Hacker News Reader

Comment by paleogizmo | Hacker News Reader

I added the weasel-word "spiritually" for that reason. If I had a teenager wanting to make a gui program I would point them to PSG as it doesn't require much conceptual understanding nor many lines of code to bang something together. There are still graphical programming environments out there and there is even a general one in the form of LabVIEW community edition. However, they just don't have the network effect of Python which is the de facto "learn to program" language.

View on HN

But HyperCard wasn't really for making GUI programs - i do not even think many people who used it viewed themselves as programmers (at least not any more than people who make complex stuff on Excel do). Sure, you can place buttons and input fields, but it was more of a hyperlinked painting program that also allowed you to enter interactive elements.

I think it was closer to something like Powerpoint (which i think also allows you to put interactive elements and jump between slides) and Access (though actually Microsoft Works' database is much closer to it) than even Visual Basic (as was mentioned in another comment).

OmniGraffle can be used to scratch some of the many needs that HyperCard fufilled.

Shapes can trigger not just navigation or show/hide but also AppleScripts. Can be quite useful to throw together a quick MVP, which HyperCard was awesome for.

As someone who made a great many HyperCard stacks, I like this characterization:

> I think it was closer to something like Powerpoint (which i think also allows you to put interactive elements and jump between slides) and Access

Hypercard occupied this weird in-between space. It was kind of a programming thing, but not exactly. You could certainly program it. And it could load XCMDs and XFCNs to expand the universe of things you could do with it. But it was a lot like PowerPoint too. I wasted a ton of time playing with transitions (dissolve, fade, swipe up, swipe across, etc) between cards.

I think HyperCard was the last thing of its kind. By that I mean its a throwback to when the default assumption was that anyone who bought a computer was, as a matter of course, going to program it. The same way many machines in the 1980s booted into BASIC interpreters and pretty much all of them included one in the default environment. HyperCard was the last effort that I can think of to take that idea and make it accessible to people who didn't know what "programming" was.

The last macs that shipped with it were, IMO, the last computers that came, by default, with everything their users needed to create and distribute programs for them and the assumption that most of their users would do just that.

I'm not sure that idea can be replicated anymore. I'm sure it can't, at scale.

I like the way you contextualize this. What's interesting is to contemplate that Macs still come with / have free access to Xcode and apps like Developer and Swift Playgrounds, which would seem to fit into what you are saying above in terms of free tools assuming the purchasing user wants to program. But what tools like that say about the complexity of modern programming vs. the wonderful simplicity of HyperCard is an interesting philosophical exercise.

There's the complexity difference, for sure. But the thing that's standing out to me right at the moment is the fact that the mac I got in 1991 just assumed I was going to use HyperCard. The same way the one I got in 2015 assumed I was going to want to use Keynote or Numbers.

HyperCard was a weird beast. While it was a programming tool, it wasn't the kind of programming tool people who programmed for a living were, by and large, using to build the applications they were selling.

(Make no mistake. Some did build the applications they sold with HyperCard. I built and sold one that way. See also Myst.) The tools that currently come free with any OS X license (or Windows, in the case of VS community editions, the sdk, and VS Code) are the tools that real working programmers use to build the things they sell. And it's real working programmers that pick those tools up.

The spirit I remember for HyperCard was: you have this computer now. You're going to want to program it. Here's a thing that does that. The business end was absent. People bought computers to create things, and one of the things you'd create is a program.

And, just to be clear, I'm not waxing nostalgic for 90s programming. Programming and the tooling that enables it are clearly better in pretty much every way now for people who know they want to do that.

I'm nostalgic for this bit of programming tooling that was intended for non-programmers and is now quite obscure. (See: livecode) That is unfortunate because much of its virtue used to lie in the fact that it was just __there__ by default when you fired up a new computer.

> As someone who made a great many HyperCard stacks...

I don't suppose you still have the files for those stacks lying around? I maintain the HyperCard Online project, a collection[1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks on the Internet Archive directly emulated in-the-browser.

I've made an uploader[2] that anyone can use to contribute their own stacks to the collection. It accepts all formats of stacks (all the .sit, .bin, .hqx-style compression formats that were common in the 80s/90s, disk images, and just raw HyperCard stacks).

It's always great to see what stacks folks are uploading - recently a large number of Japanese stacks were uploaded, covering a wide range of topics.

[1] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks

[2] http://hypercardonline.tk/

I still do have some, I think, but I'm not sure I can currently extract them from the floppies and/or syquest cartridges I saved them on. I will scour my drives and upload any I can find.

This is the first time I've seen your project, and I love it!

The two that I would most like to find and post online were

* A matrix math tool * A gadget that monitored a serial port for errors from a giant, industrial label printer

I also had one that was very similar to the then-popular tool BackOrifice but for macs of the day.

If I can get any of them onto a modern system I will definitely upload :)

That would be awesome! Those sound like some really interesting stacks - particularly the industrial monitoring one, as there currently aren't many stacks like that in the collection.

I'm happy to answer questions about moving stacks from old media onto more modern systems - there are a few 'gotchas' particularly due to the way old Macs used resource forks and new systems... don't. Email hypercardonline@gmail.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com