
HyperCard On The Archive - dogecoinbase
http://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive-celebrating-30-years-of-hypercard/
======
rhencke
Hypercard is largely responsible for my love of programming. As a kid, I would
work with my sisters on making games in it. It was a beautiful combination of
half painting program, half drag'n'drop GUI creation that we used to make
adventure games. Each card represented a room, and my sisters would draw on it
using the paint tools, and I would follow up after and add invisible buttons
over doors and the like to allow for 'moving' through rooms. We'd then use the
built-in MacInTalk speech stuff to make characters say things, too. Granted,
they were silly little games without much point to them, but... as a kid, man.
It was like magic, learning you could have computers do this.

I was sad when Hypercard fell out of general distribution with the Mac, but
I'm happy to see it here.

~~~
nihonde
When I was 14 years old, I demoed my HyperCard-based game for none other than
Bill Gates. My recollection is that he seemed genuinely interested in how I
built it, and he knew more than I expected about Macs and HyperCard.

~~~
flomo
Visual Basic always struck me as the grown-up version of Hypercard.

~~~
noblethrasher
Microsoft’s HTA[1] tech is probably their closet thing to HyperCard.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Now we are using Electron, isn't it funny how these things keep coming around
every decade or two.

~~~
seanp2k2
The need for low barrier to entry programming tools will always be there. Now
we have stuff like
[https://developers.google.com/appmaker/](https://developers.google.com/appmaker/)
but it's more Crystal Reports than VB5/6\. Still, there are alternatives.

~~~
ZenoArrow
The programming tool with the lowest barrier to entry (that's still actively
developed) is probably Scratch:

[https://scratch.mit.edu/](https://scratch.mit.edu/)

There are a few game maker tools with low barriers to entry too.

------
tedmiston
Hypercard in a lot of ways is what the Web could have been.

If never became as easy to create high quality freeform sites and apps as it
was multimedia Hypercard decks and games. Hypercard changed my life in
childhood, even without learning about its scripting features.

HyperStudio was pretty good too. We used that in school quite a bit.

~~~
zackbrown
> ... what the Web could have been... If never became as easy to create high
> quality freeform sites and apps...

You're writing as if it's too late. It's not!

What the Web has going for it today are _ubiquity,_ _multimedia capabilities,_
and the ability to deploy applications with _no end-user installation step._
There has never been a platform as advanced on these three axes as the Web
today. This is a really big deal.

As you highlighted, the missing piece is the creation environment. If only
someone could create an accessible, freeform, code-backed interaction design
tool for the modern web, learning from forebears like Hypercard and Flash, and
respecting/leveraging modern creatives' & engineers' tools of the trade.

Sounds crazy. But that hasn't stopped us from chasing this dream at Haiku:
[https://haiku.ai](https://haiku.ai)

~~~
seanp2k2
What is AI about Haiku? Is .ai just the new .io ? It just looks like a web
component designer.

~~~
ptx
Maybe it's 愛, to signify things "made with love"?

~~~
zackbrown
this is now our official answer. 谢谢, 朋友

------
jamestnz
In addition to echoing all the dev-related stories in this thread, I have very
fond memories from my childhood of playing a 1988 HyperCard-based game called
The Manhole (on our SE/30, and later Power Mac 8100).

It was an immersive and extensive visual world, where the main point was just
to explore. It was implemented as a series of linked HyperCard stacks, each
sized to fit on a floppy disk. You'd come to remember the exact points of the
game that would throw up a modal dialog prompting the insertion of the next
required disk.

And, it happens to have been made by the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who
later went on to create Myst (which itself is very reminiscent of The
Manhole).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOTq1EpV5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOTq1EpV5o)

Unrelatedly, I wonder if anyone in this thread remembers SuperCard, a third-
party knock-off of HyperCard that offered such amazing innovations as color
graphics. (I also seem to recall some kind of hack where you could use ResEdit
to get colour images into HyperCard stacks even though it wasn't officially
supported, but the details are fuzzy).

~~~
bsclifton
One of my best friends made a toolkit available on AOL's HyperCard section
called "Color Paint Tools" which let you put color into your stacks (making
that hack you mentioned easier). If I remember correctly, HyperCard could show
color images via an XCMD but they'd have to be a PICT resource (so it's not a
real solution). I think Apple eventually released an update (HyperCard 2.2?)
which included an official toolkit for doing this

~~~
karmelapple
Apple indeed did - so any stacks uploaded to this archive will likely need to
not use the color XCMD.

------
pmarreck
Bill Atkinson apparently kicks himself for not being the first to realize that
simply making the stacks work over a network could potentially have been the
first "web browser" (or at least, internet hypertext engine)

HyperCard was totally awesome at the time.

~~~
mamp
It's easy to forget that at that time Apple was pushing AppletTalk and the TCP
stack was a separate installer, so if it was over the network the network
would have been the local AppleTalk network, not a global server.

