
30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web (2012) - mpweiher
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/25-years-of-hypercard-the-missing-link-to-the-web/
======
howard941
That was cool to learn that Myst was a Hypercard deck frontended with
beautiful graphics and music. My later to become wife loved the game.

I bought a non-Apple hypercardish environment that ran on Windows 3.1 . It was
my 2d year of law school and one of my professors was a huge tech advocate and
for 2 credits she let me develop an interactive Will generator to produce
Forida-compliant wills with all the bells and whistles the new T&E statutes
allowed at the time such as an accompanying document that didn't need all of
the execution formalities to dispose of certain kinds of tangible personal
property, so long as the document was referenced in a properly-executed Will.

I hope educational institutions are still encouraging young people today to
leverage their nerdishness into non-nerdy careers if that's what they want. As
for me I did my 15 years practicing law and I'm glad to be back letting my
geek flag fly although for heaven's sake people, enough with the ageism. Yall
be my age soon enough if you're fortunate.

~~~
Crinus
> I bought a non-Apple hypercardish environment that ran on Windows 3.1 .

Out of curiosity, was that Asymetrix ToolBook? The original was neat and very
HyperCard-ish, although for some reason they pushed later versions as an
e-learning application even though there wasn't anything specific about it
(e.g. some people used it to make multimedia CDs). And last time i checked it,
even decades later, it has bugs that existed ever since the first version.

~~~
arethuza
Another HyperCard-like system was HyperNeWS - which was built on Sun's NeWS
windowing system and was incredible because of the beautiful PostScript based
graphics of NeWS.

------
derefr
I feel like we got a “true successor to HyperCard” 20 years ago, in the form
of Lotus Notes. It was essentially “HyperCard decks shareable via email, with
each deck backed by its own automatically-allocated Firebase-like document DB
co-hosted on the author’s email server.”

(And, further, each email client had its own client cert, which it used for 1.
code-signing decks it had authored, and 2. signing API requests to the DB
server when the deck makes them. So every deck, and every request, would
always have a “verified” email address associated with it.)

Essentially, it was the set of functionality provided by Google Sheets +
Google Forms (and a bit more), without any web stuff being involved.

Obviously, it became a cesspit of badly-made, overly-interlinked Intranet
apps, but this was more to do with the target market of non-IT enterprises—it
was no different than what such organizations did with Excel.

I’d really love to see what a system very much similar to Lotus Notes, given a
fresh coat of paint, and targeted _to consumers_ , would be used for today. An
app anyone could open up and make a little DB-backed interactive experience,
then either push it to an in-app inbox of their friends [where it could then
be re-shared further, virally] or onto a cloud service others could browse
within the app.

~~~
CharlesW
> _I feel like we got a “true successor to HyperCard” 20 years ago, in the
> form of Lotus Notes._

Setting aside that Lotus Notes preceded HyperCard, I'm still missing the
connection. Notes seemed to be presented as an enterprise-y workflow tool,
while HyperCard was more of a "bicycle for the mind" toy (which I mean in the
best-possible sense).

~~~
derefr
Disregarding the UX, Lotus Notes is just a viewer for HyperCard-stack
equivalent app-documents. (There’s no reason they couldn’t have _been_
HyperCard stacks, other than, as you said, the earliest versions of Notes
coming first.) Lotus Notes _with a different UX_ would be more obviously just
“HyperCard++.”

------
coob
If anyone wants to see what HyperCard was like to use or fancies a nostalgia
trip, ViperCard is a web recreation:
[https://www.vipercard.net](https://www.vipercard.net)

------
cubano
Hypercard...just that name brings back a flood of almost forgotten memories
that harken back to the 1990-1991. At that time, unless your parents were rich
or you sold drugs or something, you couldn't afford to pay the $5/hr that The
Source or Compuserve charged, so of course, you called your local BBSs.

