13 ms·

Why Hypercard had to die (2011)

158 points by _448 6y ago

twic 6y ago
> Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it. Eh. Making a calculator in LiveCode is a similar complexity to doing it in HyperCard: https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/application_development/9781849699655/1/ch01lvl1sec15/making-a-simple-calculator-application https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/application_developme... HyperCard and its successors are an accessible way to make very simple, fun little apps. You can use them to make more complex apps, but it's not significantly easier to use HyperCard than more conventional tools to do that. I think the reason HyperCard-like tools are not popular today is simply that there is little demand for such apps.
nabla9 6y ago
>HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place.
- api 6y ago
  That world still exists and many of the users of this site live in it. I program my computer all the time, from scripts all the way up to whole apps and services. I run a company that writes software. What happened is that computing became popular, vastly increasing the user base, and the majority of these new users didn't want to program any more than the average driver wants to work on the engine of their own car. They just wanted a computer to be a gadget they could use to do specific things: online interaction, spreadsheets, games, word processing, etc. Is that bad? I don't do anything with my car but drive it (and rarely these days!). Am I missing out on the car experience? Today's hobbyist computer market is larger than it was back in the good old days. We have an embarrassment of riches from cheap hardware (secondhand laptops that can run Linux are virtually free and there are dozens of <$50 Linux SBCs) to vast quantities of open source software available on aggregators like GitHub. There are vastly more creators than ever before. There are just orders of magnitude more passive casual users than those.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    I really don't think that world does still exist, at least not quite in the same way. Even on today's Linux systems, there's a huge barrier between using the system and changing something about it. I wrote a little bit about this a while back: https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html Suffice to say, I think many more people would make small changes that make their lives easier if if were easy and straightforward to do so as a user. Right now, it's not.
    - api 6y ago
      I think the answer to this part of it is at the bottom of that rant: the increase in complexity. The barrier you describe exists because there is so much damn complexity in modern systems, much of it unnecessary.
  - qsort 6y ago
    On one hand I'm completely with you that acting like programming is "an echo of a different world" is just romanticizing a past that never existed, but I can't help but feel there is some (and only some) truth to it. A car is a means of transportation, the fact that you can tweak the engine is tangential to its function, a computer is useful because, and not in spite, of its universality. There isn't any logical way of using a computer that isn't programming, but ironically, it's often a mere afterthought in commercial products. To continue the obligatory car analogy, writing complex software in a full development environment is the equivalent of tweaking the engine. It's a job for professionals and I don't expect the average user to be able to do it. But writing a simple script for the system interpreter that wires premade components is more like changing your oil or changing a tire, it's really baffling that most people can't do it.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
On a Podcast, Bill Atkinson theorized the reason Steve Jobs killed Hypercard was because it was the reason Bill had refused to leave Apple to join Steve at NeXT.
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  This assumes Jobs was a particularly petty person.
  - isomorph 6y ago
    I take it you haven’t read Small Fry
  - minikites 6y ago
    Have you read any stories about him? Something like this wouldn't even crack the top 10 petty things Steve Jobs did.
  - dboreham 6y ago
    Assuming an axiom is ok.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    You're right, it's a big assumption that he was a person.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  Of all the reasons I've read or heard, this one rings true. HyperCard at least for Bill was bigger than NeXT or Jobs which wont be tolerated. Its mere existence mocks. Reminds me of Apple's stance on mice with two or more buttons. To this day they still make them so it looks like it has one (or no) buttons.
tux1968 6y ago
Interesting article from November 2011
burlesona 6y ago
Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard. Yes it was cool, but there’s no conspiracy behind its demise. It died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was). HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It’s not complicated.
- nabla9 6y ago
  > World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers. Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have to learn web programming to do anything. We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate it.
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    The Web was a gateway tech for a whole generation of “non programmers”, and for at least its first 10-15 years (through 2005 or so) you could build reasonable sites without being a programmer. But as with all simple things in tech, there are more people whose pay depends on complexity. And so Web 2.0 rose and CSS+JavaScript became what it is today.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      You still can build reasonable sites in the circa-2005 style - I'm actually helping one of my mentees work through doing just that, as a way to learn the basic concepts of web dev without having to fight through all the added abstraction that more modern tools involve. (If anything, it's easier today to build a circa-2005 style site than it was in 2005! The native API has grown up enough that you don't need jQuery any more, and honestly good riddance.) The trouble with the circa-2005 web is that it wasn't actually all that simple. You still had similar complexity to what people do today, but not very many ways to make that complexity manageable. So it was very easy to create situations in which things went wrong a lot and you couldn't really figure out why - something I think the rosy glow of nostalgia easily obscures, these days. My early career, in hindsight, really was built on dealing with that kind of "unfixable" complexity, finding ways to reduce or replace it or at least make it more manageable - if often just in self-defense, as I typically was also largely responsible for maintaining the same stuff I built. The "capstone project" of that phase was something that we would today describe as an SPA, built in 2011 when the concept barely existed - I hadn't set out to (re)invent that wheel, nor did I even understand until a few years later that that was what I had done, but I found my way to it as the only reasonable option for coping with the essential complexity of the user interaction it expressed, and it worked really well! That work was for one of our biggest contracts, which we were at risk of losing if I didn't find a way to fix their broken and unusable registration process. It would probably have sunk the company if I'd failed. Reworking it into an SPA avant la lettre solved the problem and saved the contract, and it was some of the hardest work I've ever done precisely because, at that time, there were no tools to help manage all that complexity. It's only gotten easier since then, as successive frameworks have built on prior work in removing accidental complexity and making essential complexity easier to express and manage. Yes, today's tools are themselves more complicated than jQuery or whatever, sure. That's fair. You need to spend more time learning how to get the most out of them, that's also true. But the tools also do more, and largely do it in ways that are worth having. A Bridgeport mill takes a lot more learning than a chisel, too, and you can do a lot more damage with a Bridgeport mill used wrongly. Used rightly, though, you can achieve far more with a Bridgeport mill, far more quickly and easily, than any chisel in the history of the world could ever let you do.
hyko 6y ago
If you’ve got something important to say, why say it like a mad, embittered old crank?
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  Because internet?
- zomglings 6y ago
  This is what the internet used to be like when people had opinions and weren't afraid to express them in amusing ways.
gregsadetsky 6y ago
Past discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685 (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657 (2011)
twobitshifter 6y ago
I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in HyperCard, but I don’t think that Steve Jobs killed it because it was some existential threat to Apple’s profits. Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge they don’t make a large fraction of money on selling software licenses. It’s also completely possible to run your own code today on a Mac, so we would have to believe that Jobs was only out to get the in-house easy to use programming language. More likely is that Jobs wanted to use work from NextStep for OSX which would mean rewriting HyperCard to work with NextStep, and Apple wasn’t exactly flush with cash when Jobs returned. One of the commenters notes that there was a clone for NextStep called “HyperSense” which failed to sell. So another possibility here is that HyperCard just wasn’t as popular as we’d want it to be.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  I see it as not-invented-here. He was in love with NeXT Step because it was his. The Apple ][ shipped with BASIC. Apple was not founded on letting you consume your computer. But the world had changed since the 1970's and there was a software ecosystem. Hypercard would seem to have brought programming to the masses. But by then there was a broad base of software companies that would provide users the calculator app, etc. This leaves Hypercard, like BASIC before it, a rather more beautiful and modern tool for nerds. And you can tell Jobs always had an uneasy relationship with nerds. :-)
  - easton 6y ago
    > He was in love with NeXTSTEP because it was his. Famously, when he returned to Apple, he used NeXTSTEP/OpenStep instead of a Mac until Mac OS X 10.1 came out and it was stable enough for production use. I can't find the article, but someone received an email from him around 2000 where the headers said NeXTMail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12182350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12182350
    - p_l 6y ago
      Keynote was developed as a ripoff of the presentation program he used on NeXTSTEP called Concurrence, so it's an easy point in time to check how late (2003) Jobs used NeXT at least for some work. iWork suite didn't become "free" until 2013, and even then you have to buy a new mac or iOS device (so for example, given that I bought my mac used, I'd have to buy it new)
api 6y ago
Part of the actual answer is buried way down at the bottom, and has nothing to do with the (probably imaginary) Jobs agenda angle: > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it. That's it, not some conscious agenda by Jobs. A Mac will let you run anything you want, so why has nobody else made something like Hypercard? Why isn't there one for Linux or Windows or as a SPA web app? Because of the second system effect and the general trend toward gratuitous unnecessary complexity at every level of the stack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect The other half of the answer is in my other reply. TL;DR: there are more programmers today than there were back then, but there are orders of magnitude more passive users who aren't "computer people" and just want a gadget that does a few specific things. Walled gardens primarily service the latter, and do it acceptably well from their perspective. For the former there's Linux, FreeBSD, and commercial "real computer" OSes like MacOS and Windows that will let you run whatever you want with the proper incantations.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
