13 ms·

ViperCard – An open source re-creation and re-imagination of HyperCard

444 points by moltensyntax 9y ago

shaunxcode 9y ago
this pleases me greatly. I hope the $1000 level is reached ASAP so it can import existing stacks!
freesort 9y ago
This is my first experience with HyperCard and I love it!
dangoor 9y ago
This is cool, but I wonder if anyone has made a modern, browser-based variation of HyperCard? Something with a model akin to HyperCard's but exporting stacks in a form that can be easily put onto a page. There's Amber Smalltalk, but that's more powerful and the simplicity of HyperCard is part of its charm.
- walterbell 9y ago
  Not modern, but the original in a browser via emulation: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive-celebrating-30-years-of-hypercard/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...
  - moltensyntax 9y ago
    I'm still kind of awestruck by this. Hosting an OS inside a browser. It's great as a time capsule to perfectly see the past. But because it's an emulator, it would be difficult to add a more modern feature, like ViperCard's share-url-to-stack and save-stack-as-json.
  - kowdermeister 9y ago
    How does it work? The http://hypercardonline.tk http://hypercardonline.tk only accepts new uploads and a card archive is an iso file (https://archive.org/details/hypercard_twin-peaks https://archive.org/details/hypercard_twin-peaks) that the emulator can't seem to run.
- haraldooo 9y ago
  Not browser based but a „modern implementation“: https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/ - the website is a little „marketingy“ but you can download a open source version of their „hypercard succesor“
- bartread 9y ago
  At the risk of courting controversy, arguably that's what Flash was: ActionScript, for example, being based on HyperTalk. Certainly it included many of the concepts originally found in HyperCard. Of course, that too has been superseded, and ironically - after many years of holding Flash in some degree of contempt - I have to admit to being rather saddened by the fact.
  - dangoor 9y ago
    I knew about ActionScript's relationship with ECMAScript, but I hadn't been aware of the HyperTalk connection. Very interesting! The Flash authoring tool was always, imho, pretty nice. The runtime had lots of issues, though.
    - bartread 9y ago
      It's funny: the security aspects never really bothered me back in the day (although they should have done). No, the reason I looked down on Flash, was because all I ever saw were CPU sucking ads, fairly boring non-interactive presentations/videos, those dreadful websites that were all Flash and took an age to load, and then the crappiest of crapware games with no love or attention to detail put into them. As a result, I just came away with the idea that you couldn't do anything good in Flash. I was wrong. Incredibly and spectacularly wrong. Ironically so, because I'd been a big fan of AMOS back in the day on the Amiga (though I'd have been better off with Blitz, probably) - another environment designed to make it super-easy to take advantage of the multimedia, animation and gaming capabilities of the host platform. Don't get me wrong: you can do great stuff with HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, WebGL, and so on, but with Flash you could do all that stuff 15 years ago, and it made it all just so much easier. So with the passing of Flash I can't help but think we've lost something, and it makes me a little sad to think about it.
      - dangoor 9y ago
        Yeah, I have to agree with you there that the web platform has not _quite_ caught up with the total ease of Flash. I think it's starting to get there within certain domains, though, but it has been a long time in coming.
- misterdata 9y ago
  I did, still a WIP: https://dialogiconderzoek.nl/designer/demo.html https://dialogiconderzoek.nl/designer/demo.html
  - dangoor 9y ago
    Neat! Layout is definitely one of those interesting questions around such a thing. HyperCard got away with simple absolute positioning, which isn't so awesome in our multi-device world but is unbelievably easy for users to understand. Good luck!
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I wonder how much material design is influenced by Hypercard. I know the web was partially inspired but it looks like with material design the language is sort of extended. Or maybe it was all integrated into the design language for the web.
- Torwald 9y ago
  I had an equivalent multimedia authoring system on the Amiga, called Hyperbook. http://obligement.free.fr/articles/hyperbook_beta.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles/hyperbook_beta.php It was very much influenced by HyperCard, obviously. They didn't try to hide it, to the contrary, so much so that they hacked the UI-controls to make them more "Macintoshis" I guess. Except it came in colors. The multimedia aspect of the Amiga, remember?
  - ken 9y ago
    HyperCard on the Apple IIgs fully supported colors. :-)
- Karunamon 9y ago
  What I find amazing is that early B&W GUIs were more usable than modern material design. Most takes on Material that I’ve seen take poor use of screen real-estate, poor conveyance, and distracting/hard-to-read color choices to an art form.
  - jaysonelliot 9y ago
