I never got to play around with Hypercard.

Was there ever a migration path for Hypercard? Or are all those old scripts dead now?

“Was there ever a migration path for Hypercard? Or are all those old scripts dead now?”

The Web. Seriously.

The Web displaced HyperCard, so SuperCard was created to allow people to transition to the web. SuperCard essentially allowed you to run HyperCard apps within a web browser.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

HyperCard was my second introduction to application development after trying my hand at (Logo Turtle. I can remember sitting in tech ed in 8th grade building quiz applications and “slide shows” in Hypercard. I would always get 80% done and it would crash, forcing me to start all over again.

Reminds me of school…

I made a few hundred dollars in the 80’s selling a genealogy program written in hypercard at $30 a pop. It was a lot easier to use than most of the programs that were on the market at the time, but alas, pretty limited in reporting.

There were some great features in Hypercard, but yes, the web pretty much replaces most of it, except for the storage aspects.

Kind of looks like a low-res version of an iOS home screen.

My computer lab in middle school had a clone called HyperStudio. It was amazing to be able to create “programs” using it.

One day I picked up a Computer Gaming World CD and found some stuff that looked like HyperStudio products, but were driven by some sort of markup language. I figured out that I could edit this markup language driving it and create my own list of links and such. When I showed my teacher (after days of fiddling) he told me “guess what, that’s HTML. You can use that to build web pages!”.

15 years on, and fiddling with what essentially are HyperStudio decks are my profession. I just wish I was still playing Bolo.

Ahh, the good old days. I never got into Hypercard, but it was still around when I started playing with FileMaker Pro on my shiny 7100/80.

Wait… you guys don’t still use it??? covers screen Doh!

Hypercard introduced me to interactive design on a computer, which proved highly transferrable to the web. By fiddling around in Hypercard I figured out design principles by trial and error that I still apply today.

Moreover, while the value of those hours spent using Hypercard during my early teens are inconsequential as far as what I actually produced, I think Hypercard helped wire my brain to use a computer as an integral part of my creative process.

/me remembering hours spent in the computer lab making Myst-style dungeon crawlers in Hyperstudio.

This looks just like my iPhone home screen. Only, you know, with less color.

The great thing about HyperCard was that immediacy of interaction, brilliant for prototyping. Pretty capable too given that its external function interface gave access to the whole of MacOS. Screen shot of a toy multi-user commitment based email tool I built as a college project…sigh.

Too soon.

Oh wow, that’s a blast from the past! I remember that being in some classroom at some summer school I was in.

Kind of looks like a low-res version of an iOS home screen.

That was exactly my thought!

Yeah, that’s HyperCard all right. So what?

Are you going to post another photo tomorrow with another single word description?

VisiCalc.

Brilliant post. Look at the comments. “What is old is new again” or “I don’t get it” or “I remember that! It has something to with me!”.

Blog posts are an art, insofar as, what king of divergent reaction patterns can you generate from the smallest amount of post assets?

springboard. exactly.

The Web. Seriously.

Not just running your Cards in a Web browser, but also building websites instead of Cards. WorldWideWeb was just the NeXT version of HyperCard. The Web went on to be quite a bit more popular and HyperCard was obsolete.

iOS

It looks like classic Mac OS. Other than the frame, that could be any classic Mac OS folder.

I learned to program by hacking around in Hypercard’s scripting language on a Mac SE (VINTAGE!) I also made a few apps that I used in high school for doing audio cues in theatre and other miscelaneous crap.

The most extensive HyperCard program was one my Dad used for work (US Coast Guard) called “CAMEO” (Computer Aided Management of Emergency Operations) – it’s now a standalone app and still downloadable for free, but not HyperCard based anymore.

Back end of Highrise? ;-)

Oh wow! I remember Hypercard. I remember when I started playing around on Netscape I thought, “wow, this is a lot like Hypercard.”

Now here’s a question – do any of you remember the choose your own adventure games that were developed in the World Builder program?

I had one that was classic Knights and princesses, but the others was a twister Mr. Rogers adventure.

Those were the days…

There are some great stories about the old days of “multimedia in black and white” with Hypercard over at smackerel.net

Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. Now there was a killer app, in little ol’ hypercard.

Inigo. Myst. Sweet memories.

Noah, remember?

HyperCard => HTML => HacketyHack

Man, does that bring back memories. My first lines of code of any kind were in HyperCard on a PowerBook 140…

... and now I’m feeling all nostalgic. Damn you, Jason.

I loved Hypercard. I did a lot of programming on it and built all kinds of little apps, including some external functions (I forget what they were called) written in C and then interfaced in Hypercard. We also used it in my computer games company in the early nineties as a tool for building ‘interactive, branching storylines’ for DVD game projects. But interactive stories on DVD went the way of Hypercard long ago. I don’t think people will miss the games (remember 7th Guest, arghh!) but Hypercard was revolutionary in a lot of ways. It prefigured the web but it also put powerful programming capabilities in the hands of non-programmers. Imagine what Basecamp would be like if you let customers drag the user interface elements around and edit the code. That’s what it was like.

To be honest, I don’t understand how you can say that the web is the successor to HyperCard. HyperCard had two features that made it very different from the web:

+ It was really easy to store data + It was really easy to create a useful program

I have to admit that I miss HyperCard at least once a month, there are those small “programs” that is needed but it’s too cumbersome to build using any modern tool I’ve tried.

I wrote a stack for the Post-Dispatch that “drew” the daily stock chart (actually wrote out an adobe illustrator file) for a few years.

I view HyperCard as one of Apple’s great missed opportunities.

HyperCard was OO GUI driven programming done right.

MS tried to copy it with Visual BASIC, but nearly every successor has missed the point.

With no seperate IDE or ‘edit mode’, Hypercard could script itself to build whole new stacks on-the-fly, something that has never been repeated.

Ahead of its time (still), easy to learn, putting app design at the correct place in the programming cycle. Apple were stupid to kill it, but then Apple at that time was stupid, too stupid to even sell it on to a dev house.

Ha! In middle school we used to create animation stacks, some would get into the thousands of pages and then crash the machines. FUN!

Adorable. It makes me want to click on every one of those icons to see what’s inside.

Sorry about this late posting, we’ve been without power for a week.

I was at Boston Macworld when Atkinson demoed HyperCard for the first time and it blew my mind. I got an early version of it circulating at the show and started making stacks immediately.

I’m not a developer but the HyperCard metaphor just seemed to click with my brain so I made a lot of stacks and taught thousands (1000s) of people how to use it over many years. When Apple lost its way and gave it to Claris who killed it (then themselves) it was extremely depressing, although the web (as others have said above) was about to kill it anyway as it did the General Magic communicator (DOA).

One of the stacks I made got me a bit of fame and fortune, and it was a “pet rock” of stacks for sure.

http://www.richardsnotes.org/archives/2005/03/24/the-bee/

Over the years I was involved with HyperCard I got to know Bill Atkinson and I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Atkinson’s then young daughter enjoyed playing with a stack my then girlfriend and I had made: Ziggy Gets Out. It made my day that our kid’s story stack was on a machine in Atkinson’s house.

Another lost gem from around the same time is the paint program KidPix, made by my friend Craig Hickman. Kids would draw things just to blow them up with the dynamite eraser. Similar in spirit to HyperCard.

The old days… Sigh.

Man that brings back some memories. I did tech support for Macintosh back in the 90s.