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HyperCard Simulator

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299 pointsmetadat123 comments

I'm a bit sad that HyperCard was before my time, because if I had known about it as a kid I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have done anything else. I've played with it in emulators and it's pretty fun. I love early attempts at making programming accessible to people.

To a much lesser extent, I feel like Flash (the animation program, not the player) kind of gave me that feeling the first time I used it. Flash was so immediately approachable compared to trying to figure out something like C++ with OpenGL or SDL or something, and it was just downright fun to create things with it.

I've really not found anything since Flash that I've had as much fun developing in. Gamemaker is cool and still pretty fun, but I still don't feel like it's quite as streamlined and it doesn't give me the same "anything is possible" feeling Flash did. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Check out P5js and Processing, maybe those scratch the itch?

The joy of Flash was the ease of scripting alongside vector-based illustration with keyframe animations and audio (plus intuitive asset management, onion skinning etc. etc.). Flash was downright fun indeed!

Yeah, P5 and Processing are cool, I like them, but the part of Flash was so magical was that I sort of discovered the coding part.

I pirated a copy of Flash so I could draw dumb animations, I would then convert looping animations into movie clips, and then I sort of accidentally figured out that you can attach code to those movie clips, and then I figured out how to make basic games. None of my games were that impressive, but it was ridiculously fun for me.

I like P5, I've played with it, but the integration with the animation tool is what really made me love Flash. I miss it.

While these libraries are great, doing anything with them requires writing code. Hypercard was like PowerPoint, with a point and click GUI.

Check out Downpour - probably the closest modern thing to HyperCard to make fun clicky apps and games.

https://downpour.games/

But as I understand it, to make it actually do anything interesting you still had to write Hyperscript (wasn't it?) code.

You could set up simple interactions entirely via the GUI, like making buttons navigate to other cards.

HyperCard also came with an extensive set of stacks that contained premade buttons and fields with useful scripts, and you could copy and paste those objects into your own stacks or modify entire "template" stacks into customized applications without necessarily even looking at the scripts.

The general idea was to provide users with a smooth ramp: no code -> using someone else's code -> tweaking someone else's code -> writing your own code.

And then there was Macromedia Director. Being in love with software has become such a rare experience these days.

It's hard to love software that is an organ of a remote rent-seeking entity which is free to change the software- or its terms of use- at any time.

Well thankfully the market has moved _well_ past that point. :|

We still use Chrome, don't we?

Where is the rent-seeking happening?

Charging for Photoshop as a SaaS product

Okay, but where's the rent seeking?

They could sell me Photoshop version 2024, and I could pay them $600, and just use that for the next 20 years. Instead, I'm being sold Photoshop: cloud edition for $50/month, for forever. I don't actually own my copy of Photoshop that I'm giving them money for, I'm renting it from them.

Photoshop is Adobe's product, so they get to charge for it however they please, but that's textbook rent-seeking. You could argue that they're improving Photoshop and deserve the rent, but what if I don't want those new features and I'm happy with Photoshop 2024, but regardless of that, I'm still only renting Photoshop (and the rest of the suite) from them these days.

Textbook rent-seeking is convincing a government official to make it law that people use your service. Rent-seeking isn't "charging rent" or "charging a subscription".

I don't really think it's that hard at all.

When I discovered Flash I was a literal child (12 years old), so it's not like I was reading license agreements regardless, but even if I were an adult, I could still enjoy the software simply because it's fun to use.

I certainly don't have many nice things to say about Adobe as a company, I hate that they moved to a subscription model, and I hate that they didn't open source Flash Player, guaranteeing an expiration date on the tech, but that really doesn't detract from how much I really enjoyed using the software.

There's a few causes I'd posit. We've gone through a number of tools now, and they all seem finite. We don't have time to just noodle around anymore. We have loads of other things to play with as well. And of course, life, obligations, etc; time is a rare commodity and you want to spend it on something you know you'll enjoy.

That said, last time I spent some time on just playing with software was with the Pico-8 virtual console and its intentionally constrained development tooling.