    I've been very interested lately in the idea of monochromatic interfaces. Aside from being easier on the eyes (especially an amber or red interface), they force UI designers to make careful choices, and potentially result in a cleaner, more useable interface. It's not a project for me yet, just a series of notes and concepts, but I'd like to turn it into a proof of concept at the very least.
    - kbutler 9y ago
meatsock 9y ago
this is great, but how do i hit option on an android to draw multiple?
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  The UI was so mouse-centric that I haven't tried it much on mobile. If the menus work ok on mobile, it might make sense for "draw multiple" to be switched on in the menu like the way "draw wider lines" is now.
  - meatsock 9y ago
    minivmac does a good enough job of it on the android port, and the in-browser mac emu at the archive too. looking forward to seeing where this project leads.
wruwew8uu9 9y ago
Many happy memories. Can we make it full-screen please ?
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  The closest I could get so far is to set the browser zoom to 200%, click in the url bar, and hit F11. Looks pretty good in Chrome.
tc7 9y ago
Aw man. So much nostalgia. <3
notthegov 9y ago
I used to make Hypercard stacks back in 7th grade when I was learning from Quantum Link (Q-Link) hackers like Mobeius from the Pan-American Information Network (#hellonearth). And AOL hackers and soical engineers like HappyHardcore, creator of AOL4Free & the Master Blaster, the famous Da Chronic, creator of AOHell and KT (Shameer) who first taught me social engineering in 1995- http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/ http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/ Koceilah Rekouche aka Chron, photo from the 1990s- https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating/3816111466/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating/3816111466/
- shaunxcode 9y ago
  I love hacker news right now. Been a long time since I felt "home".
- endlessvoid94 9y ago
  this really takes me back.
mikekchar 9y ago
If I remember correctly, the only reason Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is because HyperCard was discontinued. He was apparently writing CRC cards and storing them in HyperCard (which seems like a completely reasonable thing to do...) He wanted something that was as convenient for doing that kind of thing.
- klenwell 9y ago
  That's interesting. I find the wiki concept truly transformative. One of the first things I've done with almost every job I've had is set up an internal MediaWiki wiki. It's always been worth the effort even if I was the only one who bothered to contribute it for the most part. Playing with this, I was trying to figure out a practical application for it. Is it fair to say it has largely been obsoleted by things like wikis?
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    Back in the olden days, I was actually paid to work on a couple of HyperCard applications. One that sticks out in my mind was training material for using the university's astronomical observatory. My job was to write a plugin to show an actual star field animation so that the students could practice finding objects in the classroom before they got to try on the real equipment. The HyperCard stack had a whole interactive simulation where you could walk into different rooms, see the control panels, click on buttons and activate knobs, etc. I'd have a hard time thinking of anything current that's general purpose and would be able to do something of that scope. Probably Flash would be the thing you would use, but without Flash I'm not sure. The nice thing about HyperCard was that the vast majority of the work could be done by people who weren't programmers. Even for my bit, I was still a student and it wasn't really that difficult to write the plugin (stupid Mac Pascal compiler bugs aside... :-P).
- shagie 9y ago
  In his own words: Ward Cunningham, Inventor of the Wiki WikimediaFoundation https://youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4 at about 3:00 and on for a minute. There was a release of hypercard in ‘98 - four years after he was working on the wiki.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I taught myself AppleScript when I was 13, to parse HTML and make 1000-character iPod Notes. I'd used LogoWriter in school since I was 7, but never got a copy of HyperCard. I heard many good things about HyperCard, but never thought it would be worth starting an emulator just to use it. I just opened ViperCard, and the GUI is totally intuitive. The scripts used by buttons share a lot of syntax with AppleScript. This is the GUI for AppleScript I always wanted. Now I know why people love it. If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer. Lucky you.
- dmix 9y ago
  AppleScript, for those who don't know, was heavily inspired by HyperCard. And apparently was one of the (many) core language inspirations behind Javascript too.
ashleyn 9y ago
HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like. It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these syntactically-sugared programming languages. HyperTalk reads just like English; it very much seemed like the next generation of the niche BASIC aimed to fill. Because computers of that era typically opened right into a development environment (e.g. a simple BASIC interpreter), there was even brief discussion of HyperCard potentially replacing Finder as the default Mac OS environment.
- caf 9y ago
