Art Bits from Hypercard | Hacker News Reader

Art Bits from Hypercard

archives.somnolescent.net

135 pointstodsacerdoti28 comments

People say that Apple was lost in the 90s. Yet there is/was something special about the kind of art and software that emerged on the platform like this. It was very different to what was available elsewhere, and had a strong "mac culture" feel to it. It's a shame it ended really.

As the author points out, there is some serious talent on display here—doing so much with two colors (literally black and white, not greyscale).

The minimalist line-art style was fairly fashionable in the '80s and early '90s, with people like Keith Haring making a big splash. His work was visually distinct from what's on display here, but I think the two are not entirely unrelated.

To anyone who enjoys this black and white dithered art, I recommend checking out the old MacVenture games:

Déjà Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate, and Déjà Vu II. [1]

They are all classic point-click adventure games played in first person perspective. Lots of intrigue, some horror (Uninvited and Shadowgate), weird music, good writing. Very fun games!

I believe they can all be played in the browser though a classic Mac emulator on archive.org [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacVenture

[2] https://archive.org/details/DejaVuMacintosh

https://github.com/asvitkine/wage-engine

Scummvm too, you need to compile it with --enable-all-engines on the configure command.

Reminiscent of Victorian clip art

Yes, Mac developers tended to focus only on that platform, and a large portion of its user base was on monochrome for a long time. Therefore, you had a sizeable group of artists and devs who got developed strong techniques for monochrome art.

Comparatively, on PC I never saw CGA graphics which I didn't think were anything but compromised EGA images, which were themselves degraded from VGA images etc. Did anyone else play Prince of Persia on a CGA display?

I never had Prince of Persia, but I had 16-color Tandy graphics that wasn't EGA compatible, so if there wasn't Tandy support, I'd get CGA. Not a lot of CGA games would hook me into playing, when I had other options.

Some CGA graphics assumed you would connect it to a TV via composite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

I used to play Sim City on the monochrome 640x200 IBM PC Convertible.

There was a program called "SimCGA" which would fool programs into thinking you had a color CGA graphics adapter so it would run.

Visually, it was awful. But the novelty of playing games on a battery-powered IBM made up for it.

A lot of talented folks worked in and around Apple. Susan Kare in particular helped design and create most of the Macintosh graphics, and I bet she (or folks influenced by her) created some of these Hypercard art bits.

She also created the playing card art for Windows 3.x solitaire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare

Susan Kare on the Computer Chronicles, discussing the Mac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_q50tvbQm4

I believe she also designed the Chicago font, which was then used in iPods.

Classic Macintosh bitmap fonts were (and are?) beautiful. A couple of days ago I was amazed at how clear and legible Monaco 9 (bitmap or non-antialiased) is on a 32" 4K monitor.

Regarding Chicago, I keep seeing its TrueType imitation (which isn't as beautiful as the bitmap version, but is distinctive) everywhere.

Hypercard was an outstanding piece of software. I used to know it's scripting language top to bottom back in the day. It is a shame we never saw a real evolution of Hypercard. Hyperstudio tried, however both were mostly limited to Mac releases. Powerpoint obviously does not compare.

I got my start programming before Hypercard, however Hypercard made it even more fun. It is likely a large reason I am a professional developer today. You could build stuff to do things with minimal to no code and if you add a bit of code? Magic happens. Absolute Magic.

I don't know, maybe it is just me. I've used ASM, C, C++, and a bazillion other languages, yet I always find myself coming back to the simple stuff to get things done.

FYI, LiveCode (livecode.com) is a powerful Hypercard descendant. Runs on MacOS, Windows, and Linux. My daily-personal-use programs are in LiveCode. (Previously known as Revolution and RunRev.)

AppleScript was pretty heavily inspired by Hypertalk, and you can use that with Automator today.

Agree the special Mac feel was real & quite nice. But Apple was lost in the 90s in all the important ways besides UX because their leadership didn't even understand the business.

Product marketing: they offered dozens of ever-changing models which meant customers didn't have simple purchasing choices, they priced things horribly

Engineering: they couldn't build OS foundations, they bet on the wrong architecture & techs repeatedly which meant they couldn't benefit from rapid drop in costs

Strategy: they had a bunch of half-assed efforts (ahem A-UX) and didn't see where the market was going with hardware and failed to compete against PC clones

R&D: they wound up investing in a ton of pie in the sky stuff that was way too early for market

This type of work, as cool as it was, was them basically coasting off the investment they'd put into UX and computing frontiers in the 80s, like Hypercard which came out in 1987. Nobody else really invested in UX in the 80s so Apple wound up with a decade+ lead, a bunch of great UX talent, and a loyal fan base. But they were basically a UX house atop a zombie corp.

HyperCard is from the 80s. The framing of lost in the 90s still fits.

> Apple's strange hypermedia system

So it wasn't just me that thought it was an incredibly weird system...

I wondered why or even how anyone would actually use it.

I guess the modern equivalent is a Notion or Obsidian home page. Or a Heimdall dashboard.

I actually miss the feature in XP that let you embed a static HTML page on the desktop desktop. So much potential for customisation out of the box, but instead we have the news widget in W11 which (IMO) is trash.

At the time I really didn't care for that neo-victorian junk drawer aesthetic but now it makes me nostalgic too.

Relevant: https://www.are.na/blog/the-global-village-coffeehouse-aesth...

These are images from the Art Bits stack from HyperCard 2.0, if I remember correctly. Interestingly, they seem to be totally different from the HyperCard 1.0 Art Bits, which are the ones that are rather nostalgic to me.

Absolutely beautiful and almost tear-inducing.

I swear the clip art for 'mail' has a blue stamp on it. Amazing!

Best guess is you wear glasses and were looking at a downward angle at the picture? Something something chromatic aberration.

truly beautiful!

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