25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web | Hacker News Reader

25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web

arstechnica.com

106 pointsevo_935 comments

Apple should make new version of HyperCard for iOS. Take some of the functions of Automator, add a whole lot more access to OS functions, media and have people make their own Apps.

Throwing together a program in a fun interface would be nice to get all those people creating, rather than playing Angry Birds on their way to work.

Let them combine their Garage Band songs, photos, videos, art, and writing into a nice little package that utilise functions of the device, their computer, Apple TVs, etc.

I'm not a programmer (and never used HyperCard) but I'm sure I could handle making something like: When [my Location data] is within [Y radius] call [vibrate; play song], [show this picture; display text "You've arrived at your station!"

Or I could prototype a point-n-click adventure with graphics drawn on my iPad. Or I could tell it to play an alarm every morning at 7am, then take a photo. Backup photos on X device. On the 365th day make all photos into a movie. Add text "A year in the life of [ENTER NAME]"

I think Apple needs to remember the reason a lot of people bought Apple products in the first place was because their simplicity allowed the technology to get out of the way and let people create. iPhones; social networks are all one-sided consumption, and people are getting bored. They love making stuff.

I think if Apple doesn't give people more of this kind of creativity, then people will flock to whoever does.

...Even cooler would be a combination of Project Glass and that LEAP system. I could be drawing blueprints, shaping 3D models, or making programs in augmented reality. It would be cool to look into a room and see dimensions of all the walls - see virtual previews of furniture in the scene; pull and arrange table sizes, shelves, bend and alter models. Then you could package it up to make a catalogue for other people to browse and choose options from.

I'd have a stack of cards, media files, functions, etc. in front of me. Draw lines between objects, stack, rearrange cards, manually code some parts. Some kind of combination of making an art collage and a circuit board.

Hmmmmm....

Hypertalk has gone on from strength to strength. I'm surprised that the Ars Technica writer should be so uninformed.

Runtime Revolution have been providing a Hypercard environment for at least a decade, and the technology they acquired had been in use since about 1992 (it was originally designed for Unix environemnts).

Runrev's Livecode produces hypercard-like applications that run on Windows, OS X, linux, android, and iOS. It also runs server-side, but I have no use for that part of the tecnology.

http://www.runrev.com/

And no, I don't work for them. I've just been using the technology for the past 10 years or so.

I used RR a looooong time ago to write a configuration wizard for a Java development tool set. The product used text files for configuration, and over the years the files had swollen in incomprehensible ways as programmers stuck new options into them willy-nilly.

Project management decreed that a wizard would ship with the next release. I was a full time development manager, but and as all the programmers were busy building features, I could get away with grabbing this task for myself. I used RR and built it in a week-end. A week of polishing and catering to PM requests followed, and we were ready to ship on Windows and several flavours of Unix.

Then somebody blabbed that it was written in HyperCard rather than Java. Faeces was Flung Furiously at Fans. In the end, it was rewritten for the next version over the course of a month or two. But it was Java! I engaged in a little revisionist history: Instead of saying that my work was thrown away, I took credit for building the successful prototype.

That's an awesome idea. It would be very cool to have HyperCard or similar as an iOS app. The great thing about HyperCard was that you could just pick it up and start drawing on the cards, then later learn a bit of coding to make it all go.

What happened with the restrictions on apps that execute user provided or downloaded code? I remember an app being kicked for including a BASIC interpreter and a rule banning any third-party interpreters on iOS, but it was relaxed to allow things like Unity games using LUA scripting.

Has anyone recently produced an app that lets users program on iOS?

There are a few: gambitrepl, pypad & codea.

Arthur van Hoff (who wrote the first Java compiler in Java, developed AWT and HotJava, founded Marimba and more recently Flipboard) developed a user interface tool for the NeWS window system inspired by HyperCard, that was called GoodNeWS, HyperNeWS and then HyperLook.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html

It used NeWS PostScript both as its graphics model and its scripting language, and it extended the HyperCard Object=>Card=>Background=>Stack delegation model to send messages over the network to the client (what we now call the web server -- the terms client and server have switched place since then).