  Isn't https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ a modern incarnation of this style?
  - setpatchaddress 9y ago
    Scratch is nothing like HyperCard.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      It's pretty much in the same ballpark.
      - Angostura 9y ago
        Having used both, Scratch is nothing like Hypercard at all. Hypercard was very simple to start with, but you could produce properly powerful programmes with it if you wanted. A closer analogy would be to the fully featured Logos you could get in the late 80s which looked like simple drawing languages on the surface, but were actually pretty full-featured LISP implementations.
        VonGuard 9y ago
tomcam 9y ago
www.livecode.com is a cross platform updated Hypercard descendant. Their free Community edition is GPL
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  I liked Runtime Revolution. I wish the broader coding community would taken environments like this more seriously, is the text editor sacred? I left the platform before they added more mobile+online support, I'll have to see what they have added recently.
  - tluyben2 9y ago
    Livecode is great for creating tools on most platforms very fast. Literally a few hours to create quite functional frontends to commandline applications for instance. The batteries included way of working is breath of fresh air compared to what other environments have, but the reach of the platform seems limited. Mostly because to make applications actually release ready for ‘the world’ takes insane amounts of effort. However that does not diminish the power of the system for me; being able to whip up prototypes and ‘good enough’ helper/tool applications is something I only know from Tcl/Tk (especially with Visual tcl). Delphi/VB are fast but not as fast as these. I create mostly write-only software with it but for what I need it for, it is good and I do not know anything that matches that kind of productivity.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    is the text editor sacred? No, it's the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
why is this flagged?
chris_wot 9y ago
Why has this been flagged?
drivingmenuts 9y ago
Ironically, it does not work in Safari. :(
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  It looks like Safari implements regular expressions slightly differently, and it leads to the parser behaving differently. Hope to be addressed by the end of the week.
  - ddingus 9y ago
    Irregular expressions
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  This should now be resolved, Safari should work fine.
dbcurtis 9y ago
I'll show my age here, but back when I took AI, I wrote a (toy, homework-size) expert system as a Hypercard stack. There is actually a lot to be said for Hypercard as a framework for quick UIs.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Hypercard was the inspiration behind much of the early Web. In particular the Viola browser suite. http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  Hadn't known that about Viola-thanks. Love seeing influences between software tech. JavaScript's "onmouseup" and HyperTalk's "on mouseUp". I wonder what else HyperTalk has influenced?
dfex 9y ago
Wow! This takes me back! HyperTalk was probably my second language after Applesoft BASIC and boy did it seem powerful at the time. Hypercard overall was just great at getting out of the way and letting you get things done. Looking back, if Apple had realised how powerful networking was back then, Hypercard may have morphed into the browser one day, but they missed that boat. I remember reading somewhere a while back that Hypercard plus some XCMDs were used to control the lighting system in Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar... actually here we go: https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-gone/ https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-go...
buserror 9y ago
In 88 (I was 19) I was a 'professional mac developer' and wrote a stack in hypercard to convert huge list of points to polygons, and split them with other polygons. The project was to split the parcels of land from Lille to Paris with the track of the TGV (high speed train) to calculate the expropriation the state was doing to the poor guys who'd end up getting their huge field cut in two, and would have to drive 20 miles to go from one side to the other :-) Seriously. Hypercard was pretty cool to throw together something quickly, with a UI and more importantly it gave the client the impression they could go an tinker with it afterward. It was also excellent to mockup UIs and 'processes' and other bits of Mac apps before committing to making them, so even internally at apple, Hypercard (and Supercard) were used a lot for mockups. There was a huge ecosystem around hypercard, and it lasted for a very long time. Oh, and Atkinson is still my hero!
- gm-conspiracy 9y ago
  ...and Myst.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Wait, was Myst in hypercard? I remember watching videos where they talked about how everything was only in 256 colors with adaptive pallets, plus they had Windows, 3DO and Plyastation ports.
    - sjm-lbm 9y ago
      The Mac version was in Hypercard, all of the other versions were different engines written from scratch for Myst. They actually had to use the same color palette for each age to ensure there wasn't any strangeness as they flipped between cards to move around in the game.
