How HyperCard got its color back | Hacker News Reader

How HyperCard got its color back

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148 pointstodsacerdoti36 comments

My favorite HyperCard story is mostly well known: Myst was written entirely in it.

HyperCard had some primitive reflection capabilities, where you could open a different HyperCard file and read its scripts.

I was pretty blown away when I used this truck to read in clear text the entire source code for Myst. Teenage me was pretty proud of myself.

An upgrade to HyperCard was SuperCard, which supported color and a whole bunch more. I wrote a printed circuit design program in SuperCard, which generated Gerbers for double sided boards, no soldermask or silkscreen. I wish I still had it, source code and all of my designs are long gone. That was maybe around 1995 IIRC.

I used the GUI layout tool to draw the board using basic shapes, which a script would then interpret and convert into Gerbers. My boards were typically around 2 x 2 inches, sparsely populated with through hole parts. I have a hunch that I lucked out with a board supplier who could interpret my files.

I'm pleased to see that SuperCard still exists!

https://www.supercard.us/

Wasn't there a networked version of that? I feel like I was using one back in the day

> I'm pleased to see that SuperCard still exists!

Just barely. There’s not a 64-bit version (for lack of Carbon libraries), much less one for ARM64. The developers suggest using a VM:

https://www.supercard.us/supercard-in-parallels.html

LiveCode [1] [2] still exists and seems to be actively maintained!

Runtime Revolution was the spiritual successor to SuperCard, and made building color, cross-platform stack-like apps totally possible. The language is still very close to HyperTalk, so it has a much shallower learning curve than many C-style languages.

1. https://livecode.com 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode_(company)

Shame they went closed source.

> SuperCard remains a 32-bit application and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. This means it is not compatible with Catalina (macOS 10.15) or later versions of macOS.

Boooo I got super excited for a moment at the prospect of building some stacks.

Try Decker; it runs on modern Macs, Windows, Linux, and probably your web browser, too: https://beyondloom.com/decker/tour.html

Oof that is NOT a mobile friendly link

If you're interested in an environment similar to HyperCard that runs on modern computers and produces documents that can be shared easily, have a look at Decker: https://beyondloom.com/decker/

The built-in drawing tools are 1-bit, but internally Decker uses paletted color, and there are ways to import and manipulate color images, as well as draw in color programmatically: https://itch.io/post/7387198

I tried to make button with the label "Chloë" and it showed "Chlo?" so I guess it doesn't really handle non-ASCII?

Correct. Decker only supports low-order ASCII minus most of the control codes, as a deliberate simplification.

HyperCard was before my time but I love learning about it. It's pretty easy to draw a line from HyperCard to the web and web apps we all use today.

It's also funny because the creator of HyperCard (Bill Atkinson) thought up the idea wall on LSD on a park bench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18

There was actually something very much in this line, from HyperCard to Web, namely the Viola WWW browser.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW

[1] Viola 3 website (archived): https://web.archive.org/web/20190428095157/http://www.viola....

There was actually a HyperCard Gopher server. I can’t find any references to it now. But extending it, was my first paid for project in the early 90s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19266420

Do you mean a Gopher server implemented in HyperCard? (??!)

Yes

There was a wild way that Hypercard sort of brought all the pieces of the Mac together into a single app. There was the familiar Mac UI you could create with alerts, buttons, etc. Basically MacPaint was rolled in as well and a thin MacWrite for text.

It was as if over the years all the pieces of the Mac had been created in anticipation of Hypercard.

Call me a monochromatic maximalist but 1 bit graphics is all we ever needed. What good has color done us? Smash the spectacle reject the hue!

We used to make all kinds of gory and bloody stickman “side scrollers” in hypercard in 7th grade. Blood was just black spray can tool. Or if you were really skilled, animated actual drops.

I agree, which I why I created this: https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...

yo that is awesome!

Every time HyperCard is mentioned I'm bummed the world didn't get to play with HyperCard 3, which did have full color support and so much more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293935

That sounds amazing. Kind of like Shockwave/Flash but perhaps more beginner-friendly, backward-compatible with HyperCard, and built into the QuickTime format. Of course, it probably would also have become a security nightmare like Flash (and probably most popular complex media formats to date.)

Nonetheless, it's a shame that Apple killed its most successful Mac development platform aimed at regular users. As much as I like Swift Playgrounds, it doesn't seem to have the instant and easy learning curve of HyperCard.

Apple had a bunch of interesting projects at the time that they never got out the door. You kind of get the impression that it was very developer-driven, I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like all of the cool features worked but the none of the boring but necessary stuff did, and that's why they never shipped.

Apple at the time was also an example of the worst case of internal fiefdoms, where managers would get competing projects killed out of spite or to poach engineers. The only way to make your project survive was to get it rolled into some bigger, more important project that couldn't be killed (but this also meant the projects were too big and could never be finished).

Copland was an example of this - it was going to be everything and the kitchen sink.

Another example of the fiefdomness was their crazy lineup of dozens of machines - there was no coordination between the business market team and the home market team etc and they all wanted to release their own targeted models.

I’ve always wondered what the whole color thing was about.

I latched onto HyperCard as a kid and was very taken by the premise of making adventure games with it. Its lack of color always seemed odd, but was often worth tolerating because of all you could do. I really appreciate this article explaining it all.

I have an old HC stack I would really like to rebuild in a more modern environment, e.g. a Web app or something similar. Does anyone have any recommendations how can I examine the stack and extract the source?

There are several options. LiveCode [1] (formerly open source, now closed) can open HyperCard stacks and is compatible with round 85% of the native syntax - so some things will work, and some bits will need rewriting. I am pretty sure they offer a free trial so you can check to see how well it does at converting your stack before committing.

If you are on a Mac, the command-line stackimport tool [2] will convert the stack to an XML-based format which you can inspect with regular tools.

As a final option, if you just want to get your stack running on the web (and don't mind it being a bit clunky), HyperCard Online [3] (my project!) lets you upload a stack where it will be available on archive.org, and playable directly in the browser, thanks to in-browser emulation of the entire Mac / HyperCard system. You can see examples of stacks using this technology in the collection [4].

[1] - https://livecode.com/

[2] - https://github.com/uliwitness/stackimport

[3] - http://hypercardonline.com/

[4] - https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks?sort=-date

HyperCard Simulator (hcsimulator.com) might be what you’re looking for.

For Sun NeWS there was HyperLook, lots of the good ideas of HyperCard but much more powerful. There was the whole SimCity game implemented in it:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...

Its really a crime Sun didn't OpenSource NeWS.

Loved HyperCard. Remember creating a game with a classmate at school in 6th grade. It was so much fun.

I am wondering what we used in school in the mid 90s because I swear I remember making color stacks of cards and sharing them with friends.

HyperStudio was popular in education.

Looking at screen shots I think you are correct.

There were plenty of XCMDs (extensions or plugins written in native code) that allowed color and lots more features. Myst used one, for example.

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