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As a non-programmer, I'm surprised that folks aren't talking about Myst's Hypercard/Hypertalk roots: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard-

As a non-programmer, I'm surprised that folks aren't talking about Myst's Hypercard/Hypertalk roots: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard-the-missing-link-to-the-web/2/ http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard-t... Also, Brendan Eich was inspired by Hypercard/talk as well when he was pushing out Javascript: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40brendaneich%2C+hypercard https://twitter.com/search?q=%40brendaneich%2C+hypercard Add that to the fact that Tim Berners-Lee was also inspired by Hypercard, I feel like the web that we have now really is a big, beefed-up, networked remanufacture of Hypercard. Whenever I see a Myst screengrab I always think "Look, the Web!" Again, as a non-programmer, this is probably just some useless observation, but its inspirational and evocative to me nonetheless. It gets me musing that there are some uses for what we've got now that we're not seeing, and some folks should be exploring. For me, its storytelling, and I bet we could all do some pretty damn cool storytelling with the toolkit we're sitting on. Perhaps Myst doesn't actually demonstrate a hidden value, but I always point to Hypercard and its friendliness & useability when smarter-than-me people tell me Javascript is crap. People I know from that era that were technically inquisitive tend to point to Hypercard and go: "Yeah! Hypercard was the shit!" or some variation of that.

Terretta 13y ago
I felt like the whole Flash bubble was a desperate attempt to make websites into mini Mysts.
faddotio 13y ago
Hypercard/HT was just used to stitch it together, most of the presentation was done with the help of a crapload of XCMDs. I doubt the HyperTalk involved was particularly complicated, but I can't say for sure, because they managed to make the stacks resistant to introspection.
- drawnalong 13y ago
  How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs? As in, were they commonly exchanged or reused in any sort of open-source way, or were they written in-house? I know we're talking about Myst specifically, but I wonder if there's any community parallel to what we see with libraries & APIs now. Although I'm just flipping over rocks looking for similarities, it's a blast to see when and how certain structures have been tried-out. Holy Smokes.. the more I read about Hypercard, the more I realize that Myst was quite a huge hack! The XCMD part is clutch. I'm curious what that community looked like, and how that code was exchanged. Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net?
  - tomlu 13y ago
    > How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs? There was something of a free and paid market for these, but it never really took off. Discoverability was an issue in those days. > Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net? Not that I remember.
  - faddotio 13y ago
    The closest thing to a repo that I can think of is ripping off the XCMDs/XFCNs from other people's stacks using ResCopy/ResEdit. :)

Terretta 13y ago

I felt like the whole Flash bubble was a desperate attempt to make websites into mini Mysts.

faddotio 13y ago

Hypercard/HT was just used to stitch it together, most of the presentation was done with the help of a crapload of XCMDs. I doubt the HyperTalk involved was particularly complicated, but I can't say for sure, because they managed to make the stacks resistant to introspection.

drawnalong 13y ago
How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs? As in, were they commonly exchanged or reused in any sort of open-source way, or were they written in-house? I know we're talking about Myst specifically, but I wonder if there's any community parallel to what we see with libraries & APIs now. Although I'm just flipping over rocks looking for similarities, it's a blast to see when and how certain structures have been tried-out. Holy Smokes.. the more I read about Hypercard, the more I realize that Myst was quite a huge hack! The XCMD part is clutch. I'm curious what that community looked like, and how that code was exchanged. Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net?
- tomlu 13y ago
  > How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs? There was something of a free and paid market for these, but it never really took off. Discoverability was an issue in those days. > Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net? Not that I remember.
- faddotio 13y ago
  The closest thing to a repo that I can think of is ripping off the XCMDs/XFCNs from other people's stacks using ResCopy/ResEdit. :)