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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
by nihonde 9y ago
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.
- saganus 9y agoThat sounds like a very interesting story! Care to share (if possible) how you ended up showing your game to Bill Gates when you were 14? Hiw old was he at that time?
- nihonde 9y agoI was (maybe) a freshman at Lakeside High School at that time, which is his Alma Mater. I believe the occasion was the opening of the Gates-Allen Math and Science Building. The year would have been 1987 or so.
- hypercardonline 9y agoWhat was the stack you demoed? You still have it lying around?
- nihonde 9y agoIt was a space travel game not unlike a very rudimentary (and 1-bit) version of Faster Than Light. It could be on a floppy somewhere. I still have the original 128k Mac that I built it on, but it's in storage. Edit: Fun thing that I just remembered—the game had a picture of your space ship that showed damage to various areas during battles. The image was scanned on an ImageWriter (Thunderscan!) from a magazine photo of a Delorean, and then I used MacPaint (Fatbits!) to erase the wheels and make the undercarriage look like a space ship. Pretty awesome for those early days, if I do say so myself.
- hypercardonline 9y agoIf you ever get the stack of that disk, please do upload it. I'd love to see it!
- saganus 9y agoAwesome! Thanks for sharing. PS. Sorry for the duplicated post. I was on my phone and for some reason I thought the first post wasn't sent correctly.
- saganus 9y agoThat sounds like a very interesting story! Care to share how did you end up showing your game to Bill Gates? How old was he at the time?
- flomo 9y agoVisual Basic always struck me as the grown-up version of Hypercard.
- noblethrasher 9y agoMicrosoft’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 9y agoNow we are using Electron, isn't it funny how these things keep coming around every decade or two.
- seanp2k2 9y agoThe 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 9y agoThe 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.
- vidarh 9y agoI was once hired to update a bunch of Word Basic (pre-Visual BASIC) code that generated HTA files from a bunch of Word documents that was used to maintain the ISO 9001 quality handbook for a major company. It was three weeks of torture, but it worked surprisingly well (and I say that as someone who at the time, in '96 or '97, was a devout Microsoft hater and was not inclined to look for good sides to it). I didn't know Word BASIC or how HTA's worked at all before I got the job - had never touched it at all, and I've never needed it since, but it was simple enough that I did the planned work the first week, and spent the remaining two dragging my feet because I couldn't afford to risk telling the customer they'd severely over-estimated the effort in case they'd want to cut the contract short. I didn't feel too bad about it - I spent the extra time adding additional automation and polish, and they were pleased enough to want me back for more work the next year.