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Thanks for this Xmas present, benbreen. I was reading Mondo2000 in the early 90s as a prepubescent while learning HyperCard. It ended up making me good friends

Thanks for this Xmas present, benbreen. I was reading Mondo2000 in the early 90s as a prepubescent while learning HyperCard. It ended up making me good friends at a particularly insane time of NYC history. I figured out how to produce music with HyperCard, using audio samples, with the 8-bit mono 22khz audio-in on the Macintosh IIsi. Using a program called Soundedit, I could build, chop and render multitrack audio files to one file. I couldn’t hear them before rendering, so it was mostly a visual waveform editing process. I would then get the rendered audio files into a master HyperCard stack’s resource fork using ResEdit, and sequence songs and albums through HyperTalk scripting. Albums would be a page of buttons that played individual songs, with graphics, and then a script to play songs in sequence that I could record to cassette tapes easily. I would press the album’s “Make Tape Side 1” HyperTalk script button and record on the tape deck at the same time, then flip the tape and press “Side 2” when the tape hit the end, after hearing that old helpful mechanical button pop sound. Boom, production. Good times, part of the foundation of my entire life. Making music that way made me some of the realest friends you can have. HyperCard ruled

DavidSJ 4y ago
A Mac IIsi was my own first computer, and I also spent quite a lot of quality time with HyperCard, ResEdit, and SoundEdit. You're going to kill me with nostalgia.
- dbalatero 4y ago
  Mine too! With 17mb of ram, which was always a goofy off-by-one feeling.
  - digitailor 4y ago
    I was working with the 5mb, and it was not enough, Bill Gates’ famed comments notwithstanding
- digitailor 4y ago
  Maybe we need the nostalgia to live! :)
- noduerme 4y ago
  aw man... I also read Mondo as a kid, and MY first mac was a IIsi!!! ResEdit, Hypercard, SuperCard (it was in color! And could compile binaries!) ... plus pirated Infini-D, Stratus, Renderman, Playmation... and a 680xxx? FPU. Sadly it seems HN love brought this site down. Web admin is probably really gonna enjoy what happened next time they check their traffic stats in a few months or years...
  - digitailor 4y ago
    SuperCard was awesome too (color came so late!) but I guess a little too little for the times. Once the web started really heating up, it was all about trying to get into places that had NIX or WinNT boxes. And by '96 I was old-enough looking to get snuck into the lab with a couple of SGIs at Parsons… ;) I ended up at a “startup” in '97 called onlinetv.com and our boxes were originally in the data center next to the NYSE and it wasn’t ludicrously expensive yet. The founder, an extraordinary Boomer who got us thrown out of the Film Center on 17th for smoking pot, moved us into the basement of a bar in the East Village called the Spiral. Where we streamed the bands playing upstairs in potato quality and sold Troma videocassettes, because the boss had been given the rights to them. Bell Atlantic put some kind of huge hub in the basement at our request that I can’t remember the details of anymore, but we got speed
dilap 4y ago
Wow, this is amazing! Do you still have any of the music that resulted? Would love to hear!
- digitailor 4y ago
  Had to dig it up, threw some of the tracks up quietly on SoundCloud in 2010. Thanks for reminding me and your interest https://soundcloud.com/filthybysunday/sets/the-lost-flatbush-tape https://soundcloud.com/filthybysunday/sets/the-lost-flatbush...
  - dilap 4y ago
    Wow, it's great! Thanks for sharing :-)
noduerme 4y ago
The Hypercard > SuperCard > Macromedia Director > Flash > Air (side shout out to proce55ing) method of letting kids make art and learn code seems like it's become a dead branch on the evolutionary tree whose trunk is now web standards and (bewilderingly) javascript. It's gotten fragmented to the point where to do these kinds of things you need to get a ton of separate packages and knowledge of code. It's amazing that a 9 year old could do this back in 1989 or so. What's really needed is a VM or just a compiler to web standards that gives this kind of open-ended creativity and focuses on the user experience for a broad spectrum from kids to creative professionals. And one that's open source, finally, and not locked to a hardware platform or a creative cloud subscription.

DavidSJ 4y ago

A Mac IIsi was my own first computer, and I also spent quite a lot of quality time with HyperCard, ResEdit, and SoundEdit. You're going to kill me with nostalgia.

dbalatero 4y ago
Mine too! With 17mb of ram, which was always a goofy off-by-one feeling.
- digitailor 4y ago
  I was working with the 5mb, and it was not enough, Bill Gates’ famed comments notwithstanding
digitailor 4y ago
Maybe we need the nostalgia to live! :)
noduerme 4y ago
aw man... I also read Mondo as a kid, and MY first mac was a IIsi!!! ResEdit, Hypercard, SuperCard (it was in color! And could compile binaries!) ... plus pirated Infini-D, Stratus, Renderman, Playmation... and a 680xxx? FPU. Sadly it seems HN love brought this site down. Web admin is probably really gonna enjoy what happened next time they check their traffic stats in a few months or years...
- digitailor 4y ago
  SuperCard was awesome too (color came so late!) but I guess a little too little for the times. Once the web started really heating up, it was all about trying to get into places that had NIX or WinNT boxes. And by '96 I was old-enough looking to get snuck into the lab with a couple of SGIs at Parsons… ;) I ended up at a “startup” in '97 called onlinetv.com and our boxes were originally in the data center next to the NYSE and it wasn’t ludicrously expensive yet. The founder, an extraordinary Boomer who got us thrown out of the Film Center on 17th for smoking pot, moved us into the basement of a bar in the East Village called the Spiral. Where we streamed the bands playing upstairs in potato quality and sold Troma videocassettes, because the boss had been given the rights to them. Bell Atlantic put some kind of huge hub in the basement at our request that I can’t remember the details of anymore, but we got speed

dilap 4y ago

Wow, this is amazing! Do you still have any of the music that resulted? Would love to hear!

digitailor 4y ago
Had to dig it up, threw some of the tracks up quietly on SoundCloud in 2010. Thanks for reminding me and your interest https://soundcloud.com/filthybysunday/sets/the-lost-flatbush-tape https://soundcloud.com/filthybysunday/sets/the-lost-flatbush...
- dilap 4y ago
  Wow, it's great! Thanks for sharing :-)

noduerme 4y ago

The Hypercard > SuperCard > Macromedia Director > Flash > Air (side shout out to proce55ing) method of letting kids make art and learn code seems like it's become a dead branch on the evolutionary tree whose trunk is now web standards and (bewilderingly) javascript. It's gotten fragmented to the point where to do these kinds of things you need to get a ton of separate packages and knowledge of code. It's amazing that a 9 year old could do this back in 1989 or so. What's really needed is a VM or just a compiler to web standards that gives this kind of open-ended creativity and focuses on the user experience for a broad spectrum from kids to creative professionals. And one that's open source, finally, and not locked to a hardware platform or a creative cloud subscription.