      - codezero 9y ago
        I thought it used Macromedia (Shockwave or precursor?) edit: I guess not, neat!
MR4D 9y ago
“Mobile and tablet are not yet supported” Well, heck. Now I can’t even see what is causing so much commentary on the memories of HyperCard.
jackvalentine 9y ago
I've always thought that OneNote would be better as some kind of hypercardesque application. Everything I wish my notebook could do it kinda does, but with very poor linking to data or calendars.
Angostura 9y ago
Ironically, doesn't support Safari :)
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  Click the "Click here to continue anyway" button. Like most sites that advertise that they don't work on Safari, it actually works just fine. (Reminder: If you're doing browser feature detection via User-Agent string, you seriously need to re-examine your life.)
  - moltensyntax 9y ago
    This should now be resolved, Safari should work fine.
gergles 9y ago
This reminds me of my favorite story about old-school Macs. All Macs shipped with Hypercard after its release for a while. Then, eventually, Apple spun off Claris, who got HyperCard as part of the deal, and Apple decided to ship a nerfed version of HyperCard that had most of the stack authoring tools disabled. However, you could open up a command console in this neutered version of HyperCard, type in 'magic', and you'd be able to unlock the full set of authoring tools. Magic indeed.
intrasight 9y ago
I had a early Mac in 1984 (still have the damn thing - sentimentality). Showing people Hypercard was often the thing that convinced them to purchase a Mac.
soapdog 9y ago
For those that like HyperCard, I really recommend looking at LiveCode (www.livecode.com), it is a modern version of it that is able to generate standalone applications for MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and the Web. They have a FOSS version behind that confusing website, the livecode.org site has access to the GPL version, you can download without acquiring a membership. It is just a bit hidden.
jlebrech 9y ago
there needs to be ways to jump into code without being bogged down with installing compilers and tools and configuring minifiers and choosing frameworks. just code straight away. something that works for kids but also scales all the way into enterprise.
- gglitch 9y ago
  Racket?
- zokier 9y ago
  open about:blank, right click, inspect element, start hammering code into console. You can still get pretty far with plain JS these days without touching the quagmire that is modern webdev world. Sure there are some other issues in picking JS, but it is both readily available and (somewhat) scalable to "serious" projects.
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    nothing can compare to saving a .bas file on a floppy to learn how to code.
zokier 9y ago
Considering the enthusiasm at display here, I feel like this project would deserve bit better demo video for people like me who do not really understand HyperCard.
tomc1985 9y ago
I would think "Hypercard Reimagined" would finally cast off the iron chains of its black-and-white, ancient Mac UI heritage... edit: to clarify, even back in the day those were the two things that I really disliked about HyperCard. No color and no Windows
ada1981 9y ago
I wrote a program called Virtual Journal 1.0 that was simply an infinite paged, password protected text journal app. I put it into AOL's ftp area as shareware and got checks from around the world for $2. I was about 8 years old! EDITED: I'm offering a $100 reward if anyone can find a copy of this software in an archive or old shareware disc somewhere! I'd love to find it again. Also, bonus points for finding my OneClick Palette called "AOL ROVER".
SpikeDad 9y ago
Kind of ironic they "don't support" Safari, the browser for macOS. Seems to work anyways.
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  This should now be resolved, Safari should work fine.
m8rl 9y ago
HyperCard was about empowering users, the opposite of what many tech companies want today, including Apple. It was a "predecessor" to the web (hypertext, HyperTalk scripting language), of Flash (animations, graphics), of user programmable databases (ok, Filemaker is older). It enabled users to smoothly dive into programming, as it not only offered a simple but extremly powerful concept of document-applictions called "stacks", drag-n-drop setup of your own graphical user interfaces, but behind all this a very powerful, extendable object oriented programming language with kind of "real" objects, as every item of your stack could have it's own method. Thankfully we have web technology today, else computer technology would miss its most democratic tool. But still HyperCard was the only way to simply have your own data on your own computer in your own application and not relying to a server, cloud or even paid service.
GRobLewis 9y ago
As for the problem with languages like HyperTalk and AppleScript being read-only, the solution isn't to change the syntax, it's -- wait for it -- AI! If Google can figure out what you want from a spoken free-form inquiry, then a smart interpreter should be able to figure out what you're trying to say in a line of code, even if you don't get the syntax quite right. And if your code is ambiguous, it can ask you confirm your intentions. Why haven't we seen more of this?
irascible 9y ago
Hypertalk looks like it's being spoken by Buffalo Bill.

