6 ms·

In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of softwa

In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not just programmers) the "bicycle for the mind" that Steve Jobs spoke of. I think this is the timeline that Atkinson envisioned, and I wish I lived in it. We've lost a true visionary. Memory eternal!

asveikau 1y ago
Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard did have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our future endeavors. I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task. Multiply that by however many classrooms did something like that in the 80s and 90s. That's a lot of brains that can be influenced and have been. We can judge it as a success in its own right, even if it never entered the next paradigm or never had quite an equivalent later on.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  HyperCard was the foundation of my programming career. I treated the HyperCard Bible like an actual Bible.
  - leakycap 1y ago
    I miss the days of For Dummies, Bibles, and all the rest. If you'd read that thing carefully a few times, you usually knew your stuff. There was a finish line. Modern continual versioning and constant updates means there is no finish line. No Bible could ever be printed. Ah, nostalgia.
    - mark-r 1y ago
      They don't make nostalgia like they used to.
- jkestner 1y ago
  Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism, learning to think by making that so many of us still carry. I’m still trying to build software-building software. We do live in that timeline; it’s just unevenly distributed.
- lambdaone 1y ago
  HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic, which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry in the same way web frameworks do today.
  - Stratoscope 1y ago
    HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic. I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic. Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod. Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from first principles. I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he never looked at HyperCard.
    - canucker2016 1y ago
      A blog post about Tripod/Ruby/VB history - https://retool.com/visual-basic https://retool.com/visual-basic Cooper's solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987, when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of the bank's employees: highly technical systems administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper recalls the moment of inspiration: In an instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design problem: it would be a shell construction set—a tool where each user would be able to construct exactly the shell that they needed for their unique mix of applications and training. Instead of me telling the users what the ideal shell was, they could design their own, personalized ideal shell. Thus was born Tripod, Cooper's shell construction kit.
jchrisa 1y ago
I haven't posted it here yet b/c it's not show ready, but we have been building this vision -- I like to think of it as an e-bike for the mind. https://vibes.diy/ https://vibes.diy/ We had a lot of fun last night with Vibecode Karaoke, where you code an app at the same time as you sing a song.
Arathorn 1y ago
It’s ironic that the next graphical programming environment similar to Hypercard was probably Flash - and it obviously died too. What actually are the best successors now, at least for authoring generic apps for the open web? (Other than vibe coding things)
- jx47 1y ago
  I think that would be Decker (https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker). Not my project but I found it some time ago when I searched for Hypercard successors. The neat thing is that it works in the browser.
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    This gets mentioned pretty much every time HyperCard is --- but I can't see that anyone has done anything with it. Why use it rather than Livecode (aside from the licensing of the latter) or Hypernext Studio?
    - RodgerTheGreat 1y ago
      Some programs, games, and zines made with Decker: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker https://itch.io/games/tag-decker Unlike LiveCode (or so far as I am aware HyperNext), Decker is free and open-source: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker HyperNext doesn't appear to be actively developed; the most recent updates I see are from last year, and it can't be used on modern computers. Decker's most recent release was yesterday morning. I'd be happy to go into more detail if you like.
      - WillAdams 1y ago
        Livecode used to be opensource, which made me want to use it, but that window closed. I guess I want a Flash replacement....
        1y ago
kadushka 1y ago
inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove LLMs inspired vibe coding - that’s our timeline.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
mannyv 1y ago
Hypercard must have been a support nightmare.
zahlman 1y ago
Mr. Atkinson's passing was sad enough without thinking about this. (More seriously: I can still recall using ResEdit to hack a custom FONT resource into a HyperCard stack, then using string manipulation in a text field to create tiled graphics. This performed much better than button icons or any other approach I could find. And then it stopped working in System 7.)
dan-robertson 1y ago
Not sure that sculpting clay is the best analogy. Lots of sculpting is hard, as is turning clay, especially if you want to successfully fire the result. Maybe it is an accurate analogy, but people may understand the difficulty differently.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Hypercard is more like Lego - you can simply buy completed sets (use other's hypercard programs) - or you can put together things according to instructions - but you can always take them apart and change them, and eventually build your own.
nostrademons 1y ago
The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.
- ebcode 1y ago
  IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
    Wasn't the pointer always a hand in HyperCard?
    - WillAdams 1y ago
      Depended on context, and what the stack programmer set it to. Possibilities (per Fig. 51-1 in _The Complete Hypercard Handbook, 2nd edition_ were: - watch - busy - hand - arrow - iBeam - cross - plus
      - mock-possum 1y ago
        And in turn, from the css2 spec: > auto | crosshair | default | pointer | move | e-resize | ne-resize | nw-resize | n-resize | se-resize | sw-resize | s-resize | w-resize| text | wait | help | <url> https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-CSS2-971104/ui.html https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-CSS2-971104/ui.html
  - jjcob 1y ago
    JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was pretty sweet.
- 1y ago