Hypercard was awesome. Sorry to spam, but I am working on a scripting language for the web based on HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, to try to recapture that magic: https://hyperscript.org/docs https://hyperscript.org/docs <button _="on click transition my opacity to 0 then remove me"> Fade & Remove </button>
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  Reminds me of AppleScript, which I don't miss at all.
  - recursivedoubts 6y ago
    the syntax is definitely an acquired taste for developers who come from an Algol-derived background, but it's hard to argue with the readability, even if writing it is a bit unintuitive at first applescript is also based on hypertalk, and I believe it suffered being too wide open and unfocused hyperscript is much more tightly focused on DOM manipulation and event handling, so my hope is that it doesn't suffer from the usability issues that can creep in when using AppleTalk it's an experiment, so let's find out
    - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
      > it's hard to argue with the readability, even if writing it is a bit unintuitive at first You can sure say that again. I always found it difficult to write nontrivial AppleScript code, which could have been ameliorated had the IDE been anything other than worthless for debugging. But yes, it’s very easy to read.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Love this project. Parent is also creator of htmx
wodenokoto 6y ago
You have to scroll down past the last screenshot before the part of the article related to the headline begins. The rest is just filler. The argument isn’t super clear and it is not anything resembling an official or definitive answer to the headline. Tl;dr: the author believes that hypercard was in the way of making the Mac a consumption device, because it allowed users to make their own things instead of buying it via the Apple store.
soapdog 6y ago
Couple years ago, I wrote a commentary inspired by this post highlighting that there is a readly available HyperCard-like system called LiveCode. I went on to demonstrate the creation of the same project and some more. It is basically the same source. https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hypercard.html https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp... PS: I no longer work for LiveCode but I did back when I wrote that article.
thrower123 6y ago
There is a disturbing tendency to try to sideline imperfect, but productive and accessible programming environments in favor of both more complicated, heavyweight "real" programmer languages, or on the other extreme, extremely limited no-code/low-code solutions that are frustrating and impossible to do anything beyond toy workflows. This ground that HyperCard or Visual Basic 6 or Flash occupied has been ruthlessly razed and salted.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  This isn’t necessarily a vendor-led phenomenon as it is a mutual conspiracy between customers and vendors. It is a pendulum swing between different members of the industry, some that prefer complexity as the source of their job security, and those that prefer simplicity and beauty (even if there are limitations). Arguably NeXT IB and Objective C tried to straddle both worlds (and slid into complexity over time with iOS And MacOS) Also See: Heroku vs Kubernetes
- stupidcar 6y ago
  Those accessible programming environments tended to exhibit exponentially worsening performance and maintainability characteristics as the complexity of the system being built with them grew. This would be have been fine, so long as these systems remained relatively simple, and were rebuilt in more heavyweight but scalable languages once they reached a certain level of complexity. But that isn't what happened. Instead, they just kept growing into twisted, unmaintainable monsters that organisations were completely reliant upon, but which were an absolute nightmare to maintain and extend. As a result, the industry shifted to encouraging the use of "real" programming languages for everything, even the simplest systems, because the greater up-front costs were saved many times over by having a sane story for long-term maintenance and improvement.
  - thrower123 6y ago
    Is this really the case, or does stuff just continue flowing into the tools that are still accessible to users? I have seen an incredible number of businesses that run off of either Excel spreadsheets, or glomped together masses of Salesforce customizations. I'm not convinced that this is an improvement in matters. I also think that there's just a lot of custom software that doesn't get built.
analog31 6y ago
I loved HyperCard. A Mac with Hypercard allowed me to completely bypass the entire Windows 3.1 era. I wrote some insane things in HC. By the time HC was ready to die, Visual Basic was ready to use. Of course it would be offensive to compare VB to HC, given that VB was worse in a lot of ways. Bear with me. ;-) What HC did was provide an extremely limited palette of system features for you to play with. It was extensible, but only with difficulty, and there weren't many good extensions. (I used one that gave me access to the Mac serial port, and wrote one of my own that talked to a National Instruments data acquisition board). But I think the limitations were part of the secret of why it was so clean and easy to learn. VB tried to be too much, by giving you all of the knobs and controls that let you create commercial-looking software. But you paid the price in complexity, and ultimately bloat. When VB-dot-net came along, I jumped ship and landed in the Python world. And in the time between the introductions of HC and VB, computers got more complicated, with things like networking and databases that people wanted to mess with. And still more complicated between VB and VB-dot-net. Providing just the right degree of control for novices to write interesting programs, without exposing the ugly innards of the system, or deluging us with options, has always been the challenge of creating programming tools for the rest of us. The rising complexity and expectations for modern computers is why it would be hard to resurrect HyperCard. A non-obvious feature of HyperCard is that projects could be shared and distributed in source code form, meaning that there was no distinction between the development and user environments. It wasn't in text format, but a HC stack had a nearly 100% chance of working on someone else's computer without needing to worry about installers, dependencies, and so forth. And folks were encouraged to look at someone's code and learn from it. There has always been a niche that blurs "use" and "programming," which is what is generically called "scientific programming." I work almost entirely within the Python ecosystem. I'm as happy, if not happier, than I ever was with HyperCard. A trick that I employ to deal with the complexity of the system is: Don't try to make it look and behave like real software."
- parasubvert 6y ago
  This is a great point. Also, the environment that feels most like an environment for “not really programmers but sort of if I need to” is the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem which evolved out of IPython. It’s like a spreadsheet for telling a narrative.
masoodkamandy 6y ago
Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really unnecessary and offensive. I was a lover of hypercard. It seemed to rekindle some if the magic of AppleSoft BASIC when I moved from the Apple II to the Mac in elementary school. I remember being surprised at how difficult it was to program a Mac compared to an Apple II until I found HyperCard. It seemed full of possibility.
- tombert 6y ago
  > Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really unnecessary and offensive. I'm inclined to agree. The word "annoying" would have worked about equally well without being as mean-spirited.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- captaincurrie 6y ago
  >Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really unnecessary and offensive. wahhhh
tombert 6y ago
Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, you could figure out how to make buttons and event mappings, and I thought it was so cool that you could easily animate things in the form of movie clips without having to finagle with cycling through sprites. I made simple point and click adventures, interactive menus, and once I took physics and calculus in high school, a very simple platformer. It was a lot of fun. Nowadays the closest thing I've found for a similar level of easiness is GameMaker Studio, and I have a copy (legitimate this time :) ), and it's fun to play with, but it still feels more complicated than it needs to be. With Flash, I never had to learn about shader programming or anything like that. To be clear, I'm not trying to knock GameMaker for this, it's a great tool, it's just not as simple as Flash, for better or worse. Obviously Flash Player needed to die, and I'm not suggesting we resurrect it. It was a horrible buggy mess a lot of the time (especially on non-Windows platforms in my experience), but I don't feel like we've really "replaced" it fully yet, at least not on the development side. Hypercard was a bit before my time, sadly (we didn't have a working Mac in the 90s), but it looks like something I would have really enjoyed playing with.
- phailhaus 6y ago
  I commented the same sentiment a while back and someone pointed me to Construct [1] as a spiritual successor to Flash! [1] https://www.construct.net/ https://www.construct.net/
  - tombert 6y ago
    I actually have a license to Construct as well, and like GameMaker it's fun and I do like it (though I think I actually like GameMaker a bit more). I haven't used it in like 6 years, so my knowledge is fairly out of date, but if I remember correctly, it's kind of lacking my favorite feature from Flash: the ability to use a professional-grade animation tool directly within the program. No messing with exporting sprite sheets or a series of bitmaps or anything, you can just create a movie clip, double click it, animate it, go back, and click "export to code". It's a true "one-stop-shop" for doing almost everything in your project. GameMaker actually has a pretty-ok sprite animation system built in, good enough for most retro-style games, but it's still pretty weak compared to Flash for anything more complex.
tyingq 6y ago
I've never used Hypercard, but after reading the article and looking at the screenshots, it seems similar to my experience using bubble.io. I suspect the calculator example would be very similar.
JiNCMG 6y ago
Jobs had the balls to do to Hypercard what Adobe didn't do to Flash. If Hypercard was so amazing then why did products like Supercard fail. It matched Hypercard's feature set and was able to run on Windows and Macs.
- tombert 6y ago
  I mean, there's a lot of potential reasons, maybe because it didn't have the marketing budget of a multi-[million|billion|trillion] dollar company behind it? Maybe it tried to be too much? It's tough to say.
- sjwright 6y ago
  HyperCard would have been a great platform if it was aggressively iterated. Despite being way ahead of its time in 1987, it died because it stood still and the world eventually passed it by.
  - bzzzt 6y ago
    Aggressively iterating it would make it too complicated to use for beginners which would also cause it to lose popularity.
krallja 6y ago
(2011)
parasubvert 6y ago
