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I used Hypercard for a solid year in high school. It was black-and-white and ran on Macs that were old even for 1994, but you could do stuff that was just aweso
by claystu 12y ago
I used Hypercard for a solid year in high school. It was black-and-white and ran on Macs that were old even for 1994, but you could do stuff that was just awesome.
That was 1994--20 years ago--and my anatomy teachersomehow had a lab for Hypercard computers. He had the entire class design animated anatomy presentations that you still couldn't match today using 2014 mainstream presentation software.
There's a lot of nostalgia in programming, but Hypercard was the real deal.
- sirmarksalot 12y agoI think part of what made Hypercard so useful was that it made it really easy to make one specific kind of application, which at the time was 90% of what any single person could be expected to do by themselves. Most of the "multimedia experiences" people were making and buying were basically interactive slideshows, roughly as complex as a DVD menu. Hypercard made this easy, and you knew before you started whether or not it would be a good fit for your project. Under the covers, it was a Turning-complete language, but I'd imagine trying to make anything more complicated than Myst would be really painful. I suspect the developers of Myst probably ran into its limitations before they were done. I think the main obstacle nowadays is deployment. Back in the day, you'd have Hypercard export a native application, and then copy it onto a disk that you passed around. Nowadays, the expectation is that people can run it in a browser, or download it from an app store. Web-based deployment means you have to embed it in a website using Javascript, while app stores require setting up a developer account, and building with complicated toolchains. This isn't to say it definitively can't be done, just an explanation of why it hasn't yet.