Hypercard on the Archive (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Hypercard on the Archive (2017)

blog.archive.org

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The Internet Archive lets you run HyperCard stacks by emulating the entire Macintosh system, but you can also use the HyperCard Simulator:

https://hcsimulator.com/

You can click on a menu at the top right to bring up a list of stacks. It simulates HyperCard directly rather than simulating an entire Macintosh, so it’s a lot faster and more convenient to work with. Not all stacks are compatible, but there’s a wide selection.

To clarify, all stacks are compatible, including the built in color tools. If there’s an XCMD inside that has not been supported yet, the stack will still run otherwise.

Discussed at the time (of the article):

HyperCard On The Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14985604 - Aug 2017 (115 comments)

If you want to stick with HyperCard, I recommend LiveCode (www.livecode.com). I have a dozen stacks or more that I use to keep track of things, remind me, my own very personalized calendar program, etc etc etc.

They no longer have a free version, but to me it is well worth the approx $100/year.

story of LiveCode stopping their open source version https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28370865

and an active fork https://github.com/OpenXTalk-org/OpenXtalk-IDE-DontPanicEdit...

I always felt like Hypercard was one small step from owning the www & modern browsing experience. It was earth shattering in its time for the ability to rapidly build multimedia experiences & applications...

IIRC, the Myst game creator was largely inspired by HyperCard.

More than that, the first Myst game is literally a hypercard stack.

They didn't make their own engine until the sequel, Riven, and the "Myst Masterpiece" remake.

Other Brøderbund games were HyperCard stacks too. I had Cosmic Osmo, and I remember playing The Manhole at a friends. These inspired me to make a Jurassic Park game using HyperCard. Sadly I didn’t get far.

Yeah, I just vaguely remember something about it from a documentary I saw a while back.

Not being an Apple/Mac user, I was able to get into the "About Hypercard" box, but never back out. There doesn't appear to be a way to close dialog boxes.

Keep clicking in the box until it goes away.

[Edit]

Ok... weird GUI behavior, thanks for the help. I had no expectation that the above menus had anything to do with the open window. Especially when if you click on them, they don't open.

---

Steps to reproduce:

Open HyperCard 2.0

[1] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_hypercard-20-macintalk

Boots into Macintosh, awesome!

Open "Hypercard Sys 7" diskette from upper right corner

Open up Hypercard 2.4 folder

Open "About HyperCard"

Shows About Hypercard screen, no way to close it. The Close box in the upper right does nothing. Escape does nothing, clicking incessantly does nothing.

file > quit hypercard

There's no menu on the window. It's a dialog box with no way to close it.

[Edit] It's since made sense... but single-clicking on the menu at the top of the screen briefly shows something, but it doesn't stay open, so I didn't think it was associated with the dialog.

It's a horrible UI in terms of discoverability.

the bar at the top of the screen

On the original Mac, you had to hold the mouse button down while making a menu item selection.

I am not sure why they didn’t do what Windows later did, and allow users to open the menu with a click, and select an item with a second click, but it might be as simple as that the thought hadn’t crossed their mind.

As a user that started my GUI life on an older Mac, hold-release menus always felt intuitive and "sticky menus" really felt weird when I first encountered them.

The logic behind that initial design was that menus were really just "buttons with options" and a mouseup should initiate an action. The menus had few items so there wasn't much dragging involved.

As software evolved, menus grew and spending an entire click on "present me with your selection of options" just became sensible.

I don't know why Apple made the decisions they made, but we have to keep in mind that GUIs were novel to both developers and users back in the day. It is probable that Apple tested both click & release and click & hold on users, with the results indicating the latter was a better solution. Why would disappearing menus be a better solution? Perhaps people got trapped in menus when they stayed up after releasing the mouse button. We are talking about the early 1980's here, which was a time when some people were quite intimidated by computers. Few of those who had used computers would have encountered a mouse before. (Think of the famous scene with Scotty using a Mac in Star Trek IV.) Something like clicking on an unused area of the screen to make the menu go away would not have been intuitive, while some would have feared unintended consequences from clicking on the wrong thing.

sticky menus are modes

they change what a mouse click elsewhere does

this is very bad for usability

larry tesler was the chief scientist of apple about that time and guess what his license plate says

the menu at the top of the screen was always associated with the application you were running on the macintosh

this is from 01987

its discoverability was pretty decent compared to the other user interfaces that were popular in 01987, like ms-dos, lotus 1-2-3, the bourne shell (no tab completion), the bsd c shell (control-d for filename completion), emacs, vi, commodore 64 basic, vax vms dcl, etc.

Go to the menu bar on the top of the screen, click and hold the left mouse button, move down to quit, then release the mouse button.

What is happening here? Double clicking on "About HyperCard" opens a document in HyperCard. What you were calling a dialog box is actually a window containing the document. The "close box" in the top right hand corner is actually a resize button. It doesn't appear to resize anything since the Macintosh tries to make the size of the window fit the size of the window contents. Since the contents already fit, it did not have anything to do. For whatever reason, they decided not to include a close button. A close button would have been a single square in the top left hand corner. I don't know why they omitted the close button, but I am guessing it is because of another peculiar behaviour of the Macintosh: closing a window does not quit an application or even return to the desktop. Normal behaviour simply left the application menu on the top of the screen, with an apparently empty desktop. (For those who have used old Macs, I'm referring to the era before Multi-Finder.) This would have been confusing in school environments, particularly with really old versions of the operating system.

If you think those behaviours are mind-boggling, I would suggest trying out RISC OS. GUIs of that era behaved differently from each other since standard behaviours had not been established yet.

EDIT: trying to make the description more clear for someone who has not used Macs prior to System 7.

This was my introduction to writing computer logic or “programming”. Such a fun time. I remember distinctly plucking up the courage to ask for the HyperCard books from our school computer guy, it was that cool. GoldenEye HyperCard I was famous for 15 minutes.

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