444 points by moltensyntax 9y ago

shaunxcode 9y ago

this pleases me greatly. I hope the $1000 level is reached ASAP so it can import existing stacks!

freesort 9y ago

This is my first experience with HyperCard and I love it!

dangoor 9y ago

This is cool, but I wonder if anyone has made a modern, browser-based variation of HyperCard? Something with a model akin to HyperCard's but exporting stacks in a form that can be easily put onto a page. There's Amber Smalltalk, but that's more powerful and the simplicity of HyperCard is part of its charm.

walterbell 9y ago
Not modern, but the original in a browser via emulation: https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive-celebrating-30-years-of-hypercard/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/08/11/hypercard-on-the-archive...
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  I'm still kind of awestruck by this. Hosting an OS inside a browser. It's great as a time capsule to perfectly see the past. But because it's an emulator, it would be difficult to add a more modern feature, like ViperCard's share-url-to-stack and save-stack-as-json.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  How does it work? The http://hypercardonline.tk http://hypercardonline.tk only accepts new uploads and a card archive is an iso file (https://archive.org/details/hypercard_twin-peaks https://archive.org/details/hypercard_twin-peaks) that the emulator can't seem to run.
haraldooo 9y ago
Not browser based but a „modern implementation“: https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/ - the website is a little „marketingy“ but you can download a open source version of their „hypercard succesor“
bartread 9y ago
At the risk of courting controversy, arguably that's what Flash was: ActionScript, for example, being based on HyperTalk. Certainly it included many of the concepts originally found in HyperCard. Of course, that too has been superseded, and ironically - after many years of holding Flash in some degree of contempt - I have to admit to being rather saddened by the fact.
- dangoor 9y ago
  I knew about ActionScript's relationship with ECMAScript, but I hadn't been aware of the HyperTalk connection. Very interesting! The Flash authoring tool was always, imho, pretty nice. The runtime had lots of issues, though.
  - bartread 9y ago
    It's funny: the security aspects never really bothered me back in the day (although they should have done). No, the reason I looked down on Flash, was because all I ever saw were CPU sucking ads, fairly boring non-interactive presentations/videos, those dreadful websites that were all Flash and took an age to load, and then the crappiest of crapware games with no love or attention to detail put into them. As a result, I just came away with the idea that you couldn't do anything good in Flash. I was wrong. Incredibly and spectacularly wrong. Ironically so, because I'd been a big fan of AMOS back in the day on the Amiga (though I'd have been better off with Blitz, probably) - another environment designed to make it super-easy to take advantage of the multimedia, animation and gaming capabilities of the host platform. Don't get me wrong: you can do great stuff with HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, WebGL, and so on, but with Flash you could do all that stuff 15 years ago, and it made it all just so much easier. So with the passing of Flash I can't help but think we've lost something, and it makes me a little sad to think about it.
    - dangoor 9y ago
      Yeah, I have to agree with you there that the web platform has not _quite_ caught up with the total ease of Flash. I think it's starting to get there within certain domains, though, but it has been a long time in coming.
misterdata 9y ago
I did, still a WIP: https://dialogiconderzoek.nl/designer/demo.html https://dialogiconderzoek.nl/designer/demo.html
- dangoor 9y ago
  Neat! Layout is definitely one of those interesting questions around such a thing. HyperCard got away with simple absolute positioning, which isn't so awesome in our multi-device world but is unbelievably easy for users to understand. Good luck!

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I wonder how much material design is influenced by Hypercard. I know the web was partially inspired but it looks like with material design the language is sort of extended. Or maybe it was all integrated into the design language for the web.

Torwald 9y ago
I had an equivalent multimedia authoring system on the Amiga, called Hyperbook. http://obligement.free.fr/articles/hyperbook_beta.php http://obligement.free.fr/articles/hyperbook_beta.php It was very much influenced by HyperCard, obviously. They didn't try to hide it, to the contrary, so much so that they hacked the UI-controls to make them more "Macintoshis" I guess. Except it came in colors. The multimedia aspect of the Amiga, remember?
- ken 9y ago
  HyperCard on the Apple IIgs fully supported colors. :-)
Karunamon 9y ago
What I find amazing is that early B&W GUIs were more usable than modern material design. Most takes on Material that I’ve seen take poor use of screen real-estate, poor conveyance, and distracting/hard-to-read color choices to an art form.
- jaysonelliot 9y ago
  I've been very interested lately in the idea of monochromatic interfaces. Aside from being easier on the eyes (especially an amber or red interface), they force UI designers to make careful choices, and potentially result in a cleaner, more useable interface. It's not a project for me yet, just a series of notes and concepts, but I'd like to turn it into a proof of concept at the very least.
  - kbutler 9y ago

meatsock 9y ago

this is great, but how do i hit option on an android to draw multiple?