The OS wasn't Unix based back then.

~~~
pmarreck
Becoming an internet-capable OS doesn't require Unix, though

------
CaliforniaKarl
HyperTalk was the first programming language I ever learned. Now I understand
how each card was an object that I was manipulating.

It was so good! It's too bad it never became more popular and disappeared.

~~~
mamp
It was also a great introduction to event based programming e.g. attaching
HyperTalk scripts to 'on mouseUp'.

As an avid HyperCard user one of the problems was you couldn't extend it with
new UI components. I did write an XCMD (C code to extend HyperCard) but there
was no way to visualise new stuff, I understand it was because of the highly
optimised code by Bill Atkinson. The extensibility is probably why Visual
Basic took off.

~~~
seanp2k2
Ah, that was Flash 5 for me. I remember convincing my dad to buy me the boxed
copy, which was something like $199 back then (2000), which was quite a bit of
money. I remember how ActionScript was a Big Deal and how I'd hang out on
Newgrounds, DeviantArt, CGTalk, etc with some geeky kids from school who were
also into design (though we didn't call it that at the time, it was just
general middle school dorkery and computer stuff). JavaScript was a dark art
back then, ActiveX was cool, and free hosting accounts like FortuneCity and
Homestead were what we had to work with. The lame kids used Tripod and
GeoCities, but we were cool with our .TK domain names. ActiveWorlds was the
future, DJing was our future profession, and Quake 3 over hacked Netzero
without the toolbar was the way we took our deathmatch. The MS IntelliMouse
Optical was what you used if you were REALLY cool, along with a Trinitron
monitor and Altec Lansing POWERED speakers WITH A SUBWOOFER. We eventually got
CABLE MODEM and that blew our minds again. Suddenly we could FTP FreeBSD
images down without waiting overnight.

Ah, the good old days.

~~~
arghimonmobile2
I remember saving up to buy a second-hand 21" Trinitron monitor back in...
2002? Damn, that was the shit! I found that so cool! I still sometimes wonder
if i should find a Trinitron somewhere, just for nostalgia's sake.

------
dustingetz
My project is a bit of a spiritual successor to HyperCard:
[https://github.com/hyperfiddle/hypercrud.browser](https://github.com/hyperfiddle/hypercrud.browser)

------
sthielen
Hypercard was before my time; I heard about it recently when someone compared
it to what we're building with Metaverse [0].

When you so dramatically reduce the friction required to create that anyone,
especially non-technical folks, can do it, all kinds of amazing things happen.
I watched an 11 year old build the "Not Hot Dog" app from Silicon Valley,
using Google's Vision API, in ten minutes (from never having seen the
Metaverse Studio to having her app deployed on device, cross-platform, and
sending it to her friends; this is how creation SHOULD be for 99% of people!).

[0] - [http://gometa.io](http://gometa.io) (also check out how easy it is to
create apps that integrate with IoT devices:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPrBLPG3Smk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPrBLPG3Smk)
\-- Hypercard for the modern age!)

------
zopf
HyperTalk was my first programming language!

I helped a friend build a choose-your-own-adventure murder mystery game called
Blood Hotel, and found myself obsessed with the feeling of inventive power
that programming enabled.

I ended up building an animated space invaders game, and even tried my hand at
writing a "virus" in HyperTalk that would infect other stacks with its code.

Ah, the good old days. Lovely to see this at the top of HN!

------
brentjanderson
HyperCard was my first foray into programming at the Christa McAuliffe Space
Education Center - Apparently Starfleet runs on HyperCard, [here's a video][1]
showing the program in action. Most of the software in the video is built in
HyperCard.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG2lSb1xrNM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG2lSb1xrNM)
"Four Hours: A Space Trip"

------
kylestlb
My 7th grade 'computers' class was basically a HyperCard course. It was
amazing and I made a cool choose-your-own-adventure game.

------
ontouchstart
I can even play it on iPhone:

[https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/895833140467572736](https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/895833140467572736)

Moving cursor with touch is kind of challenging though.

~~~
karmelapple
This is fantastic! Moving around the cursor on my iPhone seems pretty good
after the initial learning curve of "dragging moves the cursor from where it
currently is, not to where my finger is."

And it's amusing to see all these stacks made by young people - like myself
back then! I'll need to dig up my old stacks.

~~~
hypercardonline
Yes please do! The more stacks the better.

