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."

Comments

Supercard was available after Hypercard cancelled

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Apple is the 1970s computer maker

[mr100percent]

So, you believe Apple is a bunch of fascists, and for that reason they killed one of their programming languages? Baloney. Steve Jobs was the one on stage at NeXT showing how even a child could write GUI apps. He made XCode free and bundled it with every boxed copy of OS X back in 2001 when Microsoft required a paid dev account.

Occam's Razor

[ink]

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.