil but most of it will be in crap simple languages and we gurus will be able to use our lower level languages like c c++ ectera.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Which came out first on the NeXT.
Excel is what Microsoft has done for innovation and bringing the world forward in this space. i.e. Nothing.
Seriously. What are you thinking? Microsoft's business model is selling you the same thing again and again and again every 18 months. This time with strips.
Deleted
Yup. It was called HTML.
Around 1995 there was a university teaching some kind of "The future of publishing" class. It was mostly just Hypercard. Some FTP, Gopher, etc. About 3 weeks in the prof came in said "To hell with Hypercard, we're learning HTML." even though the prof was learning right along with the students.
Within a year all of those students had been scouted by internet startups.
It's funny as Hypercard died way before iOS did.
Hypercard Player was something that came out early 90s. It basically limited the access to what you could do with Hypercard. Earlier revisions simply hid the options, so you could enable it in the Home stack through a secret command or by manually setting the level and removing the rectangle covering the options.
Hypercard died again in early 2000's as it remained a Classic app and every Mac shipped with OS X by default, running Classic. Then Classic was basically killed by the Intel transition (no Classic available on Intel - Classic was basically a VM that required PowerPC), and finally killed for good as of 10.5 (Leopard) which didn't include Classic at all.
Basically Hypercard was killed in many different ways, but they all happened prior to the walled garden cropping up in iOS. But Hypercard pretty much died after OS X became standard - it was a Classic app that never got ported forwards.
But when the code comprises mostly DATA 69,25,... statements that get POKEd in to memory, running early is very dangerous....
Actually, while most customers don't have the slightest idea what they need and you have to patiently sift it out of them, it seems to me that quite a few know exactly what they want - and are completely wrong. Those customers you have to get the information out of, and then try to argue them into something they can use instead of the thing they thought they wanted - or in the end they reject what you built exactly to their specifications because it doesn't work. Often people feel that because they are paying for it, they can also design it - even though they don't have a clue about design.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
OK, create an open source version of it. Problem solved.
Because Visual Basic was already at version 6.0 and in the end, HyperCard was a much less powerful product.
He probably realized it was a dead-end. And, as for humans, when software dies too early when it is still popular, people elevate the recently dead into a cult state and continue the worshiping for years.
I hate to say it, but what the guy showed in the hypercard story looks like VB or WinForms. Is it that hypercard really died, or was it just head off at the pass by a swarm of things MS patented such that, once MS borrowed hypercard ideas, they could turn around then patent everything so that hypercard itself could not borrow back from MS...
This is my sig.
There is one; it's called LiveCode and a free fully-functional trial can be downloaded from http://www.runrev.com. It compiles for Mac, Windows, Linux, web, iOS, Android (I think) and WinPhone7 coming. Uses a similar interface and its scripting language is a superset of Hypertalk. And as for where Bill Atkinson is, I sat across from him at the last LiveCode user conference, directly behind WWW co-originator Robert Caillau of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, and original Xerox PARC and later Apple employee Larry Tessler came to my education session at this same user conference.
Pretty impressive set of attendees for something the rest of you all want to diss...
Move along, nothing to see here...
Tim Berners Lee has spoken about the inspiration provided by Hypercard to create the World Wide Web. HTML, HTTP and Javascript have given us a superior Hypercard. Meanwhile Mr Atkinson is happily capturing the wide world with his camera. Be Happy.
I've never used Hypercard, so I don't know what to make of this. The demo looks like a form editor with some macros in a very verbose COBOL-like language associated with the controls. If Hypercard is so great, why don't you implement it in a webapp for all of us to see how genius it is?
So Allegiant SuperCard which was HyperCard on steroids, and there was even a Windows runtime environment. It was still available long after HyperCards demise, actually Google in its wisdom tells me right now there’s a Lion Version: http://www.supercard.us/ strange that they haven’t taken over the software world in storm
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
>I don't believe people don't want to program. In fact, they absolutely do want to program. ...
>They just don't want to learn a programming language to do it.
>Natural language programming and learned skillsets are how we teach children.
This is true.
No one above seems to have mentioned the real value of HyperCard. It was a beautifully constructed object-oriented environment which children could almost naturally use to make interesting things. My own son, now a technical support for a large financial firm, started programming HyperCard at age 5. He was the youngest person I knew who learned to program right and first, without the artificial speed bumps of stated abstractions, aka Java (Pascal in those days), IDE's, etc.
As for why Apple let it die (probably a more accurate statement than "killed it"), the opinion of someone who actually worked with it once is that there were two issues:
- It was developed before color support was universal, and color was never retrofit very well. Of course, Apple eventually had the money to do that if it wanted. But in the meantime
- It was specially valuable for education, and Apple had concluded that the real money was in the consumer market, since they seemed locked out of the business one. Just bad luck and bad timing.
I still think it's a tremendous loss for the programming community; the best way for a youngster to start learning programming (and the many useful skills about generalization, abstraction, etc. that go with it) before their natural curiosity and abilities are wrecked by the school system.