------
bsclifton
HyperCard was amazing. My first online experience was with AOL in 1993 and
they had a HyperCard section where you could upload/download your stacks. I
racked up huge bills hanging out in that area (pay by the minute)

~~~
hypercardonline
Well, now you can do the same in the Internet Archive... all of the ones that
were saved from the AOL HyperCard section before it closed are online.

------
chairmanmow
Hypercard was the best - I messed with it nearly constantly from when I was
13-15. Remember being stuck in the computer lab for study halls and whipping
up animations that would mock teachers at the school.

The hardest thing I made at that time was a wack-a-mole style game where the
cards flipped randomly with a button/graphic to wack the thing. I couldn't
figure out how to make it click a button while it was in the loop, but
eventually I figured out how to break it to click the button. I still remember
the code : 'if the click then click the click lock'

good times

------
coldcode
I loved Hypercard for prototyping UI back then. UI designers didn't really
exist and programmers like me typically designed stuff, don't laugh, having
artists involved was a web era thing for the most part. Being able to
prototype and animate quickly was incredibly useful for explaining an idea to
a product manager, or showing another programmer what you had in mind. Today
there are great tools but they are clearly meant for a different audience.

~~~
Angostura
If you're familiar with the original You Don't Know Jack game - that was all
prototyped on HyperCard, originally.

------
setori88
My project [http://www.fractalide.com](http://www.fractalide.com) is looking
to build out a new hypercard type environmont

------
oso2k
I love the stuff the Archive keeps coming up with. I'm glad I finally started
donating to their cause last year.

------
hsivonen
I did my first programming in HyperTalk, which I learned from the HyperCard
2.0 manual.

Back then, software came with well-written paper manuals, and the translation
quality (into Finnish in my case) was very good, too. I feel like Apple
manuals peaked with HyperCard 2.0.

------
jandrese
Holy shit, one of the old stacks I wrote in high school and uploaded to AOL
shows up on the first page of that list! Right near all of the eyebrow raising
"What exactly are the sex laws in my state, asking for a friend..." type
stacks.

~~~
hypercardonline
You've noticed where I've been getting many of the stacks from, then! (The old
AOL HyperCard pages).

~~~
jandrese
Sadly you didn't get at least one other stack I uploaded. Or maybe AOL deleted
it for some reason. I have not had that account for over 20 years now.

~~~
hypercardonline
AOL did delete everything quite unexpectedly... if you ever find that stack on
a floppy or elsewhere, email me (hypercardonline@gmail.com) and I'd be happy
to assist getting it running online.

~~~
jandrese
Next time I visit my parents I'll have to see if I can get their old Mac LC
chugging again. Apple built them like tanks back then, I wouldn't be surprised
if it still works. The Hard Drive is the biggest question mark.

------
jacquesm
So, who will do a hypercard for the web? Or better still: a hypercard based
alternative to the web?

~~~
SwellJoe
Glitch, from Fog Creek, seems to be modeled after Hypercard, somewhat.
[https://glitch.com/](https://glitch.com/)

------
eligundry
Justin Falcone has a fantastic talk about the importance of HyperCard. He did
all the slides in HyperCard and he gets super into it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i60_REoeIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i60_REoeIY)

------
samgranieri
I loved hypercard and wish it was still around. I learned how to code in that
an in TI-Basic

~~~
pmarreck
The OP's link actually lets you fire up the stacks and edit them, although I
don't think the state is saved when you close

~~~
hypercardonline
It's not saved yet, but the Internet Archive is apparently working on this!

------
Kristine1975
Fun fact: The game Myst was created in HyperCard (at least the original Mac
version was).

------
twsted
I loved HyperCard.

As an Amiga user, I remember a good clone named CanDo. It was really
interesting.

~~~
vidarh
I keep forgetting CanDo - it gets put in the shadow of Amiga Vision. But I
found this interesting snipped about CanDo [1] - made me curious about looking
into the language and VM more.

[1]
[http://www.pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=37794&type=software](http://www.pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=37794&type=software)

------
spiderjerusalem
Any oldies here who can recount why exactly Hypercard was killed? Seems like
such a wonderful piece of software.

~~~
jandrese
The first bullet was when Apple decided to monetize it and switched all new
Macs to only get Hypercard Player instead of the full development stack.

They also didn't do a Windows port until it was way too late.

Apple also seemed to mostly stop development on it shortly after the System 7
release.

------
watersb
I will dig up some old projects...

Does anyone know if XCMDs are supported?

~~~
hypercardonline
If the XCMD comes with a sample stack, that stack will be uploaded. If it's
just an XCMD it may be trickier. If you find any stack that isn't working
because of a missing XCMD (or any other reason) then let me know -
hypercardonline@gmail.com

------
poisonarena
if you are a real sicko you can actually emulate it on basilisk and keep
making stacks..

~~~
oldmancoyote
I don't know about the sicko slur, but I run it on Basilisk II from time to
time if it will be useful.

------
smegel
They are some really nice web based emulators. It's almost certainly 100%
nostalgia but there is a certain charm to these early Mac games...simple but
somehow deeply detailed monochrome graphics...easy to use point and click
interface...it's great to see them spring back to life in a web browser.

