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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

A world where Apple had acquired PowerPoint in 1987 could have hurt Apple's own HyperCard, which was also released in 1987. HyperCard did have its moment of success from its release in 1987 to roughly the mid-1990s.

Back on our timeline where Microsoft acquired PowerPoint, HyperCard could have been a strong competitor to PowerPoint well into the 2000s had (1) Apple gave HyperCard's development more love, (2) Apple authorized a port to Windows during the Windows 3.1 era, and (3) Apple developed functionality to convert HyperCard stacks to Web applications and released this around 1995 or 1996.

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That's interesting — Hypercard as preso software.

I feel PowerPoint + Microsoft had to legitimize presentation software as a standard business piece of software first though. Maybe Hypercard was too early in that regard then.

There was a moment when the creators of the presentation and the presenters were able to become one - just like Excel took number fiddling from the dedicated wizards to any manager, so to did Powerpoint take slide decks from the slide wizards to the managers. It took a bit to catch on but once it did it was wildfire.

Hypercard was very much a presentation software. It had the best animations at the time, compared to Powerpoint. And it supported features that seem obvious once you hear about them: from any slide (card), you could click on an element of the slide, and it would take you to another slide about that element. Powerpoint is still mostly focused on linear "next slide" all the time.

In other words, with Powerpoint, you are presenting to a passive audience. With Hypercard, you were handing the control of the presentation to the attendee, and they could drive the presentation wherever they wanted.

Hypercard just needed templates.

It had some functionality in that direction, and you could easily bridge the missing features with HyperTalk scripts. I think the real limitations were the 1-bit graphics and the lack of widespread availability of projection video hardware before the early 90’s.

edit: I just remembered that I’ve seen people give presentations built with HyperCard. I recall one where the presenter pretended to be surprised by a system crash (== displaying a Macsbug screenshot in the middle of the presentation) but neglected to hide the HyperCard hand cursor.

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