I will admit that Pico 8 is probably the most fun dev environment I've found since Flash. It doesn't give me the same "anything is possible" feeling Flash did, but that might just be because I'm more jaded and not a child anymore (as my quickly receding hairline keeps reminding me of!).

I do think that Flash was more fun for me just because it was "animation-first", instead of "programming first". It felt like I could easily make "real" cartoons, and then make a game out of it, instead of trying to bolt on a bunch of PNGs into a gaming framework. I know it wasn't for everyone, but for a kid like me, it was kind of magic.

Tangent, but was the difference between Shockwave, Flash and Shockwave Flash?

I remember that Shockwave came first and Flash followed. I also remember how the HDD would thrash whenever a website called on the Macromedia plug-in to be loaded. It would thrash with that, and with Java!

Unrelated technologies given the same name for marketing, like Java and JavaScript.

I never tried Director. Out of curiosity, what made you like it more than Flash? Genuine question.

When I was in college, my roommate (also a music student) and I would scream about how frustrated we were with Finale for notating out music.

Reading the [review and seeing GIF examples][1] of the workflow of Dorico music notation software made my jaw drop as a college student. I still want to brag to other people at work about the things I can do with it (and believe me, they do not care).

There's other software that delights me from time to time, but I've been using Dorico for probably five years now (took awhile after it came out for it to be ready for my day-to-day use) and I still can't believe music notation software can be this good.

[1]: https://www.scoringnotes.com/news/dorico-is-here-a-review/

I still believe HyperCard is the most productive development environment for end user applications ever made.

If you're looking for digital interactives that are easy, you might like p5.js. https://p5js.org/

Flash went away faster than a replacement emerged. When Flash went away, it was very clear to me that if HTML5 at that time was the future and it's immediate replacement, we were screwed.

If you're looking for something that could build next, Flutter seems to be carrying on the promise of one codebase to run on everything similar to Flash.

The other techs that I'm bullish on and are still developing are WebAssembly, and to some degree Rust.

"Flash went away faster than a replacement emerged."

Not really how it looks to me: https://haxe.org/

I feel like Haxe is more of a replacement for Flex and Flash. I like Haxe, I think it's pretty neat, but Flash was cool to me because of the animation and drawing tools that I could later add code to.

Flex was cool because it gave you a more traditional framework for making Flash apps (XML-based layouts and forms and remoting stuff), but I found it only about 1/8th as fun as Flash, because it felt more like "boring" programming, which is still fun, just not as fun to me as drawing cartoons.

I mean, if you squint a little Haxe is just an ActionScript compiler that has more targets than Flash. So it's kind of close to Flash, though not perhaps as easy to use as that XML-based thing.

I don't think that P5 has direct integration with a drawing/animation tool does it?

I think what I liked about Flash was that it was a drawing/animation tool first, and there were easy ways to bolt things onto the drawings and animation. It was slow and Flash player had a lot of issues, but I don't think P5 is really a direct replacement for that.

You all probably know this, but the way that a cursor changes to an icon of a hand when hovering over a link was directly inspired by HyperCard. In many ways a browser is a development of a Hypercard stack.

It’s HyperCards all the way down.

I wonder - if Hypercard would have had networking built in would the web still have happened?

Rummy circle all jokar follow me

HyperCard and SuperPaint were my legos as a kid. My dad is a scientist that needed a Macintosh to run calculations, so I was one of the only kids I knew who's family had a computer at the time. I built so many little contraptions using HyperCard. I have a huge fondness for black and white monitor applications and the fun little ways they created patterns using only monochrome.

Similar. My parents were teachers, and my dad had dominion of the Mac lab, even though he wasn't particularly astute with them. But, since they were idle in the summers, he was able to bring one home. First Apple IIe's, later early Mac's. I spent many, many hours screwing around in HyperCard.

We also got our first computer (an Apple II GS, the precursor to Mac. With a full color monitor!) via the "Apple for a Teacher" program where teachers were able to buy them at a significantly discounted price. I had won a creative writing contest for 3-2-1 Contact magazine where the prize was 5 games of my choice, and I was able to convince my parents I needed a computer to play them on during the rest of the year.

Heads up: If you click the window-maximize box in the upper right-hand corner it zooms out to the HyperCard Editor!

