6 ms·

HyperCard Users Guide (1987) [pdf]

110 points by tablet 8y ago

dasil003 8y ago
I was 9 years old in 1987 when my dad bought the first family computer: a Macintosh SE. HyperCard immediately captured my imagination and I remember spending many long hours working on my stacks and pouring over this very guide, and pining for the critical second half of the documention the HyperCard Script Language Guide. It's hard to describe how out of reach basic documentation seemed to a child at the time compared to today where anything you want to learn about programming is readily available for free to anyone with an internet connection.
- nihonde 8y ago
  I was 14, and HyperTalk took over my life for a few years. My out-of-reach documentation was the spec for writing an XFCN in C. I wanted better sprite animations for game development.
- plushpuffin 8y ago
  I didn't have any programming books when I was 12, so I learned entirely by reading the source code of other people's stacks. For a little while I thought all variables had to be named box1, box2, etc, because one of the stacks I played with was a kind of mad libs game and all of its variables followed that convention. Finding out that I could name variables whatever I wanted was a revelation.
jasonpeacock 8y ago
I got started with QBasic, but really it was Hypercard that showed me the power of programming when I built a multi-media presentation that included laser disc cut-scenes for a school project. Hypercard was really the gateway drug to programming, like web/JS is today.
sp332 8y ago
Posted recently: HyperCard Adventures, a a way to run HyperCard in your browser on an emulated Macintosh. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052 Archive.org has similar tech that lets you browse a bunch of old HyperCard stacks. 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... They also have Teach Yourself HyperCard (1989) https://archive.org/details/TeachYourselfHyperCardforAppleMacintosh/page/n1 https://archive.org/details/TeachYourselfHyperCardforAppleMa... Vipercard is an open source re-creation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675180
kalleboo 8y ago
The HyperCard Users Guide was good, but it was after my uncle loaned me his copies of "The Complete Hypercard Handbook"[0] and "HyperTalk 2.0 The Book" that I really got obsessed. I was 9 years old and reading these thick tomes cover to cover, and building test stacks for each obscure function. The code examples were full of jokes that were way over my head but I loved it nontheless (or maybe that's part of why I did love it). https://archive.org/details/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook https://archive.org/details/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook
- DavidSJ 8y ago
  So much nostalgia. I had that book too when I was a kid.
- treve 8y ago
  I'm very interested in Hypercard and digging up some of these old ideas (and perhaps applying them to the web?) Between these 2 books, which one would you recommend as research?
adamrezich 8y ago
I'll never forget learning basic HyperCard usage in Computer Class in seventh grade... in 2005. My public middle school had just got brand new shiny white iMacs... which they used exclusively to run the Classic Mac (or whatever it was called) emulator, so we could learn HyperCard and use some ancient monochrome typing tutor. I was always annoyed that "Computer Class" was taught like this--having students follow step-by-step instructions to the letter to "learn" how to use ancient software with almost zero room for creativity or exploration. Trying to "color outside the lines" and use any of these tools for anything other than the explicit purpose of the curriculum was forbidden. I remember recognizing that HyperCard seemed like an old cross between HTML and PowerPoint, and I really wanted to try making a game with it... but my teacher wouldn't allow it. "Computer Class" basically always felt like we were being rigidly instructed how to do the menial white-collar office work of a decade prior, instead of allowing us to unlock our creativity and explore all the cool stuff this fancy new technology could actually do. I often got the vibe that these teachers really didn't know how to do literally anything with the computers they were teaching us to use, outside of exactly what they were teaching us how to do... and they were afraid that we'd figure out how to use the computers better than them. What do kids in middle-class public middle schools learn in "Computer Class" these days? Is it still just typing, basic Office use, and HTML4? What's a "Computer Class" like now that everyone carries one around in their pocket at all times?
- brd529 8y ago
  A lot of scratch. scratch.mit.edu
- protomyth 8y ago
  From what I've seen lately, Computer Class is just the place where you do your homework or gone entirely because they have some laptop / tablet in the classroom. Computer Programming went the way of Shop classes, probably for a very similar reason. You need a teacher that if competent can make more money elsewhere and you need a dedicated room. From a school's eyes computer programming is logistically a vocational class.
  - ashleyn 8y ago
js2 8y ago
I wouldn’t normally just post a link to an HN search, but I happen to have just searched HN for HyperCard... and well it’s definitely a favorite of HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hypercard&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hypercard&sort=byPopularity&pr... (I had missed these previous discussions and I’m a fairly regular HN reader.)
