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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
I posted elsewhere in this thread: Scratch isn't Hypercard, but it is very (young) student friendly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
There's a lot of interesting things in PowerPoint that most people never see - like buttons, which work very much like the buttons in HyperCard.
Most people never use more than 5% of PowerPoint's features - and even the "power users" seldom use more than 25%.
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.
But they didn't reject BayCard.
But to the point: HC died when it was sent over to Claris, and then sent back. When products get seconded like this it's almost always a kiss of death. Very few survive the process even once. Twice?
Kevin tried to bring HC back to life pretty much single-handed, but it was not to be. When he left the jig was up, although I argue that was true long before. Its constant re-purposing did not bode well, and by the time I saw it in 1996 it was only nostalgia that I felt.
Likely on the basis that you aren't supposed to have programming languages in the iOS App store (stupid of Apple, but it's their sandbox).
Apple hasn't stopped anyone from making HyperCard for OS X and if there was enough of a demand, I should think it would have shown up long ago. Remember, OS X comes with Applescript which, although a bit harder to use, covers much of the functionality of HyperCard.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
The premise of the article, that Apple killed HC because they didn't want users to create content, only consume it, is absurd. 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.
The reason that HyperCard died is that while everyone loved it, nobody could make a business case for it. That is, while people will pay for word processors, spreadsheets, databases, etc., nobody was willing to pay for HyperCard. So when HC was moved out of Apple (where it was a free part of the OS, subsidized by hardware sales) to Claris (where it had to generate revenue) it became doomed. Because while HC was a great tool for non-technical users to build apps, it couldn't compete as a commercial tool for building apps, because professionals were better off using Director, etc., which were much harder to use but which gave them more control.
The later thing that kept it from making a comeback (when Claris basically got rolled back into Apple) is that 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, and it didn't make sense to try to fight that battle. So instead Apple focused in ObjC/IB for native apps, and scripting, doing things like allowing you to make apps using IB and AppleScript, which in theory is similar to HyperCard (though in reality nowhere near as non-engineer friendly).
It's a shame, since there's no way to build web apps that's accessible to non-technical users the way HyperCard was. The closest tool now is Excel, which is still where the vast majority of non-technical "app building" takes place. And Excel is a much less creative tool than HC.
Personally, I would love to have seen Apple open source HyperCard, and keep bundling it on every Mac, because that would have allowed the creativity to continue without the cost structure. And I'd love to see a HC runtime on every iPad.
It's too late for that, sadly.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!