I'm still trying to figure out how to start with a clean slate deck, though. My skills are definitely rusty.

I wonder how feasible it'd be to create an entire hypercard based website with this thing.

The hamburger menu has "New Stack..."

You can also Sign in

https://hcsimulator.com/mmphosis/Stack

https://hcsimulator.com/havacow/RoundRectsRule

Discussed yesterday:

Round Rects Are Everywhere

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40781838 (170 comments)

Create new cards, make buttons that link to next card or wherever in the linear stack of cards. Transitions, effects, timing in a gloriously pixelated editor.

You've summed it up. Why can't we have this again?!

Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.

https://www.loper-os.org/?p=568#selection-660.0-660.5

PowerPoint? Maybe PowerPoint with embedded excel?

As someone who’s too young to have been around for HyperCard, what was the main draw? Was it the accessibility of the tech or was it just really well executed?

This was before the web or even Flash existed. It was a relatively simple multimedia/interactive program authoring tool for non-programmers that had WSYWIG layout. You could build all kinds of things in HyperCard from ways of interacting with databases to stories for school kids.

I remember being introduced to HyperCard and the idea of linked cards- hypertext, in other words- blew my mind. I imagine it was a lot of other people's introduction to hypertext too, even if they didn't realize it. It was the Adobe Flash of its era.

It was very accessible and I think it really made a difference that it appeared on a new computer that was supposed to represent the future of computering (i.e. had a GUI) yet was not meaningfully programmable out of the box, unlike the supposedly obsolete 8-bit computers it was replacing which came with BASIC. HyperCard looked like a thing that could fill that same ecological niche.

Edit: A bunch of takes from a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40294301

Yes.

It was a well-done Smalltalk-like language with a RAD component that made making, albeit limited, GUIs about as complicated as using PowerPoint.

You could give it to a "smart" kid, and they could, at the very least, make interactive fiction with it with very little instruction. The vast majority of HyperCard stacks could be considered to be non-linear PowerPoint slide decks---cards with buttons that called goto statements that jumped to other cards.

And in fact PowerPoint is Turing Complete and you can implement some basic programs in PowerPoint.

PowerPoint has VBA, so that is true.

It was both, really. HyperCard put the power of a GUI into your hands with simple metaphors and syntax. The language is English-like enough to feel easy to use, but not so much as to fool you into thinking it can do things it actually can't do (looking at you, Inform 7!). You'd attach code to widgets in a visual way that drove home the idea that this bit of code generated that behavior when you clicked a button, typed into a text field, etc. Oh, and, let's not forget that the HyperCard environment also implemented object persistence, which came in handy, because you wouldn't have to write file handling code, or any kind of "save state" functionality. Of course, you could also mess up a stack in such a way that it was hard to figure out and hard to fix due to said semantics, but, on balance, I'd say transparent object persistence was a pretty big win.

And, it was literally right there if you had a Mac. After selling it briefly as a standalone product for $49.95, Apple started bundling it with every new Mac for about a decade. If your Mac came with System 6, 7, 8, or 9, you had HyperCard. It also came with the Apple IIGS during that time. (Great machine, BTW!) Despite its limitations, I even remember seeing a couple of nontrivial apps implemented with it.

More than anything, HyperCard made personal computing personal again, in a way it hadn't been since computers would boot straight into a BASIC interpreter, and that was a very good thing.

If my little spiel wasn't convincing enough, take a look at this excerpt: http://www.cvxmelody.net/HyperCard%20IIGS%201.1%20-%20The%20...

> looking at you, Inform 7!

Oh! Good to hear this from someone else.

I imagine that Inform 7 has been a net positive for accessibility over older "code"[1] Inform syntax (personally, I bounced right off Inform 6 as a kid), but there were times where it felt like I needed a great understanding of the underlying model that would have been more self-evident from the "code" syntax.

That said, that's my experience from many years ago. Might be better now.

[1] Inform 7 is code too in a sense, but I mean syntax that doesn't look like natural language.

> HyperCard made personal computing personal again

To me, HyperCard is the definitive execution of Jobs’ “Bicycle for the mind” statement.

