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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

> imagine if spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel stopped being developed and eventually just disappeared – that’s the level of significance that HyperCard had.

I often hear similar claims about the significance of HyperCard.

But if HyperCard was so significant to so many people, wouldn’t it have been ported and/or rewritten over the years to still be available today? Even if not by Apple, then by someone else?

That’s happened to Excel and other programs. So why not HyperCard? (Serious question)

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HyperCard is like Concorde: it was replaced by less powerful alternatives (eg PowerPoint) that took away any hope of mass success and left the remaining audience too small to be viable.

That's why later successors like LiveCode have to aim themselves at niches of the original HyperCard audience, like those who want an easy dev tool. Which is nice, but misses the tool-for-everyone dream of the original

PowerPoint is the 25%.

The other 75% was Netscape Navigator as

1) distributing info on the web is so much better than on floppies. If you were not in the loop, it was very difficult to get hold of interesting Hypercard stacks.

2) Hypercard was fixed-screen-size, whereas web used whatever screen size you had.

3) The web was cross-platform and in color. Hypercard was mac only and b/w only.

In some cases it has to do with the operating system cooperating or not. Modern operating systems don't allow certain things to work due to restrictions in what apps are capable of. Consider a Smalltalk OS, where you can dynamically link objects across "apps" in interesting ways (see Alan Kay's "Tribute to Ted Nelson" where he shows a demo of this). You simply cannot do such a thing with mac/windows/linux.

In the case of Hypercard, I cannot say whether or not this is the case. It could be that Hypercard is absolutely possible today. But I wouldn't doubt it if it was somewhat unusable on modern systems due to this "cooperation" issue I mentioned. It may need buy-in from other apps and/or the host OS for it to work fully as intended.

For another example, consider emacs. Emacs effectively gives you the lisp-machine experience, but the problem is it isn't integrated with the rest of the system. You sort of have to live in an emacs bubble. With hypercard, you could surely get it running, but would you be in a bubble? Ideally you could use hypercard to script the rest of your system as well.

What we should want is something like a "card" that could "link" to a specific cell in a spreadsheet, as an example. Or a card that could open a PDF to a specific page. The more the rest of the system "plays along", the more powerful something like hypercard could be.

Hypercard was replaced by the World Wide Web and Power Point.

The World Wide Web because it solved distribution and vendor lock-in.

Power Point because slide shows were an important use case Windows Desktops were much much more common in the 1990's and 00's than Macs.

Power Point also provided much better integration with wordprocessors and spreadsheets.

One of the downsides of hypercard was that there were many XCMDs that were buggy, poorly written and became unmaintained. You could create a stack and send it to people and it would hang their machine. If not immediately an OS update came and bang! Often solving that issue was too much for the average user. It languished as Apple languished and people moved on.

Hypercard was amazing in it's prime, so it's place in history is assured. Many people who were not "programmers" were tricked in to being programmers on a 30MHz machine! They created amazing products. It also influenced the development of Netscape and the way Javascript treated events/actions (attaching actions to buttons for example as opposed to a buttons sending events in to an event loop).

It's also one of the finest examples of a domain specific language empowering a normal user to do more. It's powerful but uses human concepts. Something we seem to have forgotten completely with our obsession in integrating Javascript, Python or Lua in to everything and then blaming users for not being empowered.

There is still a lot to (re)learn from these technologies.

This is the best explanation I know:

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568

In brief: in the early 1980s, home computers were designed with the primary purpose of owners programming the machines themselves. They came with BASIC interpreters and how-to-program manuals. (Examples: ZX Spectrum, Oric-1, BBC Micro.)

But in fact, what happened was that most owners just played 3rd party videogames on them, which they bought ready-made on pre-recorded media.

So late-1980s home computers mostly had much better graphics and sound for better games, and some didn't have a BASIC at all, or only limited ones (examples: Amiga, ST) and better BASICs were left to the 3rd-party market (e.g. STOS, AMOS, GFA BASIC, BlitzBASIC.)

The Mac was on the crux between these generations, with one foot on both sides. Fairly poor graphics and sound, but it did have a (limited) BASIC. It focused on delivering a radically better UI, and this briefly included a radically better end-user programming environment, HyperCard.

But that isn't where the market went, and it wasn't where Steve Jobs was so focussed, which was on the UI and improving it, not user programmability.

Cynical interpretation: making it easier for owners to write their own polished, professional-looking graphical applications would potentially reduce the lucrative aftermarket for additional applications software, so Apple killed off this line of evolution.

It died within Claris/Apple because nobody knew how to describe it and sell it. Was it a programming environment? You didn't need to be a programmer to use it. Was it a database? Claris also sold FileMaker so it couldn't be that. It could have been a "multimedia authoring suite" but it was black-and-white and to get color images or video you needed janky XCMDs.

So it languished in Claris and ended up so out-of-date it would need a complete overhaul. The best chance it has was when they attempted to integrate it into QuickTime as an interactivity layer, but that was still when Apple was in internal management chaos and someone quit and the project died. It made sense Apple abandoned it, they had bigger fish to fry.

The question GP asked was why didn't someone else create a clone and sweep the floor? And that's a good question! There was SuperCard, and a bunch of clones on Windows. But despite expanding on HyperCard and fixing its issues none of them caught on. Why?

Fair.

It wasn't sold, was it? I think it was given away free with every Mac.

There _were_ multiple clones, as you say.

I think in part it made sense in the context of the Mac as the first mass-market GUI computer, with strict HCI guidelines, a small screen with no colour and limited sound... As computers got more multimedia abilities, including later Macs, Hypercard got left behind.

HyperCard 1 was free and included with every Mac but HyperCard 2 came out after Claris was spun off from Apple and was a paid product and Macs only came with a "HyperCard Player" version.

Edit: i just saw this in Wikipedia, apparently Atkinson commented on the death of HyperCard 3 in an interview " Steve Jobs disliked the software because Atkinson had chosen to stay at Apple to finish it instead of joining Jobs at NeXT, and (according to Atkinson) "it had Sculley's stink all over it".[9]"

There’s LiveCode (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode)

Which is the modern evolution of HyperCard to my understanding

https://hypercard.org/

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