Wikipedia describes NeWS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

In many ways NeWS had an excellent design for thin-networked clients

+ moving much of the processing to the display

+ allowing clients to reduce network traffic by defining new operators

+ separating graphical user interface semantics from client program semantics.

+ the PostScript drawing model, which is far easier to use and more powerful than other graphical APIs, even compared to ones being used 20 years later.

NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS:

+ used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming.

+ used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML/CSS for rendering.

+ used PostScript data instead of XML/JSON for data representation.

I worked with Arthur on developing HyperLook into a commercial product, and used it to port SimCity to OpenWindows on the Sun workstation.

Here are some brochures, manuals and articles about GoodNeWS/HyperNeWS/HyperLook, and the HyperLook SimCity manual:

http://www.scribd.com/collections/3512581/HyperLook-Manual

Micropolis is the open source descendent of the original SimCity code that I ported to Unix.

http://www.micropolisonline.com

I loved Hypercard.

In 1992 I was in my final year of secondary school and got into a science extension program which paired students with industry.

Somehow or other I ended up with a guy from DSTO (Australia's publicly funded defence arm), and he thought it would be a good idea for me to test the results of underwater acoustic transmissions against some results they had (he didn't tell me why this was needed, but it was pretty obvious..)

Anyway, he was a Fortran programmer who used a VAX. My family had a Mac Plus with Hypercard. He gave me "Numerical Recipes in Fortran"[1] and I ended up implementing Newton's method[1] in Hypercard. After that I felt I really understood calculus...

[1] http://www.haoli.org/nr/bookf.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtons_method

There is a language called LiveCode (http://www.runrev.com ) that is the spiritual successor to HyperCard. It uses a modern day xTalk language, it has network and database access and it cross compiles to Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android. Oh and it has a special engine that works like PHP, you can build websites by mixing HTML and xTalk.

I've been using it as my main development toolkit since 2005 and been quite happy. I am scheduled to speak at their world wide conference this month, so if you have any question, just ask. If you liked HyperCard and want to see what it could have been, just check LiveCode

I used Revolution years ago. Glad to see it's still going strong. :)

I remember creating a hypercard project in college to demonstrate video lighting techniques, allowing you turn on/off the various lights in a setup. Everyone including myself was blown away by that at the time & I think back once in a while how similar it was in a lot of ways to web development.

I'm thoroughly convinced that without hypercard my career path would have been very different.

Same here! My school was fortunate enough to receive a shipment of Apple computers when I was in 7th grade. I quickly discovered HyperCard, and spent my free time the rest of that year building a "fantasy RPG" with it. Totally ugly, barely worked, only made it about 5 screens deep, but I learned to write "code" without really realizing it, and I fell in love with building.

Who knows when (if) I would have gotten into programming without HyperCard.

Ditto. Playing Myst while using Hypercard started totally new ways of working for me too. What was your experience & what did you make with Hypercard?

I'm not that old, but the same is true about me and Flash. I think Flash is a bloated piece of software right now and should die (last great version was 8)...

As a non-coder HyperCard opened the door to interactive media for me and I've never left. I loved that program to death and was still using it to do what we would now call wireframes as late as the mid-90s. What pains me is that I can run the latest version of Windows via VMware on my Mac but can't launch good olde HyperCard and see my old stacks.

There are ways to run System 7 and HyperCard today

http://basilisk.cebix.net/

http://minivmac.sourceforge.net/

http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/

The harder part is finding a copy of full HyperCard (not just the later viewer) in a format understood by an emulator that runs on modern Mac or Linux. At least, I couldn't the last couple times I tried.