> I even remember seeing a couple of nontrivial apps implemented with it.

Myst being perhaps the most well-known example.

Worth noting that while Hypercard was the glue which held everything together, most of Myst's functionality was implemented in native plugins. (or at least that's what Robyn and Rand told me when I chatted with them at a MacWorld Expo around its release). Their earlier games (The Manhole, Cosmic Osmo, etc) had been much more pure-Hypercard affairs.

Interestingly, for Riven (Myst's sequel) they were still using Hypercard to author the game, but the game no longer ran through Hypercard; instead, it ran on a custom C++ engine which ran on the data files output by the Hypercard authoring tools.

The cool thing about Myst being built in HyperCard is you can just change the file type from APPL to STAK and open it up in HyperCard and mess around. All of the color, video and audio was built with XCMDs, but the buttons and logic around the puzzles is in HyperTalk.

I think what drove them away from being HyperCard-native for Riven was the difficulty in producing a Windows version

Macs only had a free version of Hypercard for a few years in the late '80s / early '90s, before it became a commercial product again (first under Claris then back to Apple). By the Mac OS 8 / 9 era it was a moribund product on life support, not something bundled with new systems.

It's a shame Apple doesn't do something like this today. (Or maybe they do and I don't know about it?)

People usually refer to MacOS Automator and iOS Shortcuts, but those aren't remotely the same thing.

Swift Playgrounds might be the closest thing, but it’s nowhere near as fun or intuitive as HC once was.

> If your Mac came with System 6, 7, 8, or 9, you had HyperCard.

I'm pretty sure Apple stopped development of it before System 8, and I'm certain it wasn't bundled. I'm also pretty sure (but not absolutely certain) it wasn't bundled with System 7.1.

Hypercard 2 (1990) definitely required a separate purchase (I had to talk my parents into buying it), but I think we had Hypercard 1 from being bundled with System 6.

I think Hypercard was one of last gasps of the idea that computer users should have the tools to create their own applications.

> After selling it briefly as a standalone product for $49.95, Apple started bundling it with every new Mac for about a decade. If your Mac came with System 6, 7, 8, or 9, you had HyperCard

The full story here is:

Bill Atkinson went on an LSD trip and had the idea for HyperCard (literally according to his own account), and wrote it. He gave it to Apple in return for the promise that they would bundle it with every Macintosh for free.

Eventually Apple realized that selling and giving away Macintosh software like MacWrite, MacDraw, etc, undercut their attempts at getting people to write software for the platform, so they spun off their software division as Claris, which coincided about the time of HyperCard 2.0 releasing, which became a paid Claris product. From then on, every Macintosh shipped with a copy of HyperCard Player, which just let you run stacks other people made but not author them yourself.

There were ways around the Player issue though. The copy of HyperCard on our family Mac somehow had the HyperCard application from 2.0, but the Home and other stacks from HyperCard 1, leading to me always being confused with reading any documentation, it took me literally years to realize what was going on (we didn't have AOL or anything back then, all I had were two HyperCard books from my uncle)

The last major update to HyperCard was in 1992, after which it was abandoned (but still sold, with no updates, for another decade)

There was an effort to rebuild HyperCard as a new interactivity layer for QuickTime 3.0 so that you could build multimedia applications and host them cross-platform on the web with the QuickTime plugin. This made it to an early alpha that was demoed at WWDC. Steve Jobs came back, and hated Bill Atkinson since he was a traitor who stayed at Apple instead of going to NeXT, so killed it.

> Bill Atkinson went on an LSD trip and had the idea for HyperCard

There's another (to me more plausible) story. Steve Jobs had plans for a 20MB hard drive, but marketing could not find users who wanted that much space. So Steve asked Bill to create an application full of graphics and sounds/media where people would build huge documents making floppy discs too painful.

Aside from that excellent summary of features: the model of cards in stacks sending messages to components or up through a hierarchy was SmallTalk-inspired and enabled plain old people to do a kind of object-oriented programming long before there were any languages for it.

