I've thought a lot about HyperCard. In 1994, when I was in fifth grade, I used HyperCard to make a demo of a program that would allow you to fax a grocery orde

I've thought a lot about HyperCard. In 1994, when I was in fifth grade, I used HyperCard to make a demo of a program that would allow you to fax a grocery order to a store using a modem after you checked off the items you wanted to buy. Then the store would deliver your order to you. I didn't actually know how to make use of hardware devices like modems, but it was possible to make the user interface work reasonably well on a Macintosh LC II. I was of course bummed that there was no color. (HyperCard was black and white only unless you used proprietary extensions, which could sometimes make things run very slowly.) The author of this post seems to think that HyperCard was "before its time," but it wasn't. It defined its time, and ours. It was a huge part of what made the Mac so appealing to so many people--the ability to sculpt new technology in a custom manner. There was no comparably easy-to-use tool on the PC--Visual Basic didn't come close--and there never would be. The result was that all kinds of Mac owners developed their own stacks that solved exactly whatever problem they thought needed solving; PC owners had to hope that a software company would make something for them. What's sad is that now our computers are so much faster than the LC II I used in fifth grade, but even if they're a hundred times faster, they're certainly not a hundred times easier to develop for. Most fifth graders, even smart ones, probably couldn't write an app in Objective-C that does today the same things a HyperCard stack did in 1994. HTML5 is the next best option, but it's still not as easy. I worked on a prototype of a modern-era web-based HyperCard with a friend, but we stopped working on it because there was no VC interest and it wasn't clear if there would be a good business model. It's a shame, because HyperCard is one of the things that most excited me about computers when I was a kid. I still miss it.