G'day,

Back in the day, I loved HyperCard. Some of you have seen a few of the stacks I made when I was a teen, back in the early 90's... Its ease of use and power was certainly a contributing factor both to my desire to study InfoTech at Uni, and - also probably why I pulled out - after finding that not all programming languages were as... literal and event driven.

http://www.hyperactivesw.com/SaveHC.html

These people created a petition back a few years ago to try and convince Apple (Steve) to resurrect HyperCard. Obviously, they failed.

But what if HyperCard were still live? What do you think it would now be capable of? Would you use it? Would we have at our disposal a free (part of iLife?) tool that could let any fool create their own games/etc for use via the Net? Has Apple missed out on controlling what is now the Flash & Java empire?

cheers

cosmic

HC was seriously rocking in its day. It's a little hard to imagine how things were back then but there was nothing in the world like it. Bill Atkinson, who was responsible for a lot of inspired early work at Apple, wrote it. I understand that a lot of people learned to program with HC.

I played with it a little bit but it was already deprecated when I got my 1st machine & it was only later that I found out how amazing it was.

There was a highly enjoyable stack I had once called Band-O-Matic, which created band names in the adjective-noun style, like Barking Meat Wagon for example. I wasted many hours with this. There were others but they're lost in the mists of time - to me at least. Probably on a floppy somewhere...

Just had a look on the tubes and found some stuff on Atkinson here.

In Year... 10-or-less... I did a couple of "IT" classes. One had us using Basic computers, programming "Karel the Robot" - either derived from C or Pascal, I'm not sure.

Well - whilst maybe 2 or 3 of us easily grasped the concept, half the time all the others just copied those 3's code...

BUT then we had a go at HyperCard... and everyone was able to produce a "game" that may/may not have rocked the world, but at least they could do it!

And of course, those who actually really knew what they were doing could create amazing "stacks"...

Even maybe without reverting back to "HyperCard", I would love to see Apple add a new app... iCreate or something... that applies the same approach as used in iWeb (just found that out this week!), iMovie, iEtc, and allows the every-day user to create software that can be shared online...

When I started to learn HTML, I started to "convert" my Doctor Who Database stack into a html website... But ultimately it wasn't powerful enough to achieve what I envisioned.

With all that Apple is... I'm sure they could bring complex levels of programming to the masses...

I think this is the aim of Automator actually and, whilst it is reasonably good in its own way, I don't think it's anywhere near as inspired as HC was. That said, I don't think it deserves anything like the criticism I've heard it get around here. AppleScript, for all its faults, is still pretty cool too and about to get a nice boost in Leopard from the looks of it.

And all of them completely shit on BASIC in any form.

The Adobe Flash and Flex and AIR empire, hell yeah.

Don't forget about SuperCard, it's still around. I developed in both once

I miss Hypercard, but it's nice to know we are getting Stacks back in Leopard

Oh damn, not the same, sorry

I remember using someone's Star Trek stack quite a bit in the past, and now use Wikipedia instead. It's a paradigm shift no doubt.

I always heard of SuperCard, but never had access to it. I did recently download its "player" to see if it would play my HyperCard Stacks, but it didn't really like them.


*lol* Well, at least maybe someone at Apple was thinking of HC...

Mm, now I'm having flashbacks to The Late Show...


Yes! I had that Stack... a list of episodes etc, and it let you note whether you had it on VHS etc...? I remember when I downloaded it, being re-inspired to push through with my Doctor Who stack... not that it ever saw completion.

The real problem with HC is that Apple never really took it seriously enough, which I think is quite a shame...if they had kept updating it (they never got past version 2.5), it would be incredible now.

Oh god no.....that program brings back bad memories from high school. :P I hated that stupid program!

Yes... it feel into a crack and fell through to China... I was reading on that site I referred to above... apparently it became entangled in the whole Claris Vs Apple drama...

I own version 2.3... I OWN version 2.3... Apple software I went out and PURCHASED... When I was like about 17!!!


I liked Karel.. I reckon I could still write code for it... HyperCard though... such nice coding... and so... like... logical...

Yeah HyperCard was what I thought defined the Mac back in the day. People who have only been into Macs this decade I'd say legitimately love the platform, but I don't think they'd fully understand what a big part HyperCard played in the past.

In my 3U computer studies class, we had the choice to program with Pascal for DOS or HyperCard on a Mac. Being the only one with a Mac I obviously chose this and came up with a kick arse train timetabling stack. The student who scored the next highest did a Pascal version of Hang Man. He got as far as the title screen which said "Welcome to Hang Man".


For a trip back in memory lane, take a look at:

http://www.smackerel.net/black_white_01.html

I reckon HyperCard is the single best thing about apple. Better than hardware of any kind, software or OS of any kind than I've seen from apple (itself not third parties) ever. Better than any mac. Better that tiger or leopard.

SuperCard, HyperCard Player, etc IMHO all suck by comparison.

The power of HyperCard extended beyond many of the barriers any other scripting or programming language I know, beyond the realms of the possible into the realms of the imagination, and beyond the realms of the application into the dangerously exposed inner workings of the OS itself.

In a way I'm almost scared to think what would be possible now, almost a decade on from the last dev, with say "HyperCard 6.2". Perhaps the world is much safer (albeit much less cool) without it. Perhaps it was way ahead of its time.

Perhaps an interesting addition to the "command line vs GUI" argument or thread would be the reflection upon HyperCard and HyperTalk in the same light ("anything you can do with a mouse in the GUI I can do better in the message box" etc), or perhaps they could teach conventional means a thing or two about interaction between the two.

The flexibility and intuitiveness in syntax was nothing short of mindblowing. The self-editing capabilities and the hierarchy and "passing" of commands still outshines the relative clumsiness of many languages today.

Long live HyperCard.

Amazing....

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/APPLE-Macinto...QQcmdZViewItem

Still got Hypercard .. somewhere

I'm kicking myself... for some reason or other I deleted it - just kept my stacks... and now although I have version 2.3 on floppy - can't get it onto my eMac... (short of buying a USB floppy drive... assuming the disks still work...)

I downloaded HyperCard Player a lil while ago... it's obviously been updated since what I remember... One of my friends showed me how you could turn the "player" (free with all Macs) into the full version (of course without the textures, tool stacks, help etc)... (was that a loosely guarded secret or what?) But it wouldn't work on the version I could download from Apple's website.

There are many loosely guarded secrets

most have probably been forgotten from lack of use.

Apple really fumbled the ball with HyperCard, by not continuing to keep it actively developed. If they had only had the foresight to give HyperCard decent networking capability, Apple would be a true giant in the computing world. After all, Sir Tim Berners-Lee looked at HyperCard and thought "Hmm, wouldn't it be cool if you could do this over a network so that cards could be on disparate machines?" and thus, the World Wide Web was born.

cosmichobo: I still have the full suite of the last HyperCard release as a .img file, PM me and I'll see what I can do about getting it to you.


B.