> More than anything, HyperCard made personal computing personal again, in a way it hadn't been since computers would boot straight into a BASIC interpreter

And in a way it hasn’t been since, either. Web browsers and Javascript just aren’t the same. Javascript, shell, even Emacs Lisp are just too low-level. HyperCard gave one a GUI builder and a simple yet powerful language to get things done in, and it was everywhere.

When I was in 5th grade, HyperCard was akin to early software development for me. I would spend hours after school creating games and choose your own adventures. You could put in goto statements, loops, animations, simple functions (play this sound when clicked and then go to this page), and more. I was totally hooked and it probably led to my passion for BBS development.

You were in good company as the games:

_Manhole_ --- billed as "Where Alice would have gone if Alice had HyperCard"

and

_Myst_

were developed in HyperCard.

Wow all these years (and countless references as the "original puzzler") and I never knew Myst was built in HyperCard! That's amazing. Even today I try and find games for my kids that are the "Mysts of our generation".

I actually used Hypercard to write a BBS (of sorts) that worked via filesharing on our high school appletalk network. We had maybe 10 users at it's peak. Chatting and message boards that updated via polling a shared file. It was very amateurish but it worked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard :

> It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.

But HyperCard was not ported to OSX, now MacOS; which has Slides and TextEdit for HTML without MacPorts, or Brew,.

HTML is Hypertext because it has <a name= href=> edges and scripting IIUC.

Then there was Flash by Macromedia, which also created Dreamweaver for HTML editing before Adobe acquired Macromedia.

By now there are Open Web Standards like HTML5 and ECMAscript (ES (JS not JavaScript)), WebSockets, WebRTC, WebGL, WebGPU, WASM, and various UI-to-state bindings, as Flash called what e.g. React is used for today.

Instead of the DOM and JS addEventHandler, with React/preact you call setState(attr, val) to mutate the application state dict/object so that Components can register to be updated when keys in the state dict are changed with useState() https://react.dev/learn/adding-interactivity#responding-to-e...

The HyperTalk language has a fairly simple grammar compared to creating a static SPA (Single Page Application) with all of JS and e.g React and a router to support the browser back button and deeplink bookmarks with URI fragments that "don't break the web": https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/hypertalk/H...

TodoMVC or HyperTalk? False dilemma.

It is/was a great tool to prime minds that didn't think in stack or heap. You could see it as a weird powerpoint/excel precursor, but so much more.

My favorite hypercard game is Manhole.

It is hard to separate out HyperCard from where I was in life when I was using it.

It was 1991, my family had just bought a Mac LC, and I was 8 years old. I had learned BASIC from reading an old book from 1978 that a co-worker of my dad had given me when I expressed interest in computers. That same friend said I should try HyperCard.

It literally changed my life. It is hard to explain to people who have grown up with the internet, but at this point my family had no internet access at all (we didn't even get a modem for a few more years) and I didn't know anyone who knew how to program. Everything was self taught from reading books that I either got from my dad's co-worker or from the library.

HyperCard was so easy to learn for me as a kid. For one, it was all visual. If you wanted to add a button for someone to click, you would select "Add Button" and drag it to where you wanted it to be. In addition, you could learn how to do things from other HyperCard stacks by clicking on various buttons and reading what the script for those buttons did.

Since I was self taught (and very young), I didn't know anything about data structures or algorithms. However, HyperCard made everything intuitive to me. To persist data, you could output it into 'fields' (which like buttons, could be created by clicking 'new field' and placing it where you wanted). While I later learned how to make these fields invisible, when I first started I would just make them really small and put them in a corner behind something else. I would then write data to them from button scripts, allowing me to persist data.

Since I didn't know about data structures, I would treat everything as strings that I would store in these fields. I didn't know what an array was, so I just would create a long string of comma separated values that I would read in, act on, and then write back out to the fields. I created primitive databases by having each line of the field be a different record... I had never heard the term 'csv' at the time, but it just seemed natural to me.

Debugging was easy; I could just expand the fields into my visible view to see what was being written to them. Things being 'object oriented' was very natural, since everything in HyperCard is a visual object you can interact with.