FWIW, IAACSP (albeit, an old one).
.... Time did, and progress. Hypercard was great when your programming environment was limted to interacting with a 512x342 greyscale screen. Hypercard looked great when it was practically the only alternative to coding line by line in BASIC or C. But the world did not stay in the mid 80's forever, time went on and other things came to the fore, HTML, Java, The Interface Builder which was part of the Next developer package and now free in Xcode. Yes every now and then there would be those few that would call for a revival of Hypercard, and some folks gave it their shot in Supercard. But the market had already left it behind for newer, more powerful tools.... that weren't limited to Mac only use.
Among other things, Apple gives away their entire (extremely good) development toolchain, docs, etc., because they want to make it as easy as possible for people to develop software.
How exactly is this consistent with a $99 per year tax to run software that you compiled on a device that you own?
Apple realized that the web would replace HyperCard, in that all of the nifty things that people used to do in HyperCard stacks were now being done as web apps
Then perhaps the right thing for Apple to do might have been to make migration tools to turn stacks into web apps.
They still offer all of their developer tools for free
You are correct about the Mac, but there's still that $99 per year tax thing on iDevices.
Programming should be done by professionals and kids on their way to becoming pro's.
That tax thing hinders kids from becoming professionals.
People interested in a craft will figure out the tools.
Unless someone in a position to collect rents makes the tools artificially expensive.
A combination of simple scripting languages, command line batch scripting, and application macros
Is exactly what Apple has rejected from the App Store. I remember Apple rejecting classic games for iOS just because the games had a BASIC prompt as an Easter egg, and I can dig up citations if you want.
I sure wish somebody would hinder people from getting a quarter of the way there and thinking they are us
That's why there's something called a portfolio, even though my internal monologue starts to sound like Beavis with a fake accent whenever I read that word.
What's that proverb about a little knowledge, please remind me?
Some people know enough to be dangerous, I'll admit.
Does it make me a weenie, the fact that I'd like a nice visual design tool for my GUI-driven apps ? I'm looking at you, Java. Fuck you, Java!
Yes, it does make you a weenie. And by the way, fuck off with your rant about Java. There's Netbeans if you want a visual design tool for Java, you dumbshit.
I sure wish somebody would hinder people from getting a quarter of the way there and thinking they are us...
What's that proverb about a little knowledge, please remind me?
I sure wish somebody would hinder people like us from getting all the way there and thinking we are no longer them.
I had a high-school computer teacher that taught an advanced programming class in HyperCard. By the end of the class we had succeeded in creating several different applications but the one I remember the most is the calculator application. So, I have lots of fond memories of HyperCard but I can't help but feel it's no longer needed. I know it ends up being used mostly for eye-gouging presentations, but I've often felt that PowerPoint (And it's ilk) has replaced HyperCard. While it isn't as simple and as fun as HyperCard, PowerPoint can make use of a scripting language.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.23/23.03/23.03AppleScriptPowerPoint/index.html
You have slides instead of cards, which can have links to other slides just like a HyperCard card could "link" to other cards in the stack. You have the basic interface of dragging components onto the screen and positioning them where you wish. You can play sound files, show images, animate just about any object on the screen. There are events you can have scripts listen too. But that doesn't mean I would want to make a calculator app in PowerPoint. The biggest difference is that PowerPoint was never meant to be an application development environment, even if some people try to do application like things with it. I've seen everything from creating a kiosk app out of PowerPoint to embeding a Flex app in PowerPoint. Perhaps Jobs killed it because he saw it for what it was, and outdated slideshow app. Yes it could do a lot more than that. Did it get used for more than that? Sure, but probably not often.
Lumpy can interpret machine code in his head. He's the Chuck Norris of slashdot.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Surely if we'd gotten all the way there then we would no longer be them?
Though if your point was that someone with a square yard of qualifications and a light year of experience isn't infallible you made it well, good sir.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The old 'SuperCard', which is almost as old as Hypercard itself, is still around, and kicking, and available for MacOS X.
The more-or-less 'official' successor to Hypercard, however, is LiveCode, made by a Scottish company called Runtime Revolution. It is a direct competitor to RealBasic, allowing you to develop your applications as 'card stacks', which you program using an English-like, Hypertalk-based language. It has some serious advantages over the original Hypercard, including the fact that it compiles applications for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even iOS. It has a lively and enthusiastic community of programmers and users, and if the developer's website is correct, it is actively used by large corporations in in-house projects around the world.
Those should not be a child's only computer.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but some parents who aren't willing to blow $1000 on a MacBook might not: "You already have an iPad; why do you need another computer?"
It sounds like RealBasic might be a fit for what you're looking for. Have you tried them? http://www.realbasic.com/
Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?
Any cancelled project that was *truly* useful has several open-source versions of the same idea. So, where is hypercard for linux?
LiveCode