This is from 2011 and has been posted 6 or 7 times over the years. It has one interesting point: complexity is our industry’s addiction and downfall, but blames the wrong person. it’s not Steve Jobs’ fault that customers want what they want. The dream that we’d all be in a web based on HyperCard is no different from other the Squeak Smalltalk folks or LOGO fans etc. Elegant, beautiful interactive environments to help people learn computers, but never became mainstream problem solvers. It’s an old tale. Otherwise it is mostly a “get off my lawn” rant. (For those that don’t know about Squeak, Alan Kay believed in children’s programming so much they went to Disney - Disney! - to create Squeak, named after Mickey Mouse, as a next gen Smalltalk for kids.)
- jecel 6y ago
  Squeak was started at Apple. But when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and decided to kill research, they had to move elsewhere. They were able to convince Apple to release Squeak as open source (their very first attempt to do so) so they wouldn't have to start over at their new home.
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    Yes, that’s more accurate than my account - thanks.
elondaits 6y ago
Not convinced by the author's theory. If you extend Hypercard to its logical conclusion you get either Flash or a browser running HTML locally. In any case you get a security nightmare, a lot of duplicated efforts, and the need to solve hard problems which didn't exist back then such as adapting UI to different screen sizes, accessibility, internationalization, publishing stacks on the web, etc. Also, there were some commercial products developed with Hypercard back in the day... but these days you'd need a different development environment that supports things like versioning to entertain that possibility.
dsr_ 6y ago
My takeaway is this: "The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place." This is the antithesis of the UNIX way. "The essence of the UNIX philosophy is not “make small utilities that can be fitted together with pipes” but to assume that at any moment, a user might decide to be a developer or a sysadmin and should have the tools to do that." (unashamedly, -- me)
donatj 6y ago
Quartz Composer had a very similar sort of level of ease of use. Drag some components out, wire them together, add some AppleScript or JavaScript if you want. And of course Apple has let that whither on the vine for the last ten years. I still use it on occasion to debug HID devices because it’s so fricken easy. Drag out the HID block, pick my device, drag the value I want to inspect onto a text render block. Done. Updates in real-time, essentially built an HID oscilloscope. Update - old video of me using it to inspect a keyboard - https://twitter.com/donatj/status/1223093796558209026 https://twitter.com/donatj/status/1223093796558209026
- spacedcowboy 6y ago
  To be fair, that's because the author of the project left Apple, and it was a one-man project. I think the framework is even deprecated now.
betamaxthetape 6y ago
I've mentioned this several times on HN before, but I maintain a collection [1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks hosted by the Internet Archive. The great thing about modern technology is they're all emulated in-browser - just select the one you want and press start. You've got silly little animations[2], sound samplers[3], choose-your-own adventure stories[4], reference guides[5] and teaching materials[6]. But there's so much more in the collection. I thoroughly recommend that those unfamiliar with HyperCard have a browse of the collection and see what was made possible by this groundbreaking 1980s tool. I'm always looking for more stacks for the collection - if anyone reading this has any (either already as digital files or on floppy disks), please do email me: HyperCardOnline@gmail.com [1] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks [2] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof [3] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit [4] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out [5] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 [6] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-science https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-...
- spitfire 6y ago
  I had a look at the first link and tried two decks at random. The very first one was a "gayme" (Get it? We're gay! It was the early 1990's), the second one "models" was girls in bikinis (Nice dithering!). Point I'm making is that hypercard gave access to absolutely everyone. Which means it was used far outside the normal niche technical interests. It's sort of a neat archaeological dig into the mind of a broad spectrum of people at the time. Rather than a slice of niche technical individuals.
  - betamaxthetape 6y ago
    Indeed. The "gayme" one you mention is called Caper in the Castro, and is considered one of (if not the) earliest known LGBTQ video games. https://obscuritory.com/adventure/caper-in-the-castro/ https://obscuritory.com/adventure/caper-in-the-castro/
coldtea 6y ago
The conclusion feels bogus and forced: >The various HyperCard clones and HyperCard-influenced software lack HyperCard's radical simplicity and the resulting explorability. Explorability of the "master of all you survey" variety matters. All of the extra features in a more feature-rich system like SuperCard (or even VB) are not harmless. There is a fundamental difference, especially for a child, between a system which you can fully wrap your mind around and one with countless mystery knobs. Says who? >4. Everybody pushing Javascript, Python, Wx/Qt, Cocoa, and other abominations as "HyperCard replacements" simply does not remember being a child. And/or lacks a creative bone in his body. And/or is a malicious idiot. Or the author might remember being a kid himself, but he doesn't know what is to be a kid in 2021. There are kids todays (even 8-12 year olds) who do more with Javascript, Python, Swift Playgrounds etc, than the best things ever done with HyperCard. And the reason they don't use something like one of HyperCards successors, is not that it's 'too complicated', but that it doesn't really solve problems they have in 2021. >But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down And yet Apple under Jobs and later, continued to ship AppleScript, shipped Swift Playground, and other such tools. And their subsidiary makes a powerful "build your own app" tool (FileMaker). It's BS to present it as if HyperCard-made basically toy apps would be some kind of threat (or even just perceived as such) to Apple's bottom line or core products. HyperCard alongside with other stuff was killed to re-focus Apple and save it. Apple was dying in near bankruptcy with HyperCard and Newton and everything - not only they weren't some big success, but not even the core offerings were much of success at the time either. >Seems like many readers continue to miss the essential point, just as they did in 2011. Or the point was bogus and the author insists on flogging a dead horse (or blowing a rusty trumpet)...
- marrvelous 6y ago
  Agreed. The conclusion of the article feels pretty unsupported, especially considering that AppleTalk still survives to this day.
russellthehippo 6y ago
Actual link to the "wooden stake" website is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20111203222943/http://www.thomasscopel.com/Whats%20so%20special%20about%20a%20wooden%20stake%20anyway.html https://web.archive.org/web/20111203222943/http://www.thomas...
xkeysc0re 6y ago
Myst was originally built using HyperCard, which I always thought was rather clever
- marrvelous 6y ago
  Which lead to a pretty magical moment for me as a kid. Turns out it’s trivial to write a HyperCard program that opens another HyperCard stack and extract its source code. Imagine the look on our faces when my best friend and I tried this... and ended up getting the full source code to Myst in plain text. They didn’t even try to obscure it. It really DeMystified (heheh) the act of professional development. They had used the exact same tools that I was proficient in to build something as meaningful and impactful as Myst, which literally changed the gaming world.
  - xkeysc0re 6y ago
    Wow that's amazing! I bet you could probably still do that today if you found an original version and ran it on the hardware. It's interesting to read here (http://myst.patchallel.com/myst_fl.html http://myst.patchallel.com/myst_fl.html) how they used HyperCard as sort of just the "front end" to dispatch external commands and connect it all together. I just used Godot to make a game, my first that I've ever completed (including save/load functionality!). The interface and UI building tools, once you climb the gentle learning curve, are really quite incredible and the theming options gives you extensibility to define your aesthetic. If programming languages like Python or even Rust had this sort of quality WSYIWYG VB-style form editor, I think we could see a renaissance in desktop apps. I know at one time the Godot folks were considering Python as the scripting language for the engine.
GeekyBear 6y ago
>Apple never again brought to market anything resembling HyperCard I would argue that Swift Playgrounds also attempts to make software creation simple enough for anyone, but with a real programming language instead of a scripting language.
mimixco 6y ago
This author had it right. Apple had to kill HyperCard because it let users be in charge of their computers, which is anathema to the company's business model. In doing so, they also killed their chance at being in the applications software business (even today, they're not really a big player) and they lost out on the chance to define the web browser, which is what HyperCard could have become. I wrote a blog post about how endemic this problem has become across the industry, Everything Old Isn't New Again (Yet) https://mimix.io/en/blog/everything-old https://mimix.io/en/blog/everything-old
chasing 6y ago
I don't buy this argument. There has been nothing stopping other companies from releasing HyperCard-style tools for the Mac. And many have. But they have (as far as I'm aware) not dominated nor flourished particularly well. What may have seemed amazing to a few people -- including me; I loved HyperCard as a kid! -- was possibly simply not the most valuable use of time, especially for a company trying to dig itself out of the hole Apple was in during the late 90s. As far as "use" and "programming" being kept separate in modern computers: 1) I don't think this is something a company even as powerful as Apple can control. Third parties would fill in the gap if masses of people were clamoring for a HyperCard-like experience. And arguably they have. You're reading this in a web browser, right? 2) I just don't buy that we're in some digital dystopia with an Iron Curtain between "users" and "programmers." What you can do with a computer just with "use" and not "programming" is just insane compared to the 1990s. "Non-technical" people who need to get something done can find a wide range of powerful tools to do the job. No one needs to make a calculator from scratch. No one needs to make most of the software tools they need in the day-to-day from scratch. And, again, there are plenty of available tools that allow for light scripting to give "non-programmers" even more control. And of course there are professional programmers who can do things with computers that lay people cannot. This would be true regardless of the existence of HyperCard.