I learned SO MUCH hacking around with HyperCard. It made me love programming, and it was so much fun. I didn't even realize how much I was learning until much later in life; I avoided majoring in computer science because I feared ruining my favorite hobby if I pursued it as a career. Later (after not finding an alternative to pursue after graduating college) I decided to give software development a try, and I realized how much I already knew just from HyperCard. Event driven architectures just made sense, because that is how HyperCard always worked. I had a pretty good grasp of data structures because I had created them visually as I needed them, without realizing what I was doing.

33 years later, I still get a thrill from programming that HyperCard instilled in me.

So yeah, HyperCard changed my life.

It’s funny, the graphic nature of Hypercard is what put me off of it.

It was essentially MacPaint with a few controls and a scripting language. While fundamentally it was persistent cards with fields, buttons, and actions, as presented with the assorted demos, it was graphically rich.

And myself, I am not graphically rich. Hardly. I find it intimidating. I find the web intimidating for the same reason. I really struggle trying to make a web page, even with a zillion templates. For whatever reason, it’s very hard for me.

It’s a cool system. It was a bit hamstrung later on by being trapped with its original card size. Even as screens got larger.

I am usually the same way, and have zero graphic design sense.

HyperCard never felt like it does designing a web page... i just placed buttons wherever, and they were never properly lined up in my stacks. All slightly different sizes, not aligned, horrible UI choices all over the place... but I never really concerned myself about it because I very rarely shared my projects. They were for myself.

Yeah, I could never do serious front-end work, I just can't do (and also don't enjoy) making anything graphical.

That said I have made a couple web apps for personal & work use (and I have a Neocities) and it is certainly a freeing experience to write them without giving a crap about aesthetics or design. I get the job done, it's not pretty, but once the functionality's there I'm happy.

Fighting with CSS to make things align properly is the least fun aspect of this, but it is pretty fun to figure out the logic to generate the HTML, interact with the backend, have some JavaScript for basic interactivity, etc.

Power, accessibility, and execution. A doctor could make a stack to manage their office. A child could make a game. A teacher could make an interactive tool to teach a lesson.

You could learn HyperCard by reading an article in a magazine, and you could share your stack with the rest of the world.

There has been nothing like it before, or after.

For me it was: WOW ... the internet before the internet ... we were kids who'd grown up programming Basic on BBC Micro's in school! (or Basic on Atari 800xl's at home!)

I remember it being called object oriented programming, and putting things together like jigsaw puzzles.

In 1998 I started work at the 'Advanced Techniques Department' of a traditional UK engineering company (Plessey). We primarily used Symbolics Lisp machines (and later, TI Explorer Lisp cards for Macs) but one of our contractors used HyperCard to build demos that could be easily taken to customer sites / used in exhibitions to get customer feedback. We also used it to mock user interface concepts, etc. We also made a lot of use of ResEdit which was great for creating and modifying assets such as icons, strings, bitmaps, etc.

Once I got into the Mac ecosystem, it was stunning how quickly you could build sophisticated (for the time) GUIS, demos etc. It sure beat trying to build interfaces using curses on a traditional unix box and was a lot cheaper than a Sun box or a Lisp machine!

Btw., with the MacIvory Nubus-based Lisp Machine for the Mac, one could call Lisp on the Lisp Machine from HyperCard.

I was a kid in the 90s and I have vague memories of various little games and programs on the family Mac (the first one we had was a Mac SE IIRC). When I think about them today, I realize... they were probably HyperCard programs.

There was one that was basically an interactive storybook about a black cat, that I forget the name of now but I know is on Macintosh Garden. 99% sure that one is HyperCard.

My dad gave me a program called Soroban that was basically just an abacus, I think it gave you simple arithmetic problems and you'd do the calculations on the abacus to figure out the answer. He actually may have written that one himself, I'm not sure. (unfortunately I don't remember how to use an abacus today)

Interested to hear about what kinds of obscure HyperCard programs you all encountered back then...

Worth noting: Carson Gross built _hyperscript[0], a HyperCard-inspired language that gets interpreted in the browser.

Also worth noting: the same Carson Gross built htmx[1].

They are separate projects, but they play together nicely.

[0]https://hyperscript.org/ [1]https://htmx.org/

Holy moly, this has a stack in it that I made 30 years ago! Unfortunately, it doesn't work correctly in the simulator.