DonHopkins 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675 DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002) Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham? SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy. https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-century-hypercard-stack/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-... >Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame. >How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple. >It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show. https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorld_9008_August_1990_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl... Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990 https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990 >Famham's Choice >This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up. >Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.” >On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini. https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputerExpress110_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer... Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110 https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110 >“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit. I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious. Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack: https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts I love the way Chuck holds his smirk throughout the entire interview. And Geraldo's reply to his comment: "I was a fulfillment house for orders." "That sounds sexual in itself! What was a fulfilment house?"
al_borland 1y ago
I actually had an experience like this yesterday. After reading Gruber talk about how Markdown was never meant for notes, I started to rethink things. I wanted plain text, to be future proof, then stumbled across CotEditor as a means to edit. Inside I was able to use the code highlighting and outline config to define my own regex and effectively create my own markup language with just a dash of regex and nothing more. I then jumped over to Shortcuts and dragged and dropped some stuff together to open/create yearly and daily notes (on either my computer or phone), or append to a log with a quick action. It is a custom system that didn’t require any code (if you don’t count the very minor bits of regex (just a lot of stuff like… ^\s- .). Is it a good system, probably not, but we’ll see where it goes.
garyrob 1y ago
"In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web..." In yet another alternate timeline, someone thought to add something like URLs with something like GET, PUT, etc. to HyperCard, and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web browser never happened because Hypercard already did it all.
- jandrese 1y ago
  On one hand this would be simply amazing, on the other hand it would have been a total security nightmare that makes early Javascript look like a TPM Secure Enclave.
  - duskwuff 1y ago
    Those who were there will remember: on openbackground --merryxmas merryxmas "on openbackground --merryxmas" end openbackground (And now I'm curious if this post will trip anyone's antivirus software...)
moffkalast 1y ago
Looking at the HyperTalk syntax [0] it's interesting how we take left hand variable assignment as a given while math typically teaches the exact opposite since you can't really write the answer before you have the question. Makes you think if lambda expressions would be more consistent with the rest if they were reversed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operatio...
jjcob 1y ago
We kind of had that for a time with FileMaker and MS Access. People could build pretty amazing stuff with those apps, even without being a programmer. I think the reason those apps never became mainstream is that they didn't have a good solution for sharing data. There were some ways you could use them to access database servers, but setting them up was so difficult that they were for all intents and purposes limited to local, single user programs. HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL had a learning curve, but you could easily make multi-user programs with them. That's why the web won.
- crucialfelix 1y ago
  Yes! I used FileMaker a lot, and built my first journaling system with it. Like a cross between hypercard and a wiki. It really changed my life and this lead to programming.
- specialist 1y ago
  Yes. They didn't survive the transition from workgroup (shared files on a LAN) to client/server.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  the stuff I made in Access (and later Excel) looks a lot like the stuff I generate with AI these days!
asnyder 1y ago
His legacy still exists and continues today. Even updated to modern sensibilities, cross-platform, and compatible with all your legacy Hypercard stacks! As far as I remember, progression was Hypercard -> Metacard -> Runtime Revolution -> Livecode. https://livecode.com https://livecode.com I was a kid when this progression first happened, my older brother Tuviah Snyder (now at Apple), was responsible for much of these updates and changes first at Metacard and then at its acquirer Runtime Revolution. I even wrote some of my first programs as Hypercard compatible stacks. Was quite fun to see my apps on download.com, back in the day when that meant something :). I always joked it required please and thank you due to its verbosity, but was super simple, accessible, and worked! How nice, that even today one can take their legacy Hypercard Stacks and run them in the web, mobile, etc. Or create something new in what was more structured vibecoding before vibecoding :).
- mort96 1y ago
  This seems like something completely different? Livecode looks like just another toolkit or SDK for developing standalone apps, which might be great for the handful of developers using it but certainly doesn't do anything to re-shape how users interact with their computers
  - asnyder 1y ago
    Nope, is completely the same base. Scroll the homepage, and you'll see an example of Livecode (updated HyperTalk). You can open your HyperCard stacks, or MetaCard stacks, or Runtime/Livecode Stacks in their IDE, code, edit, etc, similar to what you would have back in Hypercard days, but with modern features, updates, and additions. It's backwards compatible with HyperTalk, its current language is an updated HyperTalk (i.e. an updated MetaTalk), that incorporates all that was, but adds new features for today. Your Livecode apps can be deployed and run as cross-platform desktop applications (Mac, Win, *nix) , mobile applications, and as far as I remember, web applications with HTML5 deployment (so they say). Not affiliated with them in any way, just sharing my understanding and memories.
    - mort96 1y ago
jostylr 1y ago
There is hypersrcipt: https://hyperscript.org https://hyperscript.org which claims a descent from hypercard and certainly embraces the web. Also, this might happen in a few years if AI improves enough to be trusted to make things by novices. Hard to imagine, but just maybe.