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  I found the discontinuation of Hypercard really surprising, since Hypercard was what made Macs useful as "business computers" in the niche places where I saw them used. For example, the musical instrument store where I worked in during high school used Hypercard to keep all their customer records and maintain an inventory of all their equipment. This was all based on custom "stacks" which were in turn lightly modified from included example stacks to add their specific business logic. (For example: the stacks would calculate rental fees and late rental charges instantly based on the store's arcane formulae. They would produce reports telling us who was late on rent and who was most likely to get really late. The stacks were constantly under development, which usually meant: we need a feature, let's pop the hood and add three lines of code.) At the end of the day HC was just a single-machine database with an amazing programmable custom interface builder. This would have been obvious to me if I'd been older and understood these ideas, but I didn't realize how useful the combination was until many years later when I started building web apps. It occurred to me that what I was doing was basically making a much crummier version of Hypercard (albeit with a shared Internet-hosted database, which Hypercard did not have back then) at something like 100x the programming effort. I remember seeing that MS Access had some kind of interface builder, but it was a pile of hot garbage compared to Hypercard. TL;DR if Hypercard had managed to stay the course and improve itself for that use-case I think Macs would have been vastly more useful to (at least small) businesses. Instead Macs went through a dark period where the nearly got killed by Windows, and were basically only saved by Jobs' attention to design plus Microsoft's reluctant benevolence.
Causality1 6y ago
I wish hypercard was still around. It seems like an ideal way to build flexible reference material, like a full repair and maintenance guide for vehicles or equipment where everything could link to each other in an intuitive way.
setpatchaddress 6y ago
The walled garden rant is anachronistic. HyperCard died because Apple stopped major work it. Circa 1987! There was no HyperCard team to put out a new version when Jobs returned in 1997, and a dying Apple couldn’t justify building one from scratch. It’s that simple. (Yes, there were post-1987 updates, none of which added fundamental critical features like color support. Which was introduced to the Mac lineup with the Mac II, also in 1987.)
- dasil003 6y ago
  You nailed it. There wasn't some machiavellian plan at work, it's just that HyperCard was not a killer app, and not something that would help a struggling 90s-era Apple. It was one of many cool concept apps that came out of the early PC-era, and although it personally captured my 10-year-old imagination like no other, from a business perspective it never achieved the prominence or practicality of your FileMaker Pros and Microsoft Accesses. Also, Steve Jobs wasn't even at Apple for the critical phase of HyperCard's life cycle. By the time he returned in 1997 there had been no meaningful investment in HyperCard for many years, and it's lack of a native networking paradigm meant that even if Apple had thrown their weight behind it, it would not have been possible to catch up to the web which was already well past critical mass at that point.
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    Yeah, you, also, absolutely nailed it. By the time they could have mustered any serious effort to save it, the web had already won.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  It did get color support though, no? Kind of kludged in (iirc you had to manually add Color Tools support to a stack), but Myst was famously put together in HyperCard, and that came out in 1993. Edit: Myst apparently used a plug-in (InColor from Heizer Software), and 2.3 officially added Color Tools https://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/how-hypercard-got-its-color-back/ https://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/how-hypercard-got-its...
- rvense 6y ago
jayd16 6y ago
I think people give Hypercard (and Flash) too much credit. Its easy to make UIs if you use absolute resolution and position. You can make apps with about the same effort today using a lot of modern WYSIWYG tools but its the scaling layouts that are so tedious.
- rwmj 6y ago
  Tcl/Tk solved the scalable user interface problem back in the mid 90s. The fact that other toolkits are terrible at it is no real excuse.
- groovypuppy 6y ago
  On the contrary, I think people don't give Hypercard (and Flash) not enough credit. These tools were not about UIs. They were about enabling mere mortals to make their own tools (apps, games, etc.) - often for personal use. The idea of enabling users to make their own tools easily(or fix their own tools for that matter) is a noble one that unfortunately seems to have ran against Apples core mission.
- seumars 6y ago
  You're not taking into the account the context in which Hypercard existed, that is, a time where UI design was in its infancy.
simonh 6y ago
HyperCard broke all the UI conventions of the Mac. You couldn’t use it to create native look and feel Mac apps.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  You absolutely could (I did a couple enterprise-y projects with HyperCard during that era), but it required dedication and discipline.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Fair enough, but I don't think that would be convincing to Jobs. It being hard to make apps idiomatic isn't ideal for an Apple development product. I suspect his view would be that this is a space better filled by an independent company that cares about such a product.
arbirk 6y ago
Hypercard was great as a drag and drop "app" builder. Apple actually coded up iWeb a few years later, for which Hypercard could have been an excellent foundation. There is still no great tool for preschoolers to start programming. Scratch is great but limited by its web and flash roots. I have very fond memories of getting balls to bounce on edges and sprites as a kid. RIP Hypercard
- jandrese 6y ago
  There has been some idle speculation over the years that adding a way to load stack pages over the network would have created the interactive web back in the prehistoric web days. The flipside of this is it would have been basically Flash, complete with all of the security nightmares that entails. Old MacOS was not built with security in mind. Also of course it would have been trapped on Macs.
throwmamatrain 6y ago
The landscape of computing has DRAMATICALLY changed since hypercard, this feels really revisionist to say this: "Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a "bicycle for the mind." But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)" So dramatic! Cmon now. The sentiment at the bottom is what rings most true, you could fit the entire manual for hypercard in your head, and achieve proficiency much faster than many tools.
massysett 6y ago
If Hypercard were so wonderful, then someone else would have made something similar and it would have went on to world domination. Instead, all we're left with are occasional posts on Hacker News about how wonderful Hypercard was, some adoring comments about the wonder of Hypercard, and some fan websites. Then it falls back into obscurity - or, possibly, there are indeed Hypercard clones available, but they don't inspire the same nostalgia. Geeks keep all sort of obscure things alive - GNU Emacs, OpenTTD, ReactOS. Either there are indeed Hypercard-like things out there, or this really is nothing more than nostalgia.
- D-Coder 6y ago
  LiveCode is still out there. I use it every day for a half-dozen home applications.
dougb5 6y ago
The Apple IIgs had a port of Hypercard, but as I recall it was too slow and buggy, and it got very little traction. I was an avid user of a similar tool called HyperStudio. I looked it up just now and to my surprise it's still alive -- there's a Mac version now under different ownership but with similar features, and it's used in classrooms. https://www.hyperstudio.com https://www.hyperstudio.com
blablabla123 6y ago
I've never seen it in such detail since this was before my (Apple) time. On the other hand in the 90s there was a ton of point-and-click Rapid Application Development software available as Shareware. I used that software since programming with general purpose tools was not very accessible because of little free documentation, steep learning curves and often costly tools. Unfortunately anything more complex than a recursion level of 1 was usually impossible. As time passed by I eventually ended up buying Delphi 3, just to find out that it was less intuitive than the Delphi 2 Shareware that I used excessively until then. Nowadays I even recommend non-technical people to take a look at Python when they consider writing anything more complex than an Excel formula. I'd be surprised if such tools ever become popular again. > And if you think that XCode, Python, Processing, or the shit soup of > HTML/Javascript/CSS are any kind of substitute for HyperCard, then > read this post again. And if you continue to think so, then you might > be an autistic typical software "engineer," and please don't waste > your time commenting here. Sink back into the cube farm hellpit from whence you came. Seems you ultimately need to go ad hominem to argue for this kind of software in 20xx.
skedaddle 6y ago
Ah, loper-os.org. The saner, more competent Richard Kulisz. I miss this kind of thought leadership. Though not the beratement...
ungzd 6y ago
What are key differences between Hypercard and "Rapid Application Development", "Visual Programming" tools like Visual Basic? Visual Basic is not dead, it's still in development (although in .NET form, which might have steeper learning curve). It was highly hyped in past too, but now it has only niche uses, and it's used not as "bicycle for mind", instead mostly for handling bureaucracy in large corporations. I'm sure "calculator" example will be very similar in Visual Basic. There are lots of no-code, low-code tools but they almost always fail and become discontinued quickly. Only spreadsheets thrive out of these. There should be other reasons for that, not "corporations don't want users to program their computers".
ksec 6y ago
I have recently bumped into something called Cardstack [1] which seems to be something like HyperCard for Web. I still believe there are so much potential untapped in this HyperCard, no-code, or very little code Apps. But it seems it is similar to Nuclear Fusion it is always another 5 years away. [1] https://cardstack.com https://cardstack.com
gardenfelder 6y ago
https://hypercard.org/ https://hypercard.org/
vzcx 6y ago
Since I'm not sure the author (asciilifeform) is still around: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=asciilifeform https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=asciilifeform
dfabulich 6y ago
IMO, the important question isn't "why did Hypercard die," but rather, "why hasn't anyone rebuilt it, or built something better?" The author's answer to this question is totally wrong. > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it. Really? Nobody ever had the intelligence and discipline to design a simple GUI builder in the history of computing since Hypercard? No, the answer is that there are numerous simple GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web. But none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit. When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts. Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere." The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem. As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.
8bitsrule 6y ago
Hypercard was a work of genius. A software masterpiece. It was quite easy to learn. It enabled beginners as well as thousands of people without technical education (e.g. most educators) by providing the versatility needed to fairly simply create thousands of responsive, easily-extensible, practical apps. And they did. IMO, that's why it had to die ... and why it was not handed to its many user groups. Noble attempts to recreate its facility failed for lack of its ubiquity. One of the saddest stories in personal computing.
martyalain 6y ago
It's because I loved Hypercard+Hypertalk that I built the lambdaway project : http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/ http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/ but nobody cares. I don't speak of my own attempt, I'm not a professional coder, but I speak of the concept of a blocknote on the web coming with a true language, coherent, consistent, as a dwarf on the shoulders of the web browsers. Could somebody explain me why?

