6 ms·

A huge difference between HC and the web browser: almost anyone would make a HC stack, creating on the web is largely unavailable for most folks. HC was about

by cc101 4y ago

A huge difference between HC and the web browser: almost anyone would make a HC stack, creating on the web is largely unavailable for most folks. HC was about creating not browsing.

apples_oranges 4y ago
Hypercard was for the tech-savvy few who could actually figure out how to use it
- sircastor 4y ago
  I don’t recall any instruction on it, and I was definitely creating stacks at age 8 or 9. I recall it being quite straightforward. I made a slide show presentation about subliminal messages for my 7th grade science class (1992 I think) I admit we had a Mac early on, so I was very familiar with interactions by that point, but I found HyperCard being shockingly intuitive.
- zerohp 4y ago
  Every 7th grader in my middle school computer class learned to use Hypercard and I wouldn't say any of them were tech savvy at that age in 1990.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
I’m a self taught programmer, mostly for web targets. Granted my attempt to learn HyperCard began earlier and I had less tenacity in my attempt, but I found it utterly impenetrable. I learned to build for the web with View Source. Granted it’s harder to do that these days, with many assets being built and minified. But the documentation is worlds better than it was then, and the APIs are a hell of a lot more accessible to humans and vastly more reliably available. It’s why I recommend anyone wanting to get into web dev start with vanilla everything unless they have very specific interest in certain technologies otherwise. Web dev is eminently learnable! Maybe I’d feel the same way going back to HyperCard later in life, but it felt like an utter black box to me at the time.
- cc101 4y ago
  Mac software requires a different mind set than traditional programming. Programming the Mac completely changed my perspective on programming. I was never the same afterwards.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    My experience programming for a Mac: - I wrote a software half-QWERTY keyboard in ObjC because I literally couldn’t work through an injury otherwise. It crashed a lot, so I wrote a daemon to restart it when it crashed. I was probably experiencing the C parts I didn’t understand as much as the dynamic parts that were unfamiliar. - AppleScript, which um… I was a seasoned developer by this point and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the language or its documentation. I just gave up. Both definitely shaped my perspective on programming though!
- pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
  > with many assets being built and minified ... often needlessly and even to the author's own detriment, given the need to configure (and then maintain the configuration of) the shoddy tooling that produces the blobs--and the inability to debug them directly, of course.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    Minification is good for users in most ways, it’s fewer bytes on the wire and faster to parse. And I know bad tooling and config is the meme but I will say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how simple it’s been to adopt Vite both in new projects and now a >10 year old one. Edit: I’m just waking up and missed the point about debugging, but source maps work very well. Perhaps more sites should ship them to production though!
    - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
      The key word being "directly". Aside from that, it remains to be shown for most projects that the downsides are outweighed by the upsides (which are often theoretical or aspirational even, rather than actual).
Daub 4y ago
> HC was about creating not browsing. Let us not forget that the very first web browsers had an edit button.
- dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
  I did not know that… Mosaic had an edit button? What did it do?
  - prepend 4y ago
    Edited the page. Opened the html in notepad, or whatever your local editor was.
    - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
      It was a toolbar button or a menu item? Did it update when you saved? I wonder what the history is there
  - cc101 4y ago
    I don't recall that, but it seem quite likely. I still use HC in Basilisk II sometimes. Dragging out Xcode for something quick and easy is overkill.
    - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
      What is HC? Basilisk II seems to be a mac emulator, but I’m not getting anything for HC.
      - giantrobot 4y ago
        HyperCard.
        dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
        Ohhhh, right… thank you :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
DonHopkins 4y ago
Speaking about HyperCard, creating web pages, and publishing live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web, I wrote this about LiveCard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045 DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002) Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)! Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783227 >In fact, one of the earliest tools that enabled anyone, even children, to author and publish their own interactive dynamic web applications with graphics, text, and even forms and persistent databases, was actually based on HyperCard and the MacHTTP/WebStar web server on the Mac: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209 >One of the coolest early applications of server side scripting was integrating HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar, such that you could publish live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web! Since it was based on good old HyperCard, it was one of the first scriptable web authoring tools that normal people and even children could actually use! MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher: CGI and AppleScript: http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/184409741 http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1... >Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263 MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company. https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astronomy.pomona.edu/archeo/WebSTAR%20Doc.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron... http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machttp.html http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt... http://tidbits.com/article/6292 http://tidbits.com/article/6292 >It had an AppleScript / OSA API that let you write handlers for responding to web hits in other languages that supported AppleScript. I used it to integrate ScriptX with the web: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm... https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop... The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages! That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web! Using HyperCard as a CGI application https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-proteins.uni-graz.at/HyperCGI.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-protei... https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.com/hcfaq/hcfaq4.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.co... http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/184409741 http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1... https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royalsoftware.com/descriptions/comments.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royals... What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing: >Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done. - Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital ---- Also (a historical note about web browsers with editors, not about HyperCard): NetScape Gold had a built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor window. But it was a unique selling point -- earlier and other versions of browsers didn't support that. Now browsers have official APIs to support WYSIWYG HTML editing via the "contenteditable" attribute, execCommand function, and Selection class, but you have to implement the menus and toolbars of the user interface yourself, and there are a lot of libraries for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Navigator_(versions_0.9%E2%80%934.08) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Navigator_(v... >Netscape also released a Gold version of Navigator 3.0 that incorporated WYSIWYG editing with drag and drop between web editor and email components.[49] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_GOLD_Editor_Window.htm https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_GOLD_Editor_Windo... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/contenteditable https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att... https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#attr-contenteditable https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#attr... https://w3c.github.io/editing/docs/execCommand/#execcommand%28%29 https://w3c.github.io/editing/docs/execCommand/#execcommand%... https://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#selection-interface https://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#selection-interface

by cc101 4y ago

A huge difference between HC and the web browser: almost anyone would make a HC stack, creating on the web is largely unavailable for most folks. HC was about creating not browsing.