asveikau 1y ago

Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard did have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our future endeavors. I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task. Multiply that by however many classrooms did something like that in the 80s and 90s. That's a lot of brains that can be influenced and have been. We can judge it as a success in its own right, even if it never entered the next paradigm or never had quite an equivalent later on.

cortesoft 1y ago
HyperCard was the foundation of my programming career. I treated the HyperCard Bible like an actual Bible.
- leakycap 1y ago
  I miss the days of For Dummies, Bibles, and all the rest. If you'd read that thing carefully a few times, you usually knew your stuff. There was a finish line. Modern continual versioning and constant updates means there is no finish line. No Bible could ever be printed. Ah, nostalgia.
  - mark-r 1y ago
    They don't make nostalgia like they used to.
jkestner 1y ago
Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism, learning to think by making that so many of us still carry. I’m still trying to build software-building software. We do live in that timeline; it’s just unevenly distributed.
lambdaone 1y ago
HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic, which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry in the same way web frameworks do today.
- Stratoscope 1y ago
  HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic. I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic. Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod. Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from first principles. I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he never looked at HyperCard.
  - canucker2016 1y ago
    A blog post about Tripod/Ruby/VB history - https://retool.com/visual-basic https://retool.com/visual-basic Cooper's solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987, when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of the bank's employees: highly technical systems administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper recalls the moment of inspiration: In an instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design problem: it would be a shell construction set—a tool where each user would be able to construct exactly the shell that they needed for their unique mix of applications and training. Instead of me telling the users what the ideal shell was, they could design their own, personalized ideal shell. Thus was born Tripod, Cooper's shell construction kit.

jchrisa 1y ago

I haven't posted it here yet b/c it's not show ready, but we have been building this vision -- I like to think of it as an e-bike for the mind. https://vibes.diy/ https://vibes.diy/ We had a lot of fun last night with Vibecode Karaoke, where you code an app at the same time as you sing a song.