158 points by _448 6y ago

twic 6y ago

> Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it. Eh. Making a calculator in LiveCode is a similar complexity to doing it in HyperCard: https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/application_development/9781849699655/1/ch01lvl1sec15/making-a-simple-calculator-application https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/application_developme... HyperCard and its successors are an accessible way to make very simple, fun little apps. You can use them to make more complex apps, but it's not significantly easier to use HyperCard than more conventional tools to do that. I think the reason HyperCard-like tools are not popular today is simply that there is little demand for such apps.

nabla9 6y ago

>HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place.

api 6y ago
That world still exists and many of the users of this site live in it. I program my computer all the time, from scripts all the way up to whole apps and services. I run a company that writes software. What happened is that computing became popular, vastly increasing the user base, and the majority of these new users didn't want to program any more than the average driver wants to work on the engine of their own car. They just wanted a computer to be a gadget they could use to do specific things: online interaction, spreadsheets, games, word processing, etc. Is that bad? I don't do anything with my car but drive it (and rarely these days!). Am I missing out on the car experience? Today's hobbyist computer market is larger than it was back in the good old days. We have an embarrassment of riches from cheap hardware (secondhand laptops that can run Linux are virtually free and there are dozens of <$50 Linux SBCs) to vast quantities of open source software available on aggregators like GitHub. There are vastly more creators than ever before. There are just orders of magnitude more passive casual users than those.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  I really don't think that world does still exist, at least not quite in the same way. Even on today's Linux systems, there's a huge barrier between using the system and changing something about it. I wrote a little bit about this a while back: https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html https://jfred.dreamwidth.org/479.html Suffice to say, I think many more people would make small changes that make their lives easier if if were easy and straightforward to do so as a user. Right now, it's not.
  - api 6y ago
    I think the answer to this part of it is at the bottom of that rant: the increase in complexity. The barrier you describe exists because there is so much damn complexity in modern systems, much of it unnecessary.
- qsort 6y ago
  On one hand I'm completely with you that acting like programming is "an echo of a different world" is just romanticizing a past that never existed, but I can't help but feel there is some (and only some) truth to it. A car is a means of transportation, the fact that you can tweak the engine is tangential to its function, a computer is useful because, and not in spite, of its universality. There isn't any logical way of using a computer that isn't programming, but ironically, it's often a mere afterthought in commercial products. To continue the obligatory car analogy, writing complex software in a full development environment is the equivalent of tweaking the engine. It's a job for professionals and I don't expect the average user to be able to do it. But writing a simple script for the system interpreter that wires premade components is more like changing your oil or changing a tire, it's really baffling that most people can't do it.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

On a Podcast, Bill Atkinson theorized the reason Steve Jobs killed Hypercard was because it was the reason Bill had refused to leave Apple to join Steve at NeXT.

ChrisSD 6y ago
This assumes Jobs was a particularly petty person.
- isomorph 6y ago
  I take it you haven’t read Small Fry
- minikites 6y ago
  Have you read any stories about him? Something like this wouldn't even crack the top 10 petty things Steve Jobs did.
- dboreham 6y ago
  Assuming an axiom is ok.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  You're right, it's a big assumption that he was a person.
karmakaze 6y ago
Of all the reasons I've read or heard, this one rings true. HyperCard at least for Bill was bigger than NeXT or Jobs which wont be tolerated. Its mere existence mocks. Reminds me of Apple's stance on mice with two or more buttons. To this day they still make them so it looks like it has one (or no) buttons.

tux1968 6y ago

Interesting article from November 2011

burlesona 6y ago

Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard. Yes it was cool, but there’s no conspiracy behind its demise. It died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was). HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It’s not complicated.

nabla9 6y ago
> World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, This is incorrect and I'm convinced that you agree after you think it little more. HyperCard was tool for non-programmers. Like spreadsheet. Web is not alternative to HyperCard. You have to learn web programming to do anything. We should not get over it, but create replacement or recreate it.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  The Web was a gateway tech for a whole generation of “non programmers”, and for at least its first 10-15 years (through 2005 or so) you could build reasonable sites without being a programmer. But as with all simple things in tech, there are more people whose pay depends on complexity. And so Web 2.0 rose and CSS+JavaScript became what it is today.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    You still can build reasonable sites in the circa-2005 style - I'm actually helping one of my mentees work through doing just that, as a way to learn the basic concepts of web dev without having to fight through all the added abstraction that more modern tools involve. (If anything, it's easier today to build a circa-2005 style site than it was in 2005! The native API has grown up enough that you don't need jQuery any more, and honestly good riddance.) The trouble with the circa-2005 web is that it wasn't actually all that simple. You still had similar complexity to what people do today, but not very many ways to make that complexity manageable. So it was very easy to create situations in which things went wrong a lot and you couldn't really figure out why - something I think the rosy glow of nostalgia easily obscures, these days. My early career, in hindsight, really was built on dealing with that kind of "unfixable" complexity, finding ways to reduce or replace it or at least make it more manageable - if often just in self-defense, as I typically was also largely responsible for maintaining the same stuff I built. The "capstone project" of that phase was something that we would today describe as an SPA, built in 2011 when the concept barely existed - I hadn't set out to (re)invent that wheel, nor did I even understand until a few years later that that was what I had done, but I found my way to it as the only reasonable option for coping with the essential complexity of the user interaction it expressed, and it worked really well! That work was for one of our biggest contracts, which we were at risk of losing if I didn't find a way to fix their broken and unusable registration process. It would probably have sunk the company if I'd failed. Reworking it into an SPA avant la lettre solved the problem and saved the contract, and it was some of the hardest work I've ever done precisely because, at that time, there were no tools to help manage all that complexity. It's only gotten easier since then, as successive frameworks have built on prior work in removing accidental complexity and making essential complexity easier to express and manage. Yes, today's tools are themselves more complicated than jQuery or whatever, sure. That's fair. You need to spend more time learning how to get the most out of them, that's also true. But the tools also do more, and largely do it in ways that are worth having. A Bridgeport mill takes a lot more learning than a chisel, too, and you can do a lot more damage with a Bridgeport mill used wrongly. Used rightly, though, you can achieve far more with a Bridgeport mill, far more quickly and easily, than any chisel in the history of the world could ever let you do.

hyko 6y ago

If you’ve got something important to say, why say it like a mad, embittered old crank?

ubermonkey 6y ago
Because internet?
zomglings 6y ago
This is what the internet used to be like when people had opinions and weren't afraid to express them in amusing ways.

gregsadetsky 6y ago

Past discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20549685 (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3293657 (2011)

twobitshifter 6y ago

I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in HyperCard, but I don’t think that Steve Jobs killed it because it was some existential threat to Apple’s profits. Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge they don’t make a large fraction of money on selling software licenses. It’s also completely possible to run your own code today on a Mac, so we would have to believe that Jobs was only out to get the in-house easy to use programming language. More likely is that Jobs wanted to use work from NextStep for OSX which would mean rewriting HyperCard to work with NextStep, and Apple wasn’t exactly flush with cash when Jobs returned. One of the commenters notes that there was a clone for NextStep called “HyperSense” which failed to sell. So another possibility here is that HyperCard just wasn’t as popular as we’d want it to be.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
I see it as not-invented-here. He was in love with NeXT Step because it was his. The Apple ][ shipped with BASIC. Apple was not founded on letting you consume your computer. But the world had changed since the 1970's and there was a software ecosystem. Hypercard would seem to have brought programming to the masses. But by then there was a broad base of software companies that would provide users the calculator app, etc. This leaves Hypercard, like BASIC before it, a rather more beautiful and modern tool for nerds. And you can tell Jobs always had an uneasy relationship with nerds. :-)
- easton 6y ago
  > He was in love with NeXTSTEP because it was his. Famously, when he returned to Apple, he used NeXTSTEP/OpenStep instead of a Mac until Mac OS X 10.1 came out and it was stable enough for production use. I can't find the article, but someone received an email from him around 2000 where the headers said NeXTMail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12182350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12182350
  - p_l 6y ago
    Keynote was developed as a ripoff of the presentation program he used on NeXTSTEP called Concurrence, so it's an easy point in time to check how late (2003) Jobs used NeXT at least for some work. iWork suite didn't become "free" until 2013, and even then you have to buy a new mac or iOS device (so for example, given that I bought my mac used, I'd have to buy it new)

api 6y ago

Part of the actual answer is buried way down at the bottom, and has nothing to do with the (probably imaginary) Jobs agenda angle: > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it. That's it, not some conscious agenda by Jobs. A Mac will let you run anything you want, so why has nobody else made something like Hypercard? Why isn't there one for Linux or Windows or as a SPA web app? Because of the second system effect and the general trend toward gratuitous unnecessary complexity at every level of the stack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect The other half of the answer is in my other reply. TL;DR: there are more programmers today than there were back then, but there are orders of magnitude more passive users who aren't "computer people" and just want a gadget that does a few specific things. Walled gardens primarily service the latter, and do it acceptably well from their perspective. For the former there's Linux, FreeBSD, and commercial "real computer" OSes like MacOS and Windows that will let you run whatever you want with the proper incantations.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