Which stack? There are other ways of playing them today if you wanted to mess around for nostalgia-sake and also the creator of HC Simulator is quite responsive to fixing things that might not work quite right :)

The page with my name in the HyperCard 10th Anniversary Stack is a stack I made that was added to that project. It does a bunch of weird things to simulate the Mac Finder, none of which seem to work in the simulator (which makes sense, it's possible that it even uses Apple Script, I don't remember the details).

After finding out that this stack still exists, I also found it on archive.org. It works correctly (although slowly) on the Archive.org emulator: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_hc_10th_anniversary

Here is a question that's been bugging me. What is the modern day tool that achieves the same thing as HyperCard back then? Is it html/javascript?

HyperCard is more limited (which acted as a forcing function for creative solutions) and also had an approachability which far surpasses that of HTML/JS. But maybe it's the closest analog..

Even if you stick to only HTML, it's not nearly as fun to make.

Yes. Many people would argue that HyperCard was an offline precursor to the world wide web. Web pages are very similar to HyperCard stacks and the JavaScript 1.0 manual "cites HyperTalk as a major inspiration".

I would say that HTML/Javascript is not a "tool" in the same sense that HyperCard was.

HyperCard's real strength was that it allowed mere users (not programmers) to create their own apps (or "stacks", in the HyperCard parlance) through pointing and clicking, plus an English-like scripting language (HyperTalk).

We have largely abandoned the idea that users should be able to create their own apps, so there is no popular, modern analogue to HyperCard, though some people keep trying. For instance, LiveCode is a commercial product that is directly inspired by HyperCard. And CardStock is an open source HyperCard clone that swaps out something English-like for Python as the underlying scripting language.

https://livecode.com/

https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock

A lot of people have asked this question. There are a bunch of simple GUI-builder tools, including GUI builders for the web, but none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit.

When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.

Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."

The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.

As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

For one: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

It even looks a bit like Hypercard, by default (it's lo-fi, but there are colors under the hood).

Agreed, Decker has that right feel to it to be a good reimplementation of HyperCard. I’m happy it exists, especially as a desktop app.

Dare I say, Scratch?

https://scratch.mit.edu/

It might be, if it had traditional GUI objects, and if it were straight-forward to compile to a small, easily distributed stand-alone binary.

My take is that there is no such thing. This is not because there aren't tools now that do "similar things" to what HyperCard did, but there is simply no longer a personal computing environment in which such a tool fits so instrumentally and seamlessly.

HyperCard came about in an era where personal computer users were still being inculcated into what using a computer even meant. That was the moment to let end-user programming and malleable systems like HyperCard take over. (A somewhat similar thing might be said of OpenDoc, but that's a bit different)

From a corporate perspective, what even was HyperCard? A way computer users could just make their own basic applications? How do you continuously make money? What about your computer's dev community? Because of these and other commercial concerns, both the way users today engage with personal computing _and_ the tools we have to manipulate our computing environments are strongly determined by a consumption model -- and there exists a strong bifurcation between users and programmers.

We have no true HyperCard equivalent today because personal computing went in a different direction.

How does this compare to Decker ?

https://beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

I haven't had a chance to sit down with this simulator, but having used both Decker and HyperCard before, Decker has a much steeper learning curve for a beginner.

Would you mind expanding upon that with specifics?

The programming language in Decker is called Lil and it's a cross between APL (how it works on a vector) and a procedural language. Once you get the hang of it, it can be very powerful. But as someone that used APL (and K) and has experience with multiple other language, it was a tough grind. It helps to look at the code behind the tutorial, there are lots of great examples there.

The author (who is super responsive to questions) is clear that they liked the look of the dithered black and white from the early Mac era. So it's more of a homage to that than a hypercard.

It's fun to play with once you get the basics down. Simple drill and practice is easy to build (ie States and Capitals). I'm sketching out how to do the Ham Radio technician license test practice in it. I'd like to be able to do the math for some of the examples on the screen.

HyperCard Simulator is a centralized, web-based service which aims for compatibility with historical HyperCard stacks, including the HyperTalk scripting language.