Arathorn 1y ago

It’s ironic that the next graphical programming environment similar to Hypercard was probably Flash - and it obviously died too. What actually are the best successors now, at least for authoring generic apps for the open web? (Other than vibe coding things)

jx47 1y ago
I think that would be Decker (https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker). Not my project but I found it some time ago when I searched for Hypercard successors. The neat thing is that it works in the browser.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  This gets mentioned pretty much every time HyperCard is --- but I can't see that anyone has done anything with it. Why use it rather than Livecode (aside from the licensing of the latter) or Hypernext Studio?
  - RodgerTheGreat 1y ago
    Some programs, games, and zines made with Decker: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker https://itch.io/games/tag-decker Unlike LiveCode (or so far as I am aware HyperNext), Decker is free and open-source: https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker HyperNext doesn't appear to be actively developed; the most recent updates I see are from last year, and it can't be used on modern computers. Decker's most recent release was yesterday morning. I'd be happy to go into more detail if you like.
    - WillAdams 1y ago
      Livecode used to be opensource, which made me want to use it, but that window closed. I guess I want a Flash replacement....
      - 1y ago

kadushka 1y ago

inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove LLMs inspired vibe coding - that’s our timeline.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

mannyv 1y ago

Hypercard must have been a support nightmare.

zahlman 1y ago

Mr. Atkinson's passing was sad enough without thinking about this. (More seriously: I can still recall using ResEdit to hack a custom FONT resource into a HyperCard stack, then using string manipulation in a text field to create tiled graphics. This performed much better than button icons or any other approach I could find. And then it stopped working in System 7.)

dan-robertson 1y ago

Not sure that sculpting clay is the best analogy. Lots of sculpting is hard, as is turning clay, especially if you want to successfully fire the result. Maybe it is an accurate analogy, but people may understand the difficulty differently.

bombcar 1y ago
Hypercard is more like Lego - you can simply buy completed sets (use other's hypercard programs) - or you can put together things according to instructions - but you can always take them apart and change them, and eventually build your own.

nostrademons 1y ago

The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.

ebcode 1y ago
IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.
- Tabular-Iceberg 1y ago
  Wasn't the pointer always a hand in HyperCard?
  - WillAdams 1y ago
    Depended on context, and what the stack programmer set it to. Possibilities (per Fig. 51-1 in _The Complete Hypercard Handbook, 2nd edition_ were: - watch - busy - hand - arrow - iBeam - cross - plus
    - mock-possum 1y ago
      And in turn, from the css2 spec: > auto | crosshair | default | pointer | move | e-resize | ne-resize | nw-resize | n-resize | se-resize | sw-resize | s-resize | w-resize| text | wait | help | <url> https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-CSS2-971104/ui.html https://www.w3.org/TR/WD-CSS2-971104/ui.html
- jjcob 1y ago
  JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was pretty sweet.
1y ago

DonHopkins 1y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675 DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002) Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham? SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy. https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-century-hypercard-stack/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-... >Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame. >How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple. >It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show. https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorld_9008_August_1990_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl... Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990 https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990 >Famham's Choice >This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up. >Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.” >On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini. https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputerExpress110_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer... Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110 https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110 >“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit. I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious. Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack: https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts I love the way Chuck holds his smirk throughout the entire interview. And Geraldo's reply to his comment: "I was a fulfillment house for orders." "That sounds sexual in itself! What was a fulfilment house?"

al_borland 1y ago

I actually had an experience like this yesterday. After reading Gruber talk about how Markdown was never meant for notes, I started to rethink things. I wanted plain text, to be future proof, then stumbled across CotEditor as a means to edit. Inside I was able to use the code highlighting and outline config to define my own regex and effectively create my own markup language with just a dash of regex and nothing more. I then jumped over to Shortcuts and dragged and dropped some stuff together to open/create yearly and daily notes (on either my computer or phone), or append to a log with a quick action. It is a custom system that didn’t require any code (if you don’t count the very minor bits of regex (just a lot of stuff like… ^\s- .). Is it a good system, probably not, but we’ll see where it goes.

