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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."
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.
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.
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.
Actually, I think that more than a few do, but the current programming tools are actually more or less for those who do it for a living.
BillG was right - give the amateurs a decent enough tool to make THEIR lives more interesting. 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, but... the wiser of us then see this as an opportunity to come up with a spec for a "real" application that is much closer to how the people actually doing that work see and do their work...
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
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?
XCode is still free with OS X today, long after Apple absorbed NeXT. Plus, Apple has dumped plenty of resources into XCode and Cocoa every year to make it easier and easier to do simple programming tasks of the sort which is being discussed, things like Core Data and Bindings on top of Interface Builder.
This
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.