Hypercard was awesome. Sorry to spam, but I am working on a scripting language for the web based on HyperTalk, the scripting language from HyperCard, to try to recapture that magic: https://hyperscript.org/docs https://hyperscript.org/docs <button _="on click transition my opacity to 0 then remove me"> Fade & Remove </button>

skocznymroczny 6y ago
Reminds me of AppleScript, which I don't miss at all.
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  the syntax is definitely an acquired taste for developers who come from an Algol-derived background, but it's hard to argue with the readability, even if writing it is a bit unintuitive at first applescript is also based on hypertalk, and I believe it suffered being too wide open and unfocused hyperscript is much more tightly focused on DOM manipulation and event handling, so my hope is that it doesn't suffer from the usability issues that can creep in when using AppleTalk it's an experiment, so let's find out
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
    > it's hard to argue with the readability, even if writing it is a bit unintuitive at first You can sure say that again. I always found it difficult to write nontrivial AppleScript code, which could have been ameliorated had the IDE been anything other than worthless for debugging. But yes, it’s very easy to read.
tomcam 6y ago
Love this project. Parent is also creator of htmx

wodenokoto 6y ago

You have to scroll down past the last screenshot before the part of the article related to the headline begins. The rest is just filler. The argument isn’t super clear and it is not anything resembling an official or definitive answer to the headline. Tl;dr: the author believes that hypercard was in the way of making the Mac a consumption device, because it allowed users to make their own things instead of buying it via the Apple store.

soapdog 6y ago

Couple years ago, I wrote a commentary inspired by this post highlighting that there is a readly available HyperCard-like system called LiveCode. I went on to demonstrate the creation of the same project and some more. It is basically the same source. https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hypercard.html https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp... PS: I no longer work for LiveCode but I did back when I wrote that article.

thrower123 6y ago

There is a disturbing tendency to try to sideline imperfect, but productive and accessible programming environments in favor of both more complicated, heavyweight "real" programmer languages, or on the other extreme, extremely limited no-code/low-code solutions that are frustrating and impossible to do anything beyond toy workflows. This ground that HyperCard or Visual Basic 6 or Flash occupied has been ruthlessly razed and salted.

parasubvert 6y ago
This isn’t necessarily a vendor-led phenomenon as it is a mutual conspiracy between customers and vendors. It is a pendulum swing between different members of the industry, some that prefer complexity as the source of their job security, and those that prefer simplicity and beauty (even if there are limitations). Arguably NeXT IB and Objective C tried to straddle both worlds (and slid into complexity over time with iOS And MacOS) Also See: Heroku vs Kubernetes
stupidcar 6y ago
Those accessible programming environments tended to exhibit exponentially worsening performance and maintainability characteristics as the complexity of the system being built with them grew. This would be have been fine, so long as these systems remained relatively simple, and were rebuilt in more heavyweight but scalable languages once they reached a certain level of complexity. But that isn't what happened. Instead, they just kept growing into twisted, unmaintainable monsters that organisations were completely reliant upon, but which were an absolute nightmare to maintain and extend. As a result, the industry shifted to encouraging the use of "real" programming languages for everything, even the simplest systems, because the greater up-front costs were saved many times over by having a sane story for long-term maintenance and improvement.
- thrower123 6y ago
  Is this really the case, or does stuff just continue flowing into the tools that are still accessible to users? I have seen an incredible number of businesses that run off of either Excel spreadsheets, or glomped together masses of Salesforce customizations. I'm not convinced that this is an improvement in matters. I also think that there's just a lot of custom software that doesn't get built.

analog31 6y ago

I loved HyperCard. A Mac with Hypercard allowed me to completely bypass the entire Windows 3.1 era. I wrote some insane things in HC. By the time HC was ready to die, Visual Basic was ready to use. Of course it would be offensive to compare VB to HC, given that VB was worse in a lot of ways. Bear with me. ;-) What HC did was provide an extremely limited palette of system features for you to play with. It was extensible, but only with difficulty, and there weren't many good extensions. (I used one that gave me access to the Mac serial port, and wrote one of my own that talked to a National Instruments data acquisition board). But I think the limitations were part of the secret of why it was so clean and easy to learn. VB tried to be too much, by giving you all of the knobs and controls that let you create commercial-looking software. But you paid the price in complexity, and ultimately bloat. When VB-dot-net came along, I jumped ship and landed in the Python world. And in the time between the introductions of HC and VB, computers got more complicated, with things like networking and databases that people wanted to mess with. And still more complicated between VB and VB-dot-net. Providing just the right degree of control for novices to write interesting programs, without exposing the ugly innards of the system, or deluging us with options, has always been the challenge of creating programming tools for the rest of us. The rising complexity and expectations for modern computers is why it would be hard to resurrect HyperCard. A non-obvious feature of HyperCard is that projects could be shared and distributed in source code form, meaning that there was no distinction between the development and user environments. It wasn't in text format, but a HC stack had a nearly 100% chance of working on someone else's computer without needing to worry about installers, dependencies, and so forth. And folks were encouraged to look at someone's code and learn from it. There has always been a niche that blurs "use" and "programming," which is what is generically called "scientific programming." I work almost entirely within the Python ecosystem. I'm as happy, if not happier, than I ever was with HyperCard. A trick that I employ to deal with the complexity of the system is: Don't try to make it look and behave like real software."

parasubvert 6y ago
This is a great point. Also, the environment that feels most like an environment for “not really programmers but sort of if I need to” is the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem which evolved out of IPython. It’s like a spreadsheet for telling a narrative.

masoodkamandy 6y ago

Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really unnecessary and offensive. I was a lover of hypercard. It seemed to rekindle some if the magic of AppleSoft BASIC when I moved from the Apple II to the Mac in elementary school. I remember being surprised at how difficult it was to program a Mac compared to an Apple II until I found HyperCard. It seemed full of possibility.

tombert 6y ago
> Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really unnecessary and offensive. I'm inclined to agree. The word "annoying" would have worked about equally well without being as mean-spirited.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
captaincurrie 6y ago
>Pretty disappointed with the use of autistic as an insult. Really unnecessary and offensive. wahhhh

tombert 6y ago

Obviously not exactly the same, but a lot of the magic here is something I felt with Macromedia Flash MX back in the day. I had been (at the time) unsuccessful getting a C++ with OpenGL project working, but when I had my pirated copy of Flash, I was very quickly able to make interactive stuff. I never made anything even close to "commercial-ready", but I had a lot of fun doing it. It felt like within a day or two, you could figure out how to make buttons and event mappings, and I thought it was so cool that you could easily animate things in the form of movie clips without having to finagle with cycling through sprites. I made simple point and click adventures, interactive menus, and once I took physics and calculus in high school, a very simple platformer. It was a lot of fun. Nowadays the closest thing I've found for a similar level of easiness is GameMaker Studio, and I have a copy (legitimate this time :) ), and it's fun to play with, but it still feels more complicated than it needs to be. With Flash, I never had to learn about shader programming or anything like that. To be clear, I'm not trying to knock GameMaker for this, it's a great tool, it's just not as simple as Flash, for better or worse. Obviously Flash Player needed to die, and I'm not suggesting we resurrect it. It was a horrible buggy mess a lot of the time (especially on non-Windows platforms in my experience), but I don't feel like we've really "replaced" it fully yet, at least not on the development side. Hypercard was a bit before my time, sadly (we didn't have a working Mac in the 90s), but it looks like something I would have really enjoyed playing with.

phailhaus 6y ago
I commented the same sentiment a while back and someone pointed me to Construct [1] as a spiritual successor to Flash! [1] https://www.construct.net/ https://www.construct.net/
- tombert 6y ago
  I actually have a license to Construct as well, and like GameMaker it's fun and I do like it (though I think I actually like GameMaker a bit more). I haven't used it in like 6 years, so my knowledge is fairly out of date, but if I remember correctly, it's kind of lacking my favorite feature from Flash: the ability to use a professional-grade animation tool directly within the program. No messing with exporting sprite sheets or a series of bitmaps or anything, you can just create a movie clip, double click it, animate it, go back, and click "export to code". It's a true "one-stop-shop" for doing almost everything in your project. GameMaker actually has a pretty-ok sprite animation system built in, good enough for most retro-style games, but it's still pretty weak compared to Flash for anything more complex.

tyingq 6y ago

I've never used Hypercard, but after reading the article and looking at the screenshots, it seems similar to my experience using bubble.io. I suspect the calculator example would be very similar.