garyrob 1y ago

"In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web..." In yet another alternate timeline, someone thought to add something like URLs with something like GET, PUT, etc. to HyperCard, and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web browser never happened because Hypercard already did it all.

jandrese 1y ago
On one hand this would be simply amazing, on the other hand it would have been a total security nightmare that makes early Javascript look like a TPM Secure Enclave.
- duskwuff 1y ago
  Those who were there will remember: on openbackground --merryxmas merryxmas "on openbackground --merryxmas" end openbackground (And now I'm curious if this post will trip anyone's antivirus software...)

moffkalast 1y ago

Looking at the HyperTalk syntax [0] it's interesting how we take left hand variable assignment as a given while math typically teaches the exact opposite since you can't really write the answer before you have the question. Makes you think if lambda expressions would be more consistent with the rest if they were reversed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperTalk#Fundamental_operatio...

jjcob 1y ago

We kind of had that for a time with FileMaker and MS Access. People could build pretty amazing stuff with those apps, even without being a programmer. I think the reason those apps never became mainstream is that they didn't have a good solution for sharing data. There were some ways you could use them to access database servers, but setting them up was so difficult that they were for all intents and purposes limited to local, single user programs. HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL had a learning curve, but you could easily make multi-user programs with them. That's why the web won.

crucialfelix 1y ago
Yes! I used FileMaker a lot, and built my first journaling system with it. Like a cross between hypercard and a wiki. It really changed my life and this lead to programming.
specialist 1y ago
Yes. They didn't survive the transition from workgroup (shared files on a LAN) to client/server.
skeeter2020 1y ago
the stuff I made in Access (and later Excel) looks a lot like the stuff I generate with AI these days!

asnyder 1y ago

His legacy still exists and continues today. Even updated to modern sensibilities, cross-platform, and compatible with all your legacy Hypercard stacks! As far as I remember, progression was Hypercard -> Metacard -> Runtime Revolution -> Livecode. https://livecode.com https://livecode.com I was a kid when this progression first happened, my older brother Tuviah Snyder (now at Apple), was responsible for much of these updates and changes first at Metacard and then at its acquirer Runtime Revolution. I even wrote some of my first programs as Hypercard compatible stacks. Was quite fun to see my apps on download.com, back in the day when that meant something :). I always joked it required please and thank you due to its verbosity, but was super simple, accessible, and worked! How nice, that even today one can take their legacy Hypercard Stacks and run them in the web, mobile, etc. Or create something new in what was more structured vibecoding before vibecoding :).

mort96 1y ago
This seems like something completely different? Livecode looks like just another toolkit or SDK for developing standalone apps, which might be great for the handful of developers using it but certainly doesn't do anything to re-shape how users interact with their computers
- asnyder 1y ago
  Nope, is completely the same base. Scroll the homepage, and you'll see an example of Livecode (updated HyperTalk). You can open your HyperCard stacks, or MetaCard stacks, or Runtime/Livecode Stacks in their IDE, code, edit, etc, similar to what you would have back in Hypercard days, but with modern features, updates, and additions. It's backwards compatible with HyperTalk, its current language is an updated HyperTalk (i.e. an updated MetaTalk), that incorporates all that was, but adds new features for today. Your Livecode apps can be deployed and run as cross-platform desktop applications (Mac, Win, *nix) , mobile applications, and as far as I remember, web applications with HTML5 deployment (so they say). Not affiliated with them in any way, just sharing my understanding and memories.
  - mort96 1y ago

jostylr 1y ago

There is hypersrcipt: https://hyperscript.org https://hyperscript.org which claims a descent from hypercard and certainly embraces the web. Also, this might happen in a few years if AI improves enough to be trusted to make things by novices. Hard to imagine, but just maybe.