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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 wh

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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
This was my thinking as well. But actually, looking at Wikipedia, it appears there was work on a Hypercard 3.0, which added a bunch of features and turned Hypercard stacks into a special kind of Quicktime movie. It was demoed as alpha quality and never finished... which sounds pretty much exactly like nearly all other Apple products at the time! Smart people doing cool stuff with little direction under bad management, unable to get the cool stuff out the door. And arguably by the return of Jobs, the ship had sailed. There was no way Hypercard was going to take over the world after the introduction of Windows 95 and WWW, that was clear to anyone. I wish it had, though.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  “Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-steve-jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0 https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...

dasil003 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

This was my thinking as well. But actually, looking at Wikipedia, it appears there was work on a Hypercard 3.0, which added a bunch of features and turned Hypercard stacks into a special kind of Quicktime movie. It was demoed as alpha quality and never finished... which sounds pretty much exactly like nearly all other Apple products at the time! Smart people doing cool stuff with little direction under bad management, unable to get the cool stuff out the door. And arguably by the return of Jobs, the ship had sailed. There was no way Hypercard was going to take over the world after the introduction of Windows 95 and WWW, that was clear to anyone. I wish it had, though.

DonHopkins 5y ago
“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-steve-jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0 https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...