moltensyntax 9y ago
The UI was so mouse-centric that I haven't tried it much on mobile. If the menus work ok on mobile, it might make sense for "draw multiple" to be switched on in the menu like the way "draw wider lines" is now.
- meatsock 9y ago
  minivmac does a good enough job of it on the android port, and the in-browser mac emu at the archive too. looking forward to seeing where this project leads.

wruwew8uu9 9y ago

Many happy memories. Can we make it full-screen please ?

moltensyntax 9y ago
The closest I could get so far is to set the browser zoom to 200%, click in the url bar, and hit F11. Looks pretty good in Chrome.

tc7 9y ago

Aw man. So much nostalgia. <3

notthegov 9y ago

I used to make Hypercard stacks back in 7th grade when I was learning from Quantum Link (Q-Link) hackers like Mobeius from the Pan-American Information Network (#hellonearth). And AOL hackers and soical engineers like HappyHardcore, creator of AOL4Free & the Master Blaster, the famous Da Chronic, creator of AOHell and KT (Shameer) who first taught me social engineering in 1995- http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/ http://www.stepbystep.com/America-Onlines-Dark-Side-131812/ Koceilah Rekouche aka Chron, photo from the 1990s- https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating/3816111466/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating/3816111466/

shaunxcode 9y ago
I love hacker news right now. Been a long time since I felt "home".
endlessvoid94 9y ago
this really takes me back.

mikekchar 9y ago

If I remember correctly, the only reason Ward Cunningham invented the wiki is because HyperCard was discontinued. He was apparently writing CRC cards and storing them in HyperCard (which seems like a completely reasonable thing to do...) He wanted something that was as convenient for doing that kind of thing.

klenwell 9y ago
That's interesting. I find the wiki concept truly transformative. One of the first things I've done with almost every job I've had is set up an internal MediaWiki wiki. It's always been worth the effort even if I was the only one who bothered to contribute it for the most part. Playing with this, I was trying to figure out a practical application for it. Is it fair to say it has largely been obsoleted by things like wikis?
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Back in the olden days, I was actually paid to work on a couple of HyperCard applications. One that sticks out in my mind was training material for using the university's astronomical observatory. My job was to write a plugin to show an actual star field animation so that the students could practice finding objects in the classroom before they got to try on the real equipment. The HyperCard stack had a whole interactive simulation where you could walk into different rooms, see the control panels, click on buttons and activate knobs, etc. I'd have a hard time thinking of anything current that's general purpose and would be able to do something of that scope. Probably Flash would be the thing you would use, but without Flash I'm not sure. The nice thing about HyperCard was that the vast majority of the work could be done by people who weren't programmers. Even for my bit, I was still a student and it wasn't really that difficult to write the plugin (stupid Mac Pascal compiler bugs aside... :-P).
shagie 9y ago
In his own words: Ward Cunningham, Inventor of the Wiki WikimediaFoundation https://youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=XqxwwuUdsp4 at about 3:00 and on for a minute. There was a release of hypercard in ‘98 - four years after he was working on the wiki.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I taught myself AppleScript when I was 13, to parse HTML and make 1000-character iPod Notes. I'd used LogoWriter in school since I was 7, but never got a copy of HyperCard. I heard many good things about HyperCard, but never thought it would be worth starting an emulator just to use it. I just opened ViperCard, and the GUI is totally intuitive. The scripts used by buttons share a lot of syntax with AppleScript. This is the GUI for AppleScript I always wanted. Now I know why people love it. If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer.

jacquesm 9y ago
> If I'd been able to use HyperCard earlier, maybe I'd have become a front-end developer instead of a back-end engineer. Lucky you.
dmix 9y ago
AppleScript, for those who don't know, was heavily inspired by HyperCard. And apparently was one of the (many) core language inspirations behind Javascript too.

ashleyn 9y ago

HyperCard together with Qbasic both fell into that forgotten realm of democratising programming; making it so that even your aunt could write a simple program herself. A lot of people ended up learning programming because of these simple languages/tools, and I used to love playing with their projects I'd download from Geocities and the like. It's a bit of a shame the industry gave up on the idea, and abandoned these syntactically-sugared programming languages. HyperTalk reads just like English; it very much seemed like the next generation of the niche BASIC aimed to fill. Because computers of that era typically opened right into a development environment (e.g. a simple BASIC interpreter), there was even brief discussion of HyperCard potentially replacing Finder as the default Mac OS environment.

