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Your mention of Hypercard is nostalgic for me. That was my first real introduction to programming. I had seen a BASIC prompt on an Apple II, but that lacked suf
by Zak 6y ago
Your mention of Hypercard is nostalgic for me. That was my first real introduction to programming. I had seen a BASIC prompt on an Apple II, but that lacked sufficient discoverability given my age and available resources at the time.
Hypercard, on the other hand came with some example stacks (its name for a self-contained application), and it was just a couple clicks to see how anything worked. It was, of course too limited to be used for serious work without external tools, but the potential, had it remained bundled with every Mac and given a few more iterations was huge. It was a big step toward making the personal computer a bicycle for the user's mind as Steve Jobs once described it.
Nothing has really replaced it, and Apples most popular current platform now would forbid anything with equivalent functionality.
- scroot 6y ago> Nothing has really replaced it, and Apples most popular current platform now would forbid anything with equivalent functionality. I think a lot of us will agree that it's a shame Apple allowed Hypercard to wither and die. What you might not know -- and what I only learned about a year ago -- is that there was an effort within Apple's Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) to make more of the whole system (and programming generally) "Hypercard-like" called SK8 [1]. It seems like it was received with confused stares from the more traditional developers in the company. And, as with much of the really interesting ATG work, it was tossed out eventually. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8
- Zak 6y agoI had not heard about that. It was written in Lisp, for extra awesomeness. I fear the opportunity to popularize such a thing has passed, though I suspect the discoverability not quite as valuable in an era where information is orders of magnitudes more available.
- linguae 6y agoWow, this looks amazing! Despite my knowledge of the "interregnum" years of Apple, this is the first time I've heard of SK8. This is further proof that Apple was a fountain of interesting research in desktop computing back in the 1980s and 1990s.
- ece 6y agoIs Filemaker close to Hypercard in some ways? I'm not too familiar with Hypercard.
- Zak 6y agoFilemaker is a desktop database with some scripting tools; Hypercard is more fundamentally a GUI builder where graphical objects have scripts attached.