apples_oranges 4y ago

Hypercard was for the tech-savvy few who could actually figure out how to use it

sircastor 4y ago
I don’t recall any instruction on it, and I was definitely creating stacks at age 8 or 9. I recall it being quite straightforward. I made a slide show presentation about subliminal messages for my 7th grade science class (1992 I think) I admit we had a Mac early on, so I was very familiar with interactions by that point, but I found HyperCard being shockingly intuitive.
zerohp 4y ago
Every 7th grader in my middle school computer class learned to use Hypercard and I wouldn't say any of them were tech savvy at that age in 1990.

eyelidlessness 4y ago

I’m a self taught programmer, mostly for web targets. Granted my attempt to learn HyperCard began earlier and I had less tenacity in my attempt, but I found it utterly impenetrable. I learned to build for the web with View Source. Granted it’s harder to do that these days, with many assets being built and minified. But the documentation is worlds better than it was then, and the APIs are a hell of a lot more accessible to humans and vastly more reliably available. It’s why I recommend anyone wanting to get into web dev start with vanilla everything unless they have very specific interest in certain technologies otherwise. Web dev is eminently learnable! Maybe I’d feel the same way going back to HyperCard later in life, but it felt like an utter black box to me at the time.

cc101 4y ago
Mac software requires a different mind set than traditional programming. Programming the Mac completely changed my perspective on programming. I was never the same afterwards.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  My experience programming for a Mac: - I wrote a software half-QWERTY keyboard in ObjC because I literally couldn’t work through an injury otherwise. It crashed a lot, so I wrote a daemon to restart it when it crashed. I was probably experiencing the C parts I didn’t understand as much as the dynamic parts that were unfamiliar. - AppleScript, which um… I was a seasoned developer by this point and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the language or its documentation. I just gave up. Both definitely shaped my perspective on programming though!
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
> with many assets being built and minified ... often needlessly and even to the author's own detriment, given the need to configure (and then maintain the configuration of) the shoddy tooling that produces the blobs--and the inability to debug them directly, of course.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  Minification is good for users in most ways, it’s fewer bytes on the wire and faster to parse. And I know bad tooling and config is the meme but I will say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how simple it’s been to adopt Vite both in new projects and now a >10 year old one. Edit: I’m just waking up and missed the point about debugging, but source maps work very well. Perhaps more sites should ship them to production though!
  - pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
    The key word being "directly". Aside from that, it remains to be shown for most projects that the downsides are outweighed by the upsides (which are often theoretical or aspirational even, rather than actual).

Daub 4y ago

> HC was about creating not browsing. Let us not forget that the very first web browsers had an edit button.

dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
I did not know that… Mosaic had an edit button? What did it do?
- prepend 4y ago
  Edited the page. Opened the html in notepad, or whatever your local editor was.
  - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
    It was a toolbar button or a menu item? Did it update when you saved? I wonder what the history is there
- cc101 4y ago
  I don't recall that, but it seem quite likely. I still use HC in Basilisk II sometimes. Dragging out Xcode for something quick and easy is overkill.
  - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
    What is HC? Basilisk II seems to be a mac emulator, but I’m not getting anything for HC.
    - giantrobot 4y ago
      HyperCard.
      - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
        Ohhhh, right… thank you :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

DonHopkins 4y ago

Speaking about HyperCard, creating web pages, and publishing live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web, I wrote this about LiveCard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045 DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002) Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)! Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21783227 >In fact, one of the earliest tools that enabled anyone, even children, to author and publish their own interactive dynamic web applications with graphics, text, and even forms and persistent databases, was actually based on HyperCard and the MacHTTP/WebStar web server on the Mac: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209 >One of the coolest early applications of server side scripting was integrating HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar, such that you could publish live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web! Since it was based on good old HyperCard, it was one of the first scriptable web authoring tools that normal people and even children could actually use! MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher: CGI and AppleScript: http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/184409741 http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1... >Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263 MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company. https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astronomy.pomona.edu/archeo/WebSTAR%20Doc.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron... http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machttp.html http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt... http://tidbits.com/article/6292 http://tidbits.com/article/6292 >It had an AppleScript / OSA API that let you write handlers for responding to web hits in other languages that supported AppleScript. I used it to integrate ScriptX with the web: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm... https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-developers-conference-kaleida-labs-scriptx-demo-64271dd65570 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop... The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages! That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web! Using HyperCard as a CGI application https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-proteins.uni-graz.at/HyperCGI.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-protei... https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.com/hcfaq/hcfaq4.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.co... http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/184409741 http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1... https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royalsoftware.com/descriptions/comments.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royals... What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing: >Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done. - Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital ---- Also (a historical note about web browsers with editors, not about HyperCard): NetScape Gold had a built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor window. But it was a unique selling point -- earlier and other versions of browsers didn't support that. Now browsers have official APIs to support WYSIWYG HTML editing via the "contenteditable" attribute, execCommand function, and Selection class, but you have to implement the menus and toolbars of the user interface yourself, and there are a lot of libraries for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Navigator_(versions_0.9%E2%80%934.08) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Netscape_Navigator_(v... >Netscape also released a Gold version of Navigator 3.0 that incorporated WYSIWYG editing with drag and drop between web editor and email components.[49] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_GOLD_Editor_Window.htm https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_GOLD_Editor_Windo... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/contenteditable https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att... https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#attr-contenteditable https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#attr... https://w3c.github.io/editing/docs/execCommand/#execcommand%28%29 https://w3c.github.io/editing/docs/execCommand/#execcommand%... https://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#selection-interface https://w3c.github.io/selection-api/#selection-interface