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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

Hypercard.

It started from a-drag-and-drop equivalent of today's PowerPoint and scaled all the way up to creating the game Myst, all with no bumps or steep sections on the learning curve. I used to teach it to middle schoolers and the things they could do with it were amazing; students were teaching themselves programming because it was a simple, obvious step forward.

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I can't emphasize this point enough. Hypercard was an amazing tool, in the same class of evolutionary steps forward as the spreadsheet. It's unfortunate that nothing's come along to replace it. (I still have fond memories of Hypercard class in high school)

Relatedly, although it still exists, Apple Numbers is one of the few pieces of software that I really miss since my move to Linux. It has lots of subtle design choices that gently nudge you towards good data organization habits (e.g., If you keep an index column and title row for each dataset, you get rewarded with readable cell references).

A classmate when I was at Harvey Mudd created an Adventure-type game called “Escape from Harvey Mudd” that got sufficient popularity that the administration requested he rename it and it became “Escape from Grid Tech.”

(I also find myself thinking about so much software that has vanished over the years—my DVI previewer for VM/CMS plus the VAX/VMS change files for all the TeX software that I maintained in the 80s. There’s got to be a lot of even more interesting software where the only copies have almost certainly long since vanished.)

Wow, you've mentioned something that almost doesn't exist on the Web. The only hit on Google [1] says that dev is named Matthew Ford. I kinda enjoy these style of games - I wonder if there's any chance of it seeing the light of day again?

[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,6...

I’d guess close to zero. A few years after graduation, I bought the card game he created not knowing it was his work until I was back at my hotel room and looking through the manual and recognized the logo on the back page of the manual as the same logo he used on the Escape from Harvey Mudd.

(Fun trivia, neither Matt nor I actually graduated from Mudd. He ended up getting his degree from Pomona College and I got mine from Pitzer.)

Back when it was free, I used to use LiveCode[1] for smaller projects. It's heavily inspired by HyperCard. You could run the same source code on many platforms including iOS and Android. Not sure about the state of development now, as the Community Edition has been discontinued and it seems they only offer paid plans.

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

If only they had open sourced it, it could have lived on.

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