JiNCMG 6y ago

Jobs had the balls to do to Hypercard what Adobe didn't do to Flash. If Hypercard was so amazing then why did products like Supercard fail. It matched Hypercard's feature set and was able to run on Windows and Macs.

tombert 6y ago
I mean, there's a lot of potential reasons, maybe because it didn't have the marketing budget of a multi-[million|billion|trillion] dollar company behind it? Maybe it tried to be too much? It's tough to say.
sjwright 6y ago
HyperCard would have been a great platform if it was aggressively iterated. Despite being way ahead of its time in 1987, it died because it stood still and the world eventually passed it by.
- bzzzt 6y ago
  Aggressively iterating it would make it too complicated to use for beginners which would also cause it to lose popularity.

krallja 6y ago

(2011)

parasubvert 6y ago

This is from 2011 and has been posted 6 or 7 times over the years. It has one interesting point: complexity is our industry’s addiction and downfall, but blames the wrong person. it’s not Steve Jobs’ fault that customers want what they want. The dream that we’d all be in a web based on HyperCard is no different from other the Squeak Smalltalk folks or LOGO fans etc. Elegant, beautiful interactive environments to help people learn computers, but never became mainstream problem solvers. It’s an old tale. Otherwise it is mostly a “get off my lawn” rant. (For those that don’t know about Squeak, Alan Kay believed in children’s programming so much they went to Disney - Disney! - to create Squeak, named after Mickey Mouse, as a next gen Smalltalk for kids.)

jecel 6y ago
Squeak was started at Apple. But when Steve Jobs came back to Apple and decided to kill research, they had to move elsewhere. They were able to convince Apple to release Squeak as open source (their very first attempt to do so) so they wouldn't have to start over at their new home.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  Yes, that’s more accurate than my account - thanks.

elondaits 6y ago

Not convinced by the author's theory. If you extend Hypercard to its logical conclusion you get either Flash or a browser running HTML locally. In any case you get a security nightmare, a lot of duplicated efforts, and the need to solve hard problems which didn't exist back then such as adapting UI to different screen sizes, accessibility, internationalization, publishing stacks on the web, etc. Also, there were some commercial products developed with Hypercard back in the day... but these days you'd need a different development environment that supports things like versioning to entertain that possibility.

dsr_ 6y ago

My takeaway is this: "The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place." This is the antithesis of the UNIX way. "The essence of the UNIX philosophy is not “make small utilities that can be fitted together with pipes” but to assume that at any moment, a user might decide to be a developer or a sysadmin and should have the tools to do that." (unashamedly, -- me)

donatj 6y ago

Quartz Composer had a very similar sort of level of ease of use. Drag some components out, wire them together, add some AppleScript or JavaScript if you want. And of course Apple has let that whither on the vine for the last ten years. I still use it on occasion to debug HID devices because it’s so fricken easy. Drag out the HID block, pick my device, drag the value I want to inspect onto a text render block. Done. Updates in real-time, essentially built an HID oscilloscope. Update - old video of me using it to inspect a keyboard - https://twitter.com/donatj/status/1223093796558209026 https://twitter.com/donatj/status/1223093796558209026

spacedcowboy 6y ago
To be fair, that's because the author of the project left Apple, and it was a one-man project. I think the framework is even deprecated now.

betamaxthetape 6y ago

I've mentioned this several times on HN before, but I maintain a collection [1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks hosted by the Internet Archive. The great thing about modern technology is they're all emulated in-browser - just select the one you want and press start. You've got silly little animations[2], sound samplers[3], choose-your-own adventure stories[4], reference guides[5] and teaching materials[6]. But there's so much more in the collection. I thoroughly recommend that those unfamiliar with HyperCard have a browse of the collection and see what was made possible by this groundbreaking 1980s tool. I'm always looking for more stacks for the collection - if anyone reading this has any (either already as digital files or on floppy disks), please do email me: HyperCardOnline@gmail.com [1] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks [2] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof [3] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit [4] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out [5] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 [6] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-science https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-...

spitfire 6y ago
I had a look at the first link and tried two decks at random. The very first one was a "gayme" (Get it? We're gay! It was the early 1990's), the second one "models" was girls in bikinis (Nice dithering!). Point I'm making is that hypercard gave access to absolutely everyone. Which means it was used far outside the normal niche technical interests. It's sort of a neat archaeological dig into the mind of a broad spectrum of people at the time. Rather than a slice of niche technical individuals.
- betamaxthetape 6y ago
  Indeed. The "gayme" one you mention is called Caper in the Castro, and is considered one of (if not the) earliest known LGBTQ video games. https://obscuritory.com/adventure/caper-in-the-castro/ https://obscuritory.com/adventure/caper-in-the-castro/

coldtea 6y ago

The conclusion feels bogus and forced: >The various HyperCard clones and HyperCard-influenced software lack HyperCard's radical simplicity and the resulting explorability. Explorability of the "master of all you survey" variety matters. All of the extra features in a more feature-rich system like SuperCard (or even VB) are not harmless. There is a fundamental difference, especially for a child, between a system which you can fully wrap your mind around and one with countless mystery knobs. Says who? >4. Everybody pushing Javascript, Python, Wx/Qt, Cocoa, and other abominations as "HyperCard replacements" simply does not remember being a child. And/or lacks a creative bone in his body. And/or is a malicious idiot. Or the author might remember being a kid himself, but he doesn't know what is to be a kid in 2021. There are kids todays (even 8-12 year olds) who do more with Javascript, Python, Swift Playgrounds etc, than the best things ever done with HyperCard. And the reason they don't use something like one of HyperCards successors, is not that it's 'too complicated', but that it doesn't really solve problems they have in 2021. >But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down And yet Apple under Jobs and later, continued to ship AppleScript, shipped Swift Playground, and other such tools. And their subsidiary makes a powerful "build your own app" tool (FileMaker). It's BS to present it as if HyperCard-made basically toy apps would be some kind of threat (or even just perceived as such) to Apple's bottom line or core products. HyperCard alongside with other stuff was killed to re-focus Apple and save it. Apple was dying in near bankruptcy with HyperCard and Newton and everything - not only they weren't some big success, but not even the core offerings were much of success at the time either. >Seems like many readers continue to miss the essential point, just as they did in 2011. Or the point was bogus and the author insists on flogging a dead horse (or blowing a rusty trumpet)...

marrvelous 6y ago
Agreed. The conclusion of the article feels pretty unsupported, especially considering that AppleTalk still survives to this day.

russellthehippo 6y ago

Actual link to the "wooden stake" website is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20111203222943/http://www.thomasscopel.com/Whats%20so%20special%20about%20a%20wooden%20stake%20anyway.html https://web.archive.org/web/20111203222943/http://www.thomas...

xkeysc0re 6y ago

Myst was originally built using HyperCard, which I always thought was rather clever

marrvelous 6y ago
Which lead to a pretty magical moment for me as a kid. Turns out it’s trivial to write a HyperCard program that opens another HyperCard stack and extract its source code. Imagine the look on our faces when my best friend and I tried this... and ended up getting the full source code to Myst in plain text. They didn’t even try to obscure it. It really DeMystified (heheh) the act of professional development. They had used the exact same tools that I was proficient in to build something as meaningful and impactful as Myst, which literally changed the gaming world.
- xkeysc0re 6y ago
  Wow that's amazing! I bet you could probably still do that today if you found an original version and ran it on the hardware. It's interesting to read here (http://myst.patchallel.com/myst_fl.html http://myst.patchallel.com/myst_fl.html) how they used HyperCard as sort of just the "front end" to dispatch external commands and connect it all together. I just used Godot to make a game, my first that I've ever completed (including save/load functionality!). The interface and UI building tools, once you climb the gentle learning curve, are really quite incredible and the theming options gives you extensibility to define your aesthetic. If programming languages like Python or even Rust had this sort of quality WSYIWYG VB-style form editor, I think we could see a renaissance in desktop apps. I know at one time the Godot folks were considering Python as the scripting language for the engine.

GeekyBear 6y ago

>Apple never again brought to market anything resembling HyperCard I would argue that Swift Playgrounds also attempts to make software creation simple enough for anyone, but with a real programming language instead of a scripting language.

mimixco 6y ago

This author had it right. Apple had to kill HyperCard because it let users be in charge of their computers, which is anathema to the company's business model. In doing so, they also killed their chance at being in the applications software business (even today, they're not really a big player) and they lost out on the chance to define the web browser, which is what HyperCard could have become. I wrote a blog post about how endemic this problem has become across the industry, Everything Old Isn't New Again (Yet) https://mimix.io/en/blog/everything-old https://mimix.io/en/blog/everything-old

chasing 6y ago

I don't buy this argument. There has been nothing stopping other companies from releasing HyperCard-style tools for the Mac. And many have. But they have (as far as I'm aware) not dominated nor flourished particularly well. What may have seemed amazing to a few people -- including me; I loved HyperCard as a kid! -- was possibly simply not the most valuable use of time, especially for a company trying to dig itself out of the hole Apple was in during the late 90s. As far as "use" and "programming" being kept separate in modern computers: 1) I don't think this is something a company even as powerful as Apple can control. Third parties would fill in the gap if masses of people were clamoring for a HyperCard-like experience. And arguably they have. You're reading this in a web browser, right? 2) I just don't buy that we're in some digital dystopia with an Iron Curtain between "users" and "programmers." What you can do with a computer just with "use" and not "programming" is just insane compared to the 1990s. "Non-technical" people who need to get something done can find a wide range of powerful tools to do the job. No one needs to make a calculator from scratch. No one needs to make most of the software tools they need in the day-to-day from scratch. And, again, there are plenty of available tools that allow for light scripting to give "non-programmers" even more control. And of course there are professional programmers who can do things with computers that lay people cannot. This would be true regardless of the existence of HyperCard.

matthewdgreen 6y ago
I found the discontinuation of Hypercard really surprising, since Hypercard was what made Macs useful as "business computers" in the niche places where I saw them used. For example, the musical instrument store where I worked in during high school used Hypercard to keep all their customer records and maintain an inventory of all their equipment. This was all based on custom "stacks" which were in turn lightly modified from included example stacks to add their specific business logic. (For example: the stacks would calculate rental fees and late rental charges instantly based on the store's arcane formulae. They would produce reports telling us who was late on rent and who was most likely to get really late. The stacks were constantly under development, which usually meant: we need a feature, let's pop the hood and add three lines of code.) At the end of the day HC was just a single-machine database with an amazing programmable custom interface builder. This would have been obvious to me if I'd been older and understood these ideas, but I didn't realize how useful the combination was until many years later when I started building web apps. It occurred to me that what I was doing was basically making a much crummier version of Hypercard (albeit with a shared Internet-hosted database, which Hypercard did not have back then) at something like 100x the programming effort. I remember seeing that MS Access had some kind of interface builder, but it was a pile of hot garbage compared to Hypercard. TL;DR if Hypercard had managed to stay the course and improve itself for that use-case I think Macs would have been vastly more useful to (at least small) businesses. Instead Macs went through a dark period where the nearly got killed by Windows, and were basically only saved by Jobs' attention to design plus Microsoft's reluctant benevolence.