ncr100 8y ago
Hypercard powered the first, afaik, multimedia yearbook, at South Eugene high school, in Oregon, in 1991. I designed the UI. Hypercard was perfect for pulling that photo and text data together, and we burned it onto 650MB CDROMs, velcro'd to the inner back of each hardbound yearbook.
coldcode 8y ago
I used Hypercard to design UI back then, UI was primitive compared to today, but the knowledge of how to design functional and useful UI was also very early. Hypercard made it easy to create interactive design you could actually interact with instead of just looking at.
- joezydeco 8y ago
  Especially when the alternative was incredibly hard. Getting a simple UI running on the Mac involved using their IDE, learning a ton of Pascal, understanding the application framework, and memorizing dozens of Toolbox calls to get elements built and displayed. HyperCard let you prototype the exact same thing in a matter of seconds.
  - scroot 8y ago
    The alternative is still incredibly hard!
talkingtab 8y ago
Here is a question that I don't have an answer to: why was HyperCard so good? In simple terms you could say it opened a door to a new set of possibilities, that it was the precursor to the internet, etc. But I can't escape the sense that HyperCard demonstrated the potential for things that have not been realized. Anyone else have that sense, that somethings have been lost in what we have now?
- scroot 8y ago
  Hypercard was a thrust in the direction of the Engelbart/Kay/Papert vision of personal computing, one where there wasn't so much of a division between "programmers" and "users" (Hypercard users were even called "authors"!) This vision of computing has fallen out of fashion for a few reasons, and it's a real shame. We have, instead, allowed our personal media to become arcane devices of dubiously "necessary" complexity. You can see this in any cafe where a web developer is using a teletype emulator to create a UI, or when someone cannot take the logical "next step" in processing some information in their spreadsheets (like retrieving data easily) because the system is not set up to allow them to explore that possibility without first learning a full fledged programming language top to bottom. One lesson from this Kay/Papert line is that, when it comes to personal computing systems, metaphor is key. Hypercard worked in large part because the metaphor of cards, stacks, and live objects acting on cards and stacks was highly intuitive to a lot of people. Add in the fact that you "do Hypercard" in Hypercard itself, and that the home stack is itself an explorable example of how the whole system works. Imagine if web developers could work this way, making their sites and applications in the browser. Good luck copying and pasting that button!
  - talkingtab 8y ago
    Lots of good thoughts! I ended up at constructionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... and wonder if perhaps that is a key concept? The points about metaphor, authoring and others in your reply are significant as well. As a contstructionist, my next question is how to build a modern hypercard? What would that look like?
mosselman 8y ago
Never saw this before, how cool. It makes you think about the current state of software: the main difference is that we can do the same things as is seen here, but in the browser. Apart from that our day-to-day software might even be less advanced. Apps like Notion come to mind as a modern day equivalent. The only thing is that this is more than 30 years ago!
- scroot 8y ago
  If you have the time, grab Sheepshaver and boot up the last version of Hypercard. You will see that it did a lot of things that a browser simply cannot. For example, you can copy a button from anywhere and paste it into your own stack using copy/paste. Think of what it takes to do that on the web!
gglitch 8y ago
I need a master list of end-user-friendly programming environments with built in guis/tuis, like HyperCard, Tiddlywiki, maybe Jupyter.
- scroot 8y ago
  Don't forget spreadsheets -- the most used programming environment on the planet
- jsilence 8y ago
  I wish someone built a more user friendly non-emacs version of this sort, while storing the content in org-mode files.
arnmac 8y ago
I loved HyperCard is got me interested in development and I spent HOURS working on the perfect stack.
scarface74 8y ago
There is a direct line from HyperCard to where I am now. I started programming as a hobbyist on the Apple //e in BASIC and 65C02 assembly language. But, I released a much better version of Eliza written in HyperCard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) and submitted it on AOL and to the freeware FTP archives around 1993. It also used an XFNC that let me use the original MacinTalk text to speech engine and the newer PlainTalk. A professor at another college had been looking for an Eliza HyperCard stack to use with his HyperCard based Gopher server. He reached out to me on AOL and that was my first paying side gig. Having some freelance software under my belt in college at the no name school I was attending helped me stand out and get an internship my junior year in 1995 in the much larger city where I still live. That led to my first job when I came back a year later at the company where I interned. Side note: Writing the Eliza clone has been my go to “Hello World” program for years. I’ve written versions in AppleSoft Basic that used SAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth), GW-Basic, DEC VAX DCL, VB6, C# on Windows Mobile, JavaScript, and PHP.