caf 9y ago
Isn't https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ a modern incarnation of this style?
- setpatchaddress 9y ago
  Scratch is nothing like HyperCard.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    It's pretty much in the same ballpark.
    - Angostura 9y ago
      Having used both, Scratch is nothing like Hypercard at all. Hypercard was very simple to start with, but you could produce properly powerful programmes with it if you wanted. A closer analogy would be to the fully featured Logos you could get in the late 80s which looked like simple drawing languages on the surface, but were actually pretty full-featured LISP implementations.
      - VonGuard 9y ago

tomcam 9y ago

www.livecode.com is a cross platform updated Hypercard descendant. Their free Community edition is GPL

moltensyntax 9y ago
I liked Runtime Revolution. I wish the broader coding community would taken environments like this more seriously, is the text editor sacred? I left the platform before they added more mobile+online support, I'll have to see what they have added recently.
- tluyben2 9y ago
  Livecode is great for creating tools on most platforms very fast. Literally a few hours to create quite functional frontends to commandline applications for instance. The batteries included way of working is breath of fresh air compared to what other environments have, but the reach of the platform seems limited. Mostly because to make applications actually release ready for ‘the world’ takes insane amounts of effort. However that does not diminish the power of the system for me; being able to whip up prototypes and ‘good enough’ helper/tool applications is something I only know from Tcl/Tk (especially with Visual tcl). Delphi/VB are fast but not as fast as these. I create mostly write-only software with it but for what I need it for, it is good and I do not know anything that matches that kind of productivity.
- icebraining 9y ago
  is the text editor sacred? No, it's the worst form of development, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

why is this flagged?

chris_wot 9y ago

Why has this been flagged?

drivingmenuts 9y ago

Ironically, it does not work in Safari. :(

moltensyntax 9y ago
It looks like Safari implements regular expressions slightly differently, and it leads to the parser behaving differently. Hope to be addressed by the end of the week.
- ddingus 9y ago
  Irregular expressions
moltensyntax 9y ago
This should now be resolved, Safari should work fine.

dbcurtis 9y ago

I'll show my age here, but back when I took AI, I wrote a (toy, homework-size) expert system as a Hypercard stack. There is actually a lot to be said for Hypercard as a framework for quick UIs.

dredmorbius 9y ago

Hypercard was the inspiration behind much of the early Web. In particular the Viola browser suite. http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html http://www.viola.org/viola/violaIntro.html

moltensyntax 9y ago
Hadn't known that about Viola-thanks. Love seeing influences between software tech. JavaScript's "onmouseup" and HyperTalk's "on mouseUp". I wonder what else HyperTalk has influenced?

dfex 9y ago

Wow! This takes me back! HyperTalk was probably my second language after Applesoft BASIC and boy did it seem powerful at the time. Hypercard overall was just great at getting out of the way and letting you get things done. Looking back, if Apple had realised how powerful networking was back then, Hypercard may have morphed into the browser one day, but they missed that boat. I remember reading somewhere a while back that Hypercard plus some XCMDs were used to control the lighting system in Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpar... actually here we go: https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-gone/ https://www.wired.com/2002/08/hypercard-forgotten-but-not-go...

buserror 9y ago

In 88 (I was 19) I was a 'professional mac developer' and wrote a stack in hypercard to convert huge list of points to polygons, and split them with other polygons. The project was to split the parcels of land from Lille to Paris with the track of the TGV (high speed train) to calculate the expropriation the state was doing to the poor guys who'd end up getting their huge field cut in two, and would have to drive 20 miles to go from one side to the other :-) Seriously. Hypercard was pretty cool to throw together something quickly, with a UI and more importantly it gave the client the impression they could go an tinker with it afterward. It was also excellent to mockup UIs and 'processes' and other bits of Mac apps before committing to making them, so even internally at apple, Hypercard (and Supercard) were used a lot for mockups. There was a huge ecosystem around hypercard, and it lasted for a very long time. Oh, and Atkinson is still my hero!

gm-conspiracy 9y ago
...and Myst.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Wait, was Myst in hypercard? I remember watching videos where they talked about how everything was only in 256 colors with adaptive pallets, plus they had Windows, 3DO and Plyastation ports.
  - sjm-lbm 9y ago
    The Mac version was in Hypercard, all of the other versions were different engines written from scratch for Myst. They actually had to use the same color palette for each age to ensure there wasn't any strangeness as they flipped between cards to move around in the game.
    - codezero 9y ago
      I thought it used Macromedia (Shockwave or precursor?) edit: I guess not, neat!

