The Complete Hypercard Handbook (1988)
archive.org
archive.org
The polygons were entered by a team of people, from the map into a small serial-to-file program, and that file was then fed to a Hypercard stack that did the polygon intersection...
...To was to be the path of the Eurostar Lille<->Paris. The land in the middle was expropriated, sometime leaving landowner with bit of land they could not reach as the next "bridge" back to it was 20 miles away!
Anyway, I used hypercard back then for a multitude of reasons at the time. It had "plugins" to read/write stuff, it had pretty good interface, it allowed code to very easily detect errors in the digitizer input, and allowed a very, very rough preview of what the "cut" would look like.
I did quite a few cool projects in my career, but every time I drive at 300km/h on the eurostar to paris, I take a little extra pride into thinking I "did" that :-)
My job was very easy, basically drawing the measurents engineers on field took daily, so we could plot them in blueprints, and store them. The project seemed to stall, I changed jobs, and years later the highway started being built. I hope some of my drawings remained, because I've used that highway a lot, and would love to think that I put my grain of sand.
> ATKINSON: Lots of improvements. This is not going to be abandoned like MacPaint was. Pretty much Apple put me on something else and gave the maintenance of MacPaint to someone else and then kept shuffling that from one person to another, and MacPaint never got maintained.
As far as I understand that’s almost exactly what would happen to HyperCard over the next few years as well.
The real trouble for HyperCard came when it was moved to the Claris subsidiary, who started charging for it [1]. No longer was the full version bundled with every Mac sold, which had helped HyperCard become ubiquitous until that point.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-lost-decade-hypercard-a...
One of the cool things about Hypercard was that it could access the entire machine. A sandboxed browser page will never (hopefully) be able to do that.
I like Hypercard because it made the visual part (the UI) visual, but still gave me the programmer full control of the logic. Here it looks like you're pushing to see how far you can go with no-code.
I'm not sure if any thoughts on this I or anybody on HN would have are helpful for your stated goals of broadening computational literacy.
That said it's a very cool project and best of luck on your research!
In case you've never seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg
Good Atkinson comment that illustrates how powerful of a tool this was for verticals: "A whole new body of people that have creative ideas but aren’t programmers will be able to express their ideas or their expertise..."
I read it front to back several Times and continued to use it as a reference for years afterward.
I was using HyperCard to build an entire operating environment for myself layered on top of classic macOS. I had the equivalent of directory indexes and file management and the ability to manage and consume multi media files… Including porn, of course, but weirdly icons were the thing I kept downloading and needed to manage…. Icons and sound files…
Then I got my first UNIX shell account and never opened that book again…
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Goodman%2C...
It wasn't expected that your house be based in reality, so some people went further with this than others by adding animations or hidden-object like game elements. I remember it being a lot of fun and something that seemed accessible to everyone regardless of experience with computers.
I hadn't put it together until right now, but I wonder how much that experience influenced my eventual educational and career path (among many other factors). It really was my first experience with creating something interactive on the computer, not quite programming in the way I do now but getting those same gears turning.
I wish that somehow it was continued and not sent out to the pasture at Claris.
Linking notes (or even creating them) is as easy as type [[ and then type the (new) name and ]] and boom it is linked or a new note created (as you type the name it searches for existing notes of course).
A powerful idea, but it appears that it is anything but new lol
Use for free on Mac, Windows, Linux. Support them for early access to iOS and Android beta apps. Stores all your notes as plaintext markdown files.
Optionally pay to sync (encrypted) with their sync across devices.
I really like Markdown - that’s what brought it to my attention.
Instead of using HyperCard to track information, like Obsidian, you might instead use it to create an information system like Obisidian.
I told him that HyperCard was the only graphical programming environment that I ever loved. My first real job had me making stacks and XFCNs.
DonHopkins 2 days ago | parent [–] | on: LSD, cargo shorts and the fall of a tech CEO
I don't know how it affected Steve Jobs, but Bill Atkinson handled his LSD pretty well.
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
>The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson.
>In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.
>I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.
>I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
>It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
>But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
>The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
>My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team.
>How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
>It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself.
>Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections.
>Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?
>I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.
>This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.
>Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
>It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
>HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
As the whole system environment grew, the scripting language outgrew the cards, but Apple seemed utterly blind, in contempt of any system that could not be shown as a GUI product. They could not tell a story, so they threw it away.
UserLand Frontier was fantastic.
* https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/frontier
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software
* https://inessential.com/2014/05/24/what_happened_at_userland
The samples that came with HyperCard where good enough though :)
And it's free to use and GPL'd.
What a weird place HN is.