30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web (2012)

That was cool to learn that Myst was a Hypercard deck frontended with beautiful graphics and music. My later to become wife loved the game.

I bought a non-Apple hypercardish environment that ran on Windows 3.1 . It was my 2d year of law school and one of my professors was a huge tech advocate and for 2 credits she let me develop an interactive Will generator to produce Forida-compliant wills with all the bells and whistles the new T&E statutes allowed at the time such as an accompanying document that didn't need all of the execution formalities to dispose of certain kinds of tangible personal property, so long as the document was referenced in a properly-executed Will.

I hope educational institutions are still encouraging young people today to leverage their nerdishness into non-nerdy careers if that's what they want. As for me I did my 15 years practicing law and I'm glad to be back letting my geek flag fly although for heaven's sake people, enough with the ageism. Yall be my age soon enough if you're fortunate.

I feel like we got a “true successor to HyperCard” 20 years ago, in the form of Lotus Notes. It was essentially “HyperCard decks shareable via email, with each deck backed by its own automatically-allocated Firebase-like document DB co-hosted on the author’s email server.”

(And, further, each email client had its own client cert, which it used for 1. code-signing decks it had authored, and 2. signing API requests to the DB server when the deck makes them. So every deck, and every request, would always have a “verified” email address associated with it.)

Essentially, it was the set of functionality provided by Google Sheets + Google Forms (and a bit more), without any web stuff being involved.

Obviously, it became a cesspit of badly-made, overly-interlinked Intranet apps, but this was more to do with the target market of non-IT enterprises—it was no different than what such organizations did with Excel.

I’d really love to see what a system very much similar to Lotus Notes, given a fresh coat of paint, and targeted to consumers, would be used for today. An app anyone could open up and make a little DB-backed interactive experience, then either push it to an in-app inbox of their friends [where it could then be re-shared further, virally] or onto a cloud service others could browse within the app.

If anyone wants to see what HyperCard was like to use or fancies a nostalgia trip, ViperCard is a web recreation: https://www.vipercard.net

Hypercard...just that name brings back a flood of almost forgotten memories that harken back to the 1990-1991. At that time, unless your parents were rich or you sold drugs or something, you couldn't afford to pay the $5/hr that The Source or Compuserve charged, so of course, you called your local BBSs.

I was deeply involved with BBS software development at the time, and after 2 years of futzing with ANSI graphics, the whole BBS community was looking for a new terminal paradigm, something that would (finally!) allows us to display pictures (porn?), change fonts, and even stream video (oh, the raw ambition).

Back then, your modem dialer was also your software terminal (yeah, makes perfect sense right?). Soft terminals emulated popular-but-limited UNIX-based hard terminals like VT52 or VT100 etc. Remember, software used to be EXPENSIVE because, of course, memory was expensive!

Oh yeah, Hypercard...so I remember discussing the problem with my partner, Tim Stark, and the folks at Galacticomm, the BBS company we worked with. Someone mentioned Hypercard as an almost ideal paradigm for building a frontend that allowed for hot-linking of text, graphics, and sound.

We actually built basic hypercard functionality into our flagship product, Magisearch, that I still contend was one of the very first online search engines ever created for general purpose online searching. We quickly realized that since we already had the indexes built for all the documents, or pages, we could quickly scan the returned text and highlight any already indexed words and "link" them.

Then one day, a true programming genius (I unfortunately cannot remember his name this morning, and thats a shame because he deserves full credit for his efforts) dropped a floppy on my desk and said "run it"...and up came a hybrid dialer/BROWSER!

This guy had done it!! I can't remember what he called the product, but I'll never forget the date...January 19th, 1993...my mom's birthday. Our BBSes were finally going to have rich text capabilities...hyperstacks!

And then came January 23rd and I product I DO remember the name of, Mosaic, dropped, signalling the end for BBS's and my software business.

Back in the day, I made a hypercard deck, including a soundtrack made from a highly processed flute riff, as a "brochure" for my consultancy. I handed it out on 3.5 inch disks in place of business cards. For someone like me who was not a multimedia production expert, it was miles beyond anything else one could do using tools on a personal computer. It still compares favorably to most site-builders in terms of a balance between simplicity and programmability.

I did my 4th grade assignment on the human heart in a hypercard stack instead of the giant piece of cardboard with pictures and text..

Had it animate, and had sounds that I recorded.. everything.

This was 1991-1992...

I got a fail.. the Teacher wanted me to "print it out and put it on cardboard".

I eventually got a good mark.. but that's another story

HyperCard and Logo on Mac introduced me to computer programming when I was 8 years old.

My company produces what is a spiritual successor to hypercard on the web + mobile.

https://tiled.co/

My first programming class in highschool was with hypercard. I'm not sure we actually learned anything outside of playing might and magic.

Saw an indie dev working on a horror game using the hypercard aesthetic over at: http://www.wohgame.com/ It scratches that nostalgic itch.

I have never been a hypercard user but everything I have seen/read about it suggests that it would be a great replacement for my Evernote use case (accessible anywhere personal database of stuff). I have looked at some re-implementations but lack of Linux and/or mobile device (Android) support have ruled out the ones I have seen.

Back then I used Hypercard to design UIs, made it really easy to prototype stuff so that product people could understand. I think Hypercard is Bill Atkinson's biggest gift to humanity (even more so than Quickdraw).

I often wonder how much work it would be to turn emacs into a hypercard system.

I will always upvote anything Hypercard.