I was deeply involved with BBS software development at the time, and after 2
years of futzing with ANSI graphics, the whole BBS community was looking for a
new terminal paradigm, something that would (finally!) allows us to display
pictures (porn?), change fonts, and even stream video (oh, the raw _ambition_
).

Back then, your modem dialer was also your software terminal (yeah, makes
perfect sense right?). Soft terminals emulated popular-but-limited UNIX-based
hard terminals like VT52 or VT100 etc. Remember, software used to be EXPENSIVE
because, of course, memory was expensive!

Oh yeah, Hypercard...so I remember discussing the problem with my partner, Tim
Stark, and the folks at Galacticomm, the BBS company we worked with. Someone
mentioned Hypercard as an almost ideal paradigm for building a frontend that
allowed for hot-linking of text, graphics, and sound.

We actually built basic hypercard functionality into our flagship product,
Magisearch, that I still contend was one of the very first online search
engines ever created for general purpose online searching. We quickly realized
that since we already had the indexes built for all the documents, or pages,
we could quickly scan the returned text and highlight any already indexed
words and "link" them.

Then one day, a true programming genius (I unfortunately cannot remember his
name this morning, and thats a shame because he deserves full credit for his
efforts) dropped a floppy on my desk and said "run it"...and up came a hybrid
dialer/BROWSER!

This guy had done it!! I can't remember what he called the product, but I'll
never forget the date...January 19th, 1993...my mom's birthday. Our BBSes were
finally going to have rich text capabilities...hyperstacks!

And then came January 23rd and I product I DO remember the name of, Mosaic,
dropped, signalling the end for BBS's and my software business.

------
Zigurd
Back in the day, I made a hypercard deck, including a soundtrack made from a
highly processed flute riff, as a "brochure" for my consultancy. I handed it
out on 3.5 inch disks in place of business cards. For someone like me who was
not a multimedia production expert, it was miles beyond anything else one
could do using tools on a personal computer. It still compares favorably to
most site-builders in terms of a balance between simplicity and
programmability.

------
intothemild
I did my 4th grade assignment on the human heart in a hypercard stack instead
of the giant piece of cardboard with pictures and text..

Had it animate, and had sounds that I recorded.. everything.

This was 1991-1992...

I got a fail.. the Teacher wanted me to "print it out and put it on
cardboard".

I eventually got a good mark.. but that's another story

~~~
kgwxd
"but that's another story"

I'm guessing you hacked the school computer, changed your grade and lowered
the number days absent on a day you faked sick and went on kooky adventures
with your friends.

------
qetuo13579
HyperCard and Logo on Mac introduced me to computer programming when I was 8
years old.

------
brandall10
My company produces what is a spiritual successor to hypercard on the web +
mobile.

[https://tiled.co/](https://tiled.co/)

------
floor_
My first programming class in highschool was with hypercard. I'm not sure we
actually learned anything outside of playing might and magic.

Saw an indie dev working on a horror game using the hypercard aesthetic over
at: [http://www.wohgame.com/](http://www.wohgame.com/) It scratches that
nostalgic itch.

------
murrayb
I have never been a hypercard user but everything I have seen/read about it
suggests that it would be a great replacement for my Evernote use case
(accessible anywhere personal database of stuff). I have looked at some re-
implementations but lack of Linux and/or mobile device (Android) support have
ruled out the ones I have seen.

~~~
narag
I'm making something that seems to fit in that description. Hopefully I will
release it... some day (one man shop).

------
coldcode
Back then I used Hypercard to design UIs, made it really easy to prototype
stuff so that product people could understand. I think Hypercard is Bill
Atkinson's biggest gift to humanity (even more so than Quickdraw).

------
regularfry
I often wonder how much work it would be to turn emacs into a hypercard
system.

~~~
elviejo
shuouldn't it be the other way around? An hypercard system implemented as an
Emacs mode.

------
dropit_sphere
I will always upvote anything Hypercard.