110 points by tablet 8y ago

I was 9 years old in 1987 when my dad bought the first family computer: a Macintosh SE. HyperCard immediately captured my imagination and I remember spending many long hours working on my stacks and pouring over this very guide, and pining for the critical second half of the documention the HyperCard Script Language Guide. It's hard to describe how out of reach basic documentation seemed to a child at the time compared to today where anything you want to learn about programming is readily available for free to anyone with an internet connection.

nihonde 8y ago
I was 14, and HyperTalk took over my life for a few years. My out-of-reach documentation was the spec for writing an XFCN in C. I wanted better sprite animations for game development.
plushpuffin 8y ago
I didn't have any programming books when I was 12, so I learned entirely by reading the source code of other people's stacks. For a little while I thought all variables had to be named box1, box2, etc, because one of the stacks I played with was a kind of mad libs game and all of its variables followed that convention. Finding out that I could name variables whatever I wanted was a revelation.

jasonpeacock 8y ago

I got started with QBasic, but really it was Hypercard that showed me the power of programming when I built a multi-media presentation that included laser disc cut-scenes for a school project. Hypercard was really the gateway drug to programming, like web/JS is today.

sp332 8y ago

Posted recently: HyperCard Adventures, a a way to run HyperCard in your browser on an emulated Macintosh. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237052 Archive.org has similar tech that lets you browse a bunch of old HyperCard stacks. 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... They also have Teach Yourself HyperCard (1989) https://archive.org/details/TeachYourselfHyperCardforAppleMacintosh/page/n1 https://archive.org/details/TeachYourselfHyperCardforAppleMa... Vipercard is an open source re-creation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675180

kalleboo 8y ago

The HyperCard Users Guide was good, but it was after my uncle loaned me his copies of "The Complete Hypercard Handbook"[0] and "HyperTalk 2.0 The Book" that I really got obsessed. I was 9 years old and reading these thick tomes cover to cover, and building test stacks for each obscure function. The code examples were full of jokes that were way over my head but I loved it nontheless (or maybe that's part of why I did love it). https://archive.org/details/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook https://archive.org/details/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook

DavidSJ 8y ago
So much nostalgia. I had that book too when I was a kid.
treve 8y ago
I'm very interested in Hypercard and digging up some of these old ideas (and perhaps applying them to the web?) Between these 2 books, which one would you recommend as research?

adamrezich 8y ago

I'll never forget learning basic HyperCard usage in Computer Class in seventh grade... in 2005. My public middle school had just got brand new shiny white iMacs... which they used exclusively to run the Classic Mac (or whatever it was called) emulator, so we could learn HyperCard and use some ancient monochrome typing tutor. I was always annoyed that "Computer Class" was taught like this--having students follow step-by-step instructions to the letter to "learn" how to use ancient software with almost zero room for creativity or exploration. Trying to "color outside the lines" and use any of these tools for anything other than the explicit purpose of the curriculum was forbidden. I remember recognizing that HyperCard seemed like an old cross between HTML and PowerPoint, and I really wanted to try making a game with it... but my teacher wouldn't allow it. "Computer Class" basically always felt like we were being rigidly instructed how to do the menial white-collar office work of a decade prior, instead of allowing us to unlock our creativity and explore all the cool stuff this fancy new technology could actually do. I often got the vibe that these teachers really didn't know how to do literally anything with the computers they were teaching us to use, outside of exactly what they were teaching us how to do... and they were afraid that we'd figure out how to use the computers better than them. What do kids in middle-class public middle schools learn in "Computer Class" these days? Is it still just typing, basic Office use, and HTML4? What's a "Computer Class" like now that everyone carries one around in their pocket at all times?

brd529 8y ago
A lot of scratch. scratch.mit.edu
protomyth 8y ago
From what I've seen lately, Computer Class is just the place where you do your homework or gone entirely because they have some laptop / tablet in the classroom. Computer Programming went the way of Shop classes, probably for a very similar reason. You need a teacher that if competent can make more money elsewhere and you need a dedicated room. From a school's eyes computer programming is logistically a vocational class.
- ashleyn 8y ago

js2 8y ago

I wouldn’t normally just post a link to an HN search, but I happen to have just searched HN for HyperCard... and well it’s definitely a favorite of HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hypercard&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hypercard&sort=byPopularity&pr... (I had missed these previous discussions and I’m a fairly regular HN reader.)