I looked into a few of the Classic mac emulation packages and the amount of work always looked off putting -- in fact I think some even required finding a ROM if I recall. It's actually easier for me to dust off my giant G5. And yes abecedarius another challenge you may find is that if you have the real Hypercard it would be a series of floppy discs which can no longer be read.

Side note: My other dream has been to run NeXTstep on my Mac -- I understand that can be done too, but it looks like a ton of work.

What about this project I've been working on:

- HyperCard influenced design (Stacks/Cards)

- Focused on mobile use, HTML5 with offline use

- RESTful server component with git as the backend storage

- Seperate web app for stack access & design

- JavaScript as scripting language

- Local Storage/offline cache for data storage

Been toying with it as a personal project - I have prototype working...

Sounds awesome. Any samples online?

I keep re-writing it... :-)

Taking the week off next week to work on this again - going to start with a demo Stack online.

Well, good luck next week! :D

My team has been debating about building something similar for years. I just want it to exist!

I think one of the things that stands out is that if the patent laden litigious environment that exists within technology and software today was in effect in 1990 we would probably be still waiting for the internet...

I used Hypercard and programmed some, as a teenage. It is a stellar example of how a tech inventor can think of openness vs closeness; www at CERN by Berner vs Hypercard by some typical Apple guy.

Berner was looking at RPC as his dayjob to give control commands to machines. What Berner did, was to use the Interface Builder's precursor on the NeXT he got as a toy to put a gopher-like link into the text properties field, where the font boldness, size ...and colour and underline were. This was quite graphical programming, and not world-wide at the time (NeXT was an expensive toy). Hardly an innovation. And not everybody was allowed to toy around -- certainly not western equivalents.

Nobody has really heard of Groff, Pellow, Nielsen and the rest, who made it work multiplatform, over the command-line, etc. ie. world-wide. Nobody was astonished by them back then, because what they were doing was nothing special: several such systems existed already both commercial and academic. They were the cheap students, whose work allowed it to be opened up and given away without charge. WWW grew like it did because of two reasons: it was free of charge, because it was actually made by cheap and disposable students, and the then changing climate of the deregulation of the internet, of which some companies ie. Vermeer, Netscape could take early advantage of.

CERN likes cheap students' work, and sell if off as stellar examples of innovation by CERN. Read Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Veltman if you feel to downvote this because of CERN.

> "some typical Apple guy."

I'm not sure Bill Atkinson qualifies as just "some typical Apple guy." That aside, in 1987 there really wasn't a concept of "open vs. closed," at least not in its modern interpretation.

Indeed. In the 80s and early 90s there was a huge "public domain" scene, but no-one thought about source code.

I used BSD Unix on a VAX in the mid 80s - pretty sure that came will full source.

Right, but I am talking programs written by hobbyists on Mac, Amiga, ST, and so on.

I remember playing Sabacc freeware on a HyperCard stack with my old LCII. Unfortunately I eventually figured out the pseudo-random card shuffling algorithm and it lost all appeal to me.

edit: Found it. http://hem.passagen.se/johan99/files.htm

I learned hyper card in 6th grade middle school computer class, 1996. It really was great... I created games.

Two things:

1) I miss HyperCard!

2) This seems to have been influenced by HyperCard: http://www.citia.com (Disclosure: I am not connected to them at all).

HyperCard 2012 could be positioned as a better (and more powerful/useful) Powerpoint. Put it on the web and make it multiuser.

One big lesson from HyperCard is the need to keep releasing updates.

HyperCard never got around to supporting color. At least, not properly; I think there were extensions to do it. HyperCard was released in 1987, the same year as the first color mac, but was only monochrome. The "Color Tools" came out in 1992(!) but still made life difficult by not treating color pictures the same way as monochrome pictures. Given that the whole idea of HyperCard was to have pretty graphics you can interact with, the lack of color was pretty crippling by the time most macs had color screens.

It was finally discontinued in 2004, and they'd never got around to implementing proper support for color graphics.

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