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HyperCard On The Archive
- CaliforniaKarl 9y agoHyperTalk 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.
- dddanmar 9y agoI wish I could go back 10 years old playing with HyperCard with understanding I have now!
- jacquesm 9y agoWhat's stopping you?
- leephillips 9y agoI also made a handful of things with Hypercard. A very impressive program. I'd say it was killed by a combination of Steve Jobs' desire to turn Macs into appliances and the web.
- mamp 9y agoIt 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.
- robterrell 9y agoIsn't "no HyperCard for Windows" another likely reason? WindowScript was a popular XCMD that would let you open multiple windows with native controls (which is how many stacks added color support long before HyperCard did).
- seanp2k2 9y agoAh, 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 9y agoI 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.
- robterrell 9y ago> Now I understand how each card was an object And inheritance too! Every card inherits from its background. It was basically OOP.
- scaryspooky 9y agooop it was not. perhaps prototypical.
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoIf you don't think prototype programming is OO, your definition of OO is remarkably restrictive (and in my opinion wrong.) I'd suggest reading up on Self -- or Smalltalk-72 for that matter. My first OO programming language was the 'MOO' language used in the online LambdaMOO text-'VR' worlds.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jandrese 9y agoIt's still around: https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/ They used to have a really perplexing pricing model, but I think you can use it for home now mostly unrestricted.
- rhencke 9y agoHypercard 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.
- kilroy123 9y agoWow, are all of you software engineers? That would be cool to have a family engineers.
- rhencke 9y agoI ended up being the only software engineer, but computers definitely stuck with all of us (both my sisters ended up working in the gaming industry).
- donohoe 9y agoNot to be "me too", but ME TOO! Commodore 64 BASIC got me started, but HyperCard kept me moving.
- jandrese 9y agoI'm in the same boat. Stated out with the C64 but found "drawing" by working out the hex codes to poke into the sprite gen a bit too much for 10 year old me. Then my parents bought a Mac LC with System 7 that came with a full Hypercard dev stack. We also scrounged a copy of ResEdit and were off to the races. I learned the language mostly from opening up existing stacks and inspecting the code, sometimes with a text editor if the stack was protected (like many games were).
- 9y ago
- samgranieri 9y agoI loved hypercard and wish it was still around. I learned how to code in that an in TI-Basic
- pmarreck 9y agoThe 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
- textfiles 9y agoThe state is not saved.
- hypercardonline 9y agoIt's not saved yet, but the Internet Archive is apparently working on this!
- D-Coder 9y agoLiveCode (livecode.com) (ex Runtime Revolution) is a pretty good descendant of HyperCard. Cards, controls, scripts are mostly compatible. I migrated many of my old stacks to LiveCode.
- coldcode 9y agoI 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 9y agoIf you're familiar with the original You Don't Know Jack game - that was all prototyped on HyperCard, originally.
- tedmiston 9y agoHypercard 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 9y ago> ... 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
- zopf 9y agoHyperTalk 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!
- poisonarena 9y agoif you are a real sicko you can actually emulate it on basilisk and keep making stacks..
- oldmancoyote 9y agoI don't know about the sicko slur, but I run it on Basilisk II from time to time if it will be useful.
- hypercardonline 9y agoAlso, every stack in the Internet Archive has a downloadable disk image that can be downloaded and run offline in an emulator, or on an old Mac if you still have one.
- pmarreck 9y agoBill 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 9y agoIt'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 9y agoBecoming an internet-capable OS doesn't require Unix, though
- oldmancoyote 9y agoI definitely remember making a hypercard stack that served an ore deposit data base over the internet. That was about 1995
- pmarreck 9y agodid it use some kind of appletalk networking over TCP/IP though? That's different IMHO. I also don't know if stacks were multiuser ever (could be opened and edited by multiple people)
- oldmancoyote 9y agoI can't remember. Sorry
- arethuza 9y agoTo be fair, in 1992 when I first used a web browser my first thought was "why would anyone want to load a document over the internet"... :-)
- jacquesm 9y agoSo, who will do a hypercard for the web? Or better still: a hypercard based alternative to the web?
- SwellJoe 9y agoGlitch, from Fog Creek, seems to be modeled after Hypercard, somewhat. https://glitch.com/ https://glitch.com/
- 5ilv3r 9y agohypercard via gopher would be a heck of a thing. :p
- deckar01 9y agoWhen I was an intern at Inkling in 2013, the engineer that started Habitat, the eBook editor we were working on, showed us HyperCard. It was amazing how many of the features we were working on had been in HyperCard for 25 years. Now Habitat is limited to enterprise publishers, things have come full circle. https://www.inkling.com/habitat/ https://www.inkling.com/habitat/
- jcburns 9y agoThe long name of me Show all cards Put "hello" into cd fld 1 Ask "What is this?" with default answer "HyperCard" [HyperTalk Poetry.]
- ontouchstart 9y agoI 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.
- linux2647 9y agoI've found dragging with my finger works decently well, or at least on Chrome on Android
- karmelapple 9y agoThis 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 9y agoYes please do! The more stacks the better.
- smegel 9y agoThey 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.
- dustingetz 9y agoMy project is a bit of a spiritual successor to HyperCard: https://github.com/hyperfiddle/hypercrud.browser https://github.com/hyperfiddle/hypercrud.browser
- watersb 9y agoI will dig up some old projects... Does anyone know if XCMDs are supported?
- Kristine1975 9y agoGiven that there's a topic "hypercard_xcmd-xfcn" I'd wager they are. Archive.org is essentially emulating a Mac Plus that runs HyperCard in the browser.
- hypercardonline 9y agoIf 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
- setori88 9y agoMy project http://www.fractalide.com http://www.fractalide.com is looking to build out a new hypercard type environmont
- brentjanderson 9y agoHyperCard 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"
- hsivonen 9y agoI 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.
- sthielen 9y agoHypercard 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!)
- kylestlb 9y agoMy 7th grade 'computers' class was basically a HyperCard course. It was amazing and I made a cool choose-your-own-adventure game.
- jamestnz 9y agoIn 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 9y agoOne 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 9y agoApple indeed did - so any stacks uploaded to this archive will likely need to not use the color XCMD.
- textfiles 9y agoThe Manhole is in the Archive as well.
- coroxout 9y ago
- Kristine1975 9y agoFun fact: The game Myst was created in HyperCard (at least the original Mac version was).
- bsclifton 9y agoHyperCard 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 9y agoWell, 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.
- oso2k 9y agoI love the stuff the Archive keeps coming up with. I'm glad I finally started donating to their cause last year.
- twsted 9y agoI loved HyperCard. As an Amiga user, I remember a good clone named CanDo. It was really interesting.
- vidarh 9y agoI 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 9y agoAny oldies here who can recount why exactly Hypercard was killed? Seems like such a wonderful piece of software.
- doomlaser 9y agoI think it was Apple's poor management and succession of ineffective CEOs in the late 80s and early 90s. They delayed bringing it to Windows, and lacked the vision to pursue adding networking features to it. Eventually, Mosaic came along and the rest is history.
- jandrese 9y agoThe 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.
- eligundry 9y agoJustin 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
- chairmanmow 9y agoHypercard 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
- jandrese 9y agoHoly 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 9y agoYou've noticed where I've been getting many of the stacks from, then! (The old AOL HyperCard pages).
- jandrese 9y agoSadly 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 9y agoAOL 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 9y agoNext 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.