ncr100 8y ago

Hypercard powered the first, afaik, multimedia yearbook, at South Eugene high school, in Oregon, in 1991. I designed the UI. Hypercard was perfect for pulling that photo and text data together, and we burned it onto 650MB CDROMs, velcro'd to the inner back of each hardbound yearbook.

coldcode 8y ago

I used Hypercard to design UI back then, UI was primitive compared to today, but the knowledge of how to design functional and useful UI was also very early. Hypercard made it easy to create interactive design you could actually interact with instead of just looking at.

joezydeco 8y ago
Especially when the alternative was incredibly hard. Getting a simple UI running on the Mac involved using their IDE, learning a ton of Pascal, understanding the application framework, and memorizing dozens of Toolbox calls to get elements built and displayed. HyperCard let you prototype the exact same thing in a matter of seconds.
- scroot 8y ago
  The alternative is still incredibly hard!

talkingtab 8y ago

Here is a question that I don't have an answer to: why was HyperCard so good? In simple terms you could say it opened a door to a new set of possibilities, that it was the precursor to the internet, etc. But I can't escape the sense that HyperCard demonstrated the potential for things that have not been realized. Anyone else have that sense, that somethings have been lost in what we have now?

scroot 8y ago
Hypercard was a thrust in the direction of the Engelbart/Kay/Papert vision of personal computing, one where there wasn't so much of a division between "programmers" and "users" (Hypercard users were even called "authors"!) This vision of computing has fallen out of fashion for a few reasons, and it's a real shame. We have, instead, allowed our personal media to become arcane devices of dubiously "necessary" complexity. You can see this in any cafe where a web developer is using a teletype emulator to create a UI, or when someone cannot take the logical "next step" in processing some information in their spreadsheets (like retrieving data easily) because the system is not set up to allow them to explore that possibility without first learning a full fledged programming language top to bottom. One lesson from this Kay/Papert line is that, when it comes to personal computing systems, metaphor is key. Hypercard worked in large part because the metaphor of cards, stacks, and live objects acting on cards and stacks was highly intuitive to a lot of people. Add in the fact that you "do Hypercard" in Hypercard itself, and that the home stack is itself an explorable example of how the whole system works. Imagine if web developers could work this way, making their sites and applications in the browser. Good luck copying and pasting that button!
- talkingtab 8y ago
  Lots of good thoughts! I ended up at constructionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... and wonder if perhaps that is a key concept? The points about metaphor, authoring and others in your reply are significant as well. As a contstructionist, my next question is how to build a modern hypercard? What would that look like?

mosselman 8y ago

Never saw this before, how cool. It makes you think about the current state of software: the main difference is that we can do the same things as is seen here, but in the browser. Apart from that our day-to-day software might even be less advanced. Apps like Notion come to mind as a modern day equivalent. The only thing is that this is more than 30 years ago!

scroot 8y ago
If you have the time, grab Sheepshaver and boot up the last version of Hypercard. You will see that it did a lot of things that a browser simply cannot. For example, you can copy a button from anywhere and paste it into your own stack using copy/paste. Think of what it takes to do that on the web!

gglitch 8y ago

I need a master list of end-user-friendly programming environments with built in guis/tuis, like HyperCard, Tiddlywiki, maybe Jupyter.

scroot 8y ago
Don't forget spreadsheets -- the most used programming environment on the planet
jsilence 8y ago
I wish someone built a more user friendly non-emacs version of this sort, while storing the content in org-mode files.

arnmac 8y ago

I loved HyperCard is got me interested in development and I spent HOURS working on the perfect stack.

scarface74 8y ago

There is a direct line from HyperCard to where I am now. I started programming as a hobbyist on the Apple //e in BASIC and 65C02 assembly language. But, I released a much better version of Eliza written in HyperCard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) and submitted it on AOL and to the freeware FTP archives around 1993. It also used an XFNC that let me use the original MacinTalk text to speech engine and the newer PlainTalk. A professor at another college had been looking for an Eliza HyperCard stack to use with his HyperCard based Gopher server. He reached out to me on AOL and that was my first paying side gig. Having some freelance software under my belt in college at the no name school I was attending helped me stand out and get an internship my junior year in 1995 in the much larger city where I still live. That led to my first job when I came back a year later at the company where I interned. Side note: Writing the Eliza clone has been my go to “Hello World” program for years. I’ve written versions in AppleSoft Basic that used SAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth), GW-Basic, DEC VAX DCL, VB6, C# on Windows Mobile, JavaScript, and PHP.