
HyperCard Stack: Douglas Adams' Megapode Nest Volume Calculator (1991) - dcminter
https://archive.org/details/DouglasAdamsMegapode
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pmarreck
This is right up my alley and I never heard of it till now!

HyperCard was a wonderful creative tool at the time. (I’m pretty sure Bill
Atkinson has stated on more than one occasion something along the lines of “If
only I added hyperlinks!”)

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rgovostes
HyperCard had hyperlinks, in the sense that a card can link to another card,
and even to another stack. It was networking that was omitted, really.

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pmarreck
You could just link to a stack on a network share, but yeah.

trivia: Macintosh aliases, starting with System 7 I believe, were able to link
to network shares and automount them if they weren't yet mounted

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jrace
From: Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine - Last Chance to See

Excellent book, sad funny and eyeopening.

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TomMasz
I had to convert the .img file to a .dmg using hdiutil on OS X to get to the
stack. Diskcopy under OS 9 w/Sheepshaver complained of -39 unexpected end of
file otherwise.

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tomweingarten
This is amazing, thank you! In the 90s I wrote way too much HyperCard and read
way too much Douglas Adams, so this is bringing back great memories.

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bobthedino
Am not sure that doing too much of either of those two things is possible...!

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HocusLocus
ALMOST DID THAT...

Soon after HyperCard was introduced I was working a 'sweet' IT position at The
Phone Company, IBM AS/400 stuff. It was burning me out though, I liked the
machines but not the corporate culture. The thought that I was destined to
have my boss's boss's job some day filled me with a sense of dread, not
triumph.

Before that I'd been into PCs since the late 70s 8086|Z80|S-100|CP/M|MS-DOS
and had worked for a time doing board/memory level repair of Macs. So I
contacted a good friend of mine who was also comp sci professor and colleague
and told him "I'm dying here! What's the next best thing? What are you working
on?" He told me I was ape-shit crazy and should get over it. The job I had was
one that he groomed his students for and most had to leave town to get them,
here I had one and was asking him for advice??

But he was really excited about Apple IIs and Macs with HyperCard and the way
it could revolutionize High School and University learning. He had the idea
that some day with HyperCard apps and networks you could have the brightest HS
students begin to choose a curriculum for themselves sail off at their own
pace, seamlessly getting through High School and into University courses by,
say, 10th grade even?

He used to say "Now we go to school because that's where the teachers are. But
tomorrow we'll go there because that's where the computers are." Notice the
lack of the idea that computers could become affordable. Give us a break! He
thought school was a necessary environment but he envisioned teachers more as
advisors than broadcasters dispensing the same curriculum to all students. He
also wanted to design his own HyperCard concepts from scratch with better
networking. He was convinced that Apple was working to port everything to
other PCs. He clearly had something like a modern web browser in mind but we
didn't know that then!

If I was foolish enough to leave my IT job I was welcome to join his team, he
had some students and other consultants working for him. But in the end I did
something else entirely, left the Phone Company rejoining the PC world where
offices were being networked to share documents and I stayed with the command
line, which led into commercial Internet providers and unix servers.

My poor friend called me a couple years later to say that his investment into
HyperCard, the learning courses he'd developed, and time spent had mostly been
wasted because of Apple's platform lock-in and Claris predatory licensing and
pricing.

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utexaspunk
HyperCard was a great gateway to programming for me as a kid. I've seen
Vipercard.net's faithful reproduction, which is pretty cool. What's the
closest thing to HyperCard that is modern?

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kalleboo
It looks like SuperCard is still around, can't speak to how modern it is
[https://supercard.us](https://supercard.us)

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tonyedgecombe
I’d love to find something like that with a modern language.

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iamgopal
Spreadsheets stole all programming fun.

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roguecoder
I manage to have plenty of fun in spreadsheets, but I do miss doing pixel-
drawing-based animation.

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macawfish
I'm just impressed that Mac OS 7 runs on my telephone.

Does this mean that I can make a progressive web app with HyperCard? ; )

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itomato
As rendered by vMac transpiled with emscripten.

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mambodog
It's actually the PCE emulator, not vMac:
[https://github.com/jsdf/pce](https://github.com/jsdf/pce)