MR4D 9y ago

“Mobile and tablet are not yet supported” Well, heck. Now I can’t even see what is causing so much commentary on the memories of HyperCard.

jackvalentine 9y ago

I've always thought that OneNote would be better as some kind of hypercardesque application. Everything I wish my notebook could do it kinda does, but with very poor linking to data or calendars.

Angostura 9y ago

Ironically, doesn't support Safari :)

Cyberdog 9y ago
Click the "Click here to continue anyway" button. Like most sites that advertise that they don't work on Safari, it actually works just fine. (Reminder: If you're doing browser feature detection via User-Agent string, you seriously need to re-examine your life.)
- moltensyntax 9y ago
  This should now be resolved, Safari should work fine.

gergles 9y ago

This reminds me of my favorite story about old-school Macs. All Macs shipped with Hypercard after its release for a while. Then, eventually, Apple spun off Claris, who got HyperCard as part of the deal, and Apple decided to ship a nerfed version of HyperCard that had most of the stack authoring tools disabled. However, you could open up a command console in this neutered version of HyperCard, type in 'magic', and you'd be able to unlock the full set of authoring tools. Magic indeed.

intrasight 9y ago

I had a early Mac in 1984 (still have the damn thing - sentimentality). Showing people Hypercard was often the thing that convinced them to purchase a Mac.

soapdog 9y ago

For those that like HyperCard, I really recommend looking at LiveCode (www.livecode.com), it is a modern version of it that is able to generate standalone applications for MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS and the Web. They have a FOSS version behind that confusing website, the livecode.org site has access to the GPL version, you can download without acquiring a membership. It is just a bit hidden.

jlebrech 9y ago

there needs to be ways to jump into code without being bogged down with installing compilers and tools and configuring minifiers and choosing frameworks. just code straight away. something that works for kids but also scales all the way into enterprise.

gglitch 9y ago
Racket?
zokier 9y ago
open about:blank, right click, inspect element, start hammering code into console. You can still get pretty far with plain JS these days without touching the quagmire that is modern webdev world. Sure there are some other issues in picking JS, but it is both readily available and (somewhat) scalable to "serious" projects.
- jlebrech 9y ago
  nothing can compare to saving a .bas file on a floppy to learn how to code.

zokier 9y ago

Considering the enthusiasm at display here, I feel like this project would deserve bit better demo video for people like me who do not really understand HyperCard.

tomc1985 9y ago

I would think "Hypercard Reimagined" would finally cast off the iron chains of its black-and-white, ancient Mac UI heritage... edit: to clarify, even back in the day those were the two things that I really disliked about HyperCard. No color and no Windows

ada1981 9y ago

I wrote a program called Virtual Journal 1.0 that was simply an infinite paged, password protected text journal app. I put it into AOL's ftp area as shareware and got checks from around the world for $2. I was about 8 years old! EDITED: I'm offering a $100 reward if anyone can find a copy of this software in an archive or old shareware disc somewhere! I'd love to find it again. Also, bonus points for finding my OneClick Palette called "AOL ROVER".

SpikeDad 9y ago

Kind of ironic they "don't support" Safari, the browser for macOS. Seems to work anyways.

moltensyntax 9y ago
This should now be resolved, Safari should work fine.

m8rl 9y ago

HyperCard was about empowering users, the opposite of what many tech companies want today, including Apple. It was a "predecessor" to the web (hypertext, HyperTalk scripting language), of Flash (animations, graphics), of user programmable databases (ok, Filemaker is older). It enabled users to smoothly dive into programming, as it not only offered a simple but extremly powerful concept of document-applictions called "stacks", drag-n-drop setup of your own graphical user interfaces, but behind all this a very powerful, extendable object oriented programming language with kind of "real" objects, as every item of your stack could have it's own method. Thankfully we have web technology today, else computer technology would miss its most democratic tool. But still HyperCard was the only way to simply have your own data on your own computer in your own application and not relying to a server, cloud or even paid service.

GRobLewis 9y ago

As for the problem with languages like HyperTalk and AppleScript being read-only, the solution isn't to change the syntax, it's -- wait for it -- AI! If Google can figure out what you want from a spoken free-form inquiry, then a smart interpreter should be able to figure out what you're trying to say in a line of code, even if you don't get the syntax quite right. And if your code is ambiguous, it can ask you confirm your intentions. Why haven't we seen more of this?

irascible 9y ago

Hypertalk looks like it's being spoken by Buffalo Bill.