Causality1 6y ago

I wish hypercard was still around. It seems like an ideal way to build flexible reference material, like a full repair and maintenance guide for vehicles or equipment where everything could link to each other in an intuitive way.

setpatchaddress 6y ago

The walled garden rant is anachronistic. HyperCard died because Apple stopped major work it. Circa 1987! There was no HyperCard team to put out a new version when Jobs returned in 1997, and a dying Apple couldn’t justify building one from scratch. It’s that simple. (Yes, there were post-1987 updates, none of which added fundamental critical features like color support. Which was introduced to the Mac lineup with the Mac II, also in 1987.)

dasil003 6y ago
You nailed it. There wasn't some machiavellian plan at work, it's just that HyperCard was not a killer app, and not something that would help a struggling 90s-era Apple. It was one of many cool concept apps that came out of the early PC-era, and although it personally captured my 10-year-old imagination like no other, from a business perspective it never achieved the prominence or practicality of your FileMaker Pros and Microsoft Accesses. Also, Steve Jobs wasn't even at Apple for the critical phase of HyperCard's life cycle. By the time he returned in 1997 there had been no meaningful investment in HyperCard for many years, and it's lack of a native networking paradigm meant that even if Apple had thrown their weight behind it, it would not have been possible to catch up to the web which was already well past critical mass at that point.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  Yeah, you, also, absolutely nailed it. By the time they could have mustered any serious effort to save it, the web had already won.
wlesieutre 6y ago
It did get color support though, no? Kind of kludged in (iirc you had to manually add Color Tools support to a stack), but Myst was famously put together in HyperCard, and that came out in 1993. Edit: Myst apparently used a plug-in (InColor from Heizer Software), and 2.3 officially added Color Tools https://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/how-hypercard-got-its-color-back/ https://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/how-hypercard-got-its...
rvense 6y ago

jayd16 6y ago

I think people give Hypercard (and Flash) too much credit. Its easy to make UIs if you use absolute resolution and position. You can make apps with about the same effort today using a lot of modern WYSIWYG tools but its the scaling layouts that are so tedious.

rwmj 6y ago
Tcl/Tk solved the scalable user interface problem back in the mid 90s. The fact that other toolkits are terrible at it is no real excuse.
groovypuppy 6y ago
On the contrary, I think people don't give Hypercard (and Flash) not enough credit. These tools were not about UIs. They were about enabling mere mortals to make their own tools (apps, games, etc.) - often for personal use. The idea of enabling users to make their own tools easily(or fix their own tools for that matter) is a noble one that unfortunately seems to have ran against Apples core mission.
seumars 6y ago
You're not taking into the account the context in which Hypercard existed, that is, a time where UI design was in its infancy.

simonh 6y ago

HyperCard broke all the UI conventions of the Mac. You couldn’t use it to create native look and feel Mac apps.

CharlesW 6y ago
You absolutely could (I did a couple enterprise-y projects with HyperCard during that era), but it required dedication and discipline.
- simonh 6y ago
  Fair enough, but I don't think that would be convincing to Jobs. It being hard to make apps idiomatic isn't ideal for an Apple development product. I suspect his view would be that this is a space better filled by an independent company that cares about such a product.

arbirk 6y ago

Hypercard was great as a drag and drop "app" builder. Apple actually coded up iWeb a few years later, for which Hypercard could have been an excellent foundation. There is still no great tool for preschoolers to start programming. Scratch is great but limited by its web and flash roots. I have very fond memories of getting balls to bounce on edges and sprites as a kid. RIP Hypercard

jandrese 6y ago
There has been some idle speculation over the years that adding a way to load stack pages over the network would have created the interactive web back in the prehistoric web days. The flipside of this is it would have been basically Flash, complete with all of the security nightmares that entails. Old MacOS was not built with security in mind. Also of course it would have been trapped on Macs.

throwmamatrain 6y ago

The landscape of computing has DRAMATICALLY changed since hypercard, this feels really revisionist to say this: "Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a "bicycle for the mind." But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)" So dramatic! Cmon now. The sentiment at the bottom is what rings most true, you could fit the entire manual for hypercard in your head, and achieve proficiency much faster than many tools.

massysett 6y ago

If Hypercard were so wonderful, then someone else would have made something similar and it would have went on to world domination. Instead, all we're left with are occasional posts on Hacker News about how wonderful Hypercard was, some adoring comments about the wonder of Hypercard, and some fan websites. Then it falls back into obscurity - or, possibly, there are indeed Hypercard clones available, but they don't inspire the same nostalgia. Geeks keep all sort of obscure things alive - GNU Emacs, OpenTTD, ReactOS. Either there are indeed Hypercard-like things out there, or this really is nothing more than nostalgia.

D-Coder 6y ago
LiveCode is still out there. I use it every day for a half-dozen home applications.

dougb5 6y ago

The Apple IIgs had a port of Hypercard, but as I recall it was too slow and buggy, and it got very little traction. I was an avid user of a similar tool called HyperStudio. I looked it up just now and to my surprise it's still alive -- there's a Mac version now under different ownership but with similar features, and it's used in classrooms. https://www.hyperstudio.com https://www.hyperstudio.com

blablabla123 6y ago

I've never seen it in such detail since this was before my (Apple) time. On the other hand in the 90s there was a ton of point-and-click Rapid Application Development software available as Shareware. I used that software since programming with general purpose tools was not very accessible because of little free documentation, steep learning curves and often costly tools. Unfortunately anything more complex than a recursion level of 1 was usually impossible. As time passed by I eventually ended up buying Delphi 3, just to find out that it was less intuitive than the Delphi 2 Shareware that I used excessively until then. Nowadays I even recommend non-technical people to take a look at Python when they consider writing anything more complex than an Excel formula. I'd be surprised if such tools ever become popular again. > And if you think that XCode, Python, Processing, or the shit soup of > HTML/Javascript/CSS are any kind of substitute for HyperCard, then > read this post again. And if you continue to think so, then you might > be an autistic typical software "engineer," and please don't waste > your time commenting here. Sink back into the cube farm hellpit from whence you came. Seems you ultimately need to go ad hominem to argue for this kind of software in 20xx.

skedaddle 6y ago

Ah, loper-os.org. The saner, more competent Richard Kulisz. I miss this kind of thought leadership. Though not the beratement...

ungzd 6y ago

What are key differences between Hypercard and "Rapid Application Development", "Visual Programming" tools like Visual Basic? Visual Basic is not dead, it's still in development (although in .NET form, which might have steeper learning curve). It was highly hyped in past too, but now it has only niche uses, and it's used not as "bicycle for mind", instead mostly for handling bureaucracy in large corporations. I'm sure "calculator" example will be very similar in Visual Basic. There are lots of no-code, low-code tools but they almost always fail and become discontinued quickly. Only spreadsheets thrive out of these. There should be other reasons for that, not "corporations don't want users to program their computers".

ksec 6y ago

I have recently bumped into something called Cardstack [1] which seems to be something like HyperCard for Web. I still believe there are so much potential untapped in this HyperCard, no-code, or very little code Apps. But it seems it is similar to Nuclear Fusion it is always another 5 years away. [1] https://cardstack.com https://cardstack.com

gardenfelder 6y ago

https://hypercard.org/ https://hypercard.org/

vzcx 6y ago

Since I'm not sure the author (asciilifeform) is still around: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=asciilifeform https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=asciilifeform

dfabulich 6y ago

IMO, the important question isn't "why did Hypercard die," but rather, "why hasn't anyone rebuilt it, or built something better?" The author's answer to this question is totally wrong. > Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it. Really? Nobody ever had the intelligence and discipline to design a simple GUI builder in the history of computing since Hypercard? No, the answer is that there are numerous simple GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web. But none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit. When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts. Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere." The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem. As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

8bitsrule 6y ago

Hypercard was a work of genius. A software masterpiece. It was quite easy to learn. It enabled beginners as well as thousands of people without technical education (e.g. most educators) by providing the versatility needed to fairly simply create thousands of responsive, easily-extensible, practical apps. And they did. IMO, that's why it had to die ... and why it was not handed to its many user groups. Noble attempts to recreate its facility failed for lack of its ubiquity. One of the saddest stories in personal computing.

martyalain 6y ago

It's because I loved Hypercard+Hypertalk that I built the lambdaway project : http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/ http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/ but nobody cares. I don't speak of my own attempt, I'm not a professional coder, but I speak of the concept of a blocknote on the web coming with a true language, coherent, consistent, as a dwarf on the shoulders of the web browsers. Could somebody explain me why?