Decker is an open-source standalone application which is similar in some ways to HyperCard, but differs in many details, including the use of a unique scripting language descended from APL. Decker is not designed to be compatible with HyperCard stacks.

Okay, so you click on the zoom box to go to the "editor". But: if the hypercard player was emulated, why wasn't the editor emulated? Or even an attempt made to be reasonably similar to it? Instead it's replaced with something completely different.

Pretty cool! Two of my cheesy old stacks are included in the massive index card and one of my original online friends from the days of eWorld has his stack featured on the second card (the "Are You A Space Alien" stack).

I notice that this simulator doesn't load XCMD and XFCN plugins; I distinctly remember using an XFCN to include graphics in pop-up windows and my stacks running in the emulator don't trigger that functionality. It doesn't affect the main stack functions but no one will ever find the easter eggs in my stacks without them.

Many corporate apps at HBO were written in HyperCard. Unfortunately I joined at the very end of that era, around 1996. I built a few things in HyperCard there, but it was clear by then that HyperCard was done.

If memory serves, devs were pretty upset when Jobs killed it. Think there is even a video on YT where one dev gives Jobs a mouthful. Using it, I can see why. It was an internet precursor.

I want this:

- as an actual app on my Mac

- not in retro/bw but with a high res and high colors support

Please

In Sonoma, you can choose Add to Dock in Safari and make a nice little progressive web “app”. Just a cool feature.

As for the color, it’s there now. It imports any stack resources from the old AddColor extension, the buttons and fields support both color and bevel level properties in the picker, and you can use any online image as a button icon you want.

LiveCode?

https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp...

I used, and liked, the predecessor called Revolution which was closer to the original HyperCard ethos. They are now stuffing so much into LiveCode it feels lost in itself. As a company I find them all over the place with this product.

Moreover, they gave up on their opensource Community Edition:

https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?t=14667

They did yes, after quite a few funding campaigns targeted at their users. I felt quite bitter about that and I fell for the hype myself.

For those who may be wondering what became of the erstwhile Free & Open Source LiveCode Community Edition (LCCE), check out OpenXTalk:

https://openxtalk.org/

and Forum:

https://www.openxtalk.org/forum/

and Downloads:

https://openxtalk.org/OXTDownloads.html

Some of the download links are for RCs of the OpenXTalk DON'T PANIC! Edition (DPE) IDE , which is a fork of LCCE

GitHub of OXT DPE:

https://github.com/OpenXTalk-org/OpenXtalk-IDE-DontPanicEdit...

Other download links are to another fork, OpenXTalk Lite Edition (OXT Lite), which seems to have recently been rebranded to "tIDE."

tIDE Homepage:

https://www.tsites.co.uk/sites/other/other.php

EDIT: LiveCode, not Live Code.

Thank you for this. It lives! I will try these forks out. Don't you just love open source!

Thoughts on the rebranding of tIDE? I'm sorry I missed it as "OXT Lite", but worry about it being presented Athena-like as born fully-formed from a single developer...

Try Basilisk 2 running MacOS 8 and HyperCard.

Being an "actual app on your Mac" is probably not going to be a great target for a revival of Hypercard. I would imagine a website, HTML5 "app" or some other portable technology would make way more sense and have much greater reach.

The whole point should be to make the environment operable on the "cheapest computer" a person may have access to - an old Android mobile.

Oh interesting, the relationship web on the Twin Peaks stack is truly awesome.

Someone put a whole lot of effort into this and it shows, it's genuinely a great way to present the data.

It's weirdly refreshing to see something that so much passion went into. It's got the same energy as the early days of the internet.

[Using Dark Reader extension darkreader.org] In Death Mall 3000, the inventory text color is almost white on white, can't see unless adding css rule div[id="-6"] > div { color: black; }, but I just realized it was because of DarkReader and disabling that fixes everything

Just wasted half an hour at work playing the Get Rich Quick game. I remember the old days of point and click games, not knowing what the next step was, and just aimlessly clicking every item on every screen trying to make something happen

If you liked Get Rich Quick they made a sequel called Lost & Found that's quite a bit more expansive! You can play it on archive.org here: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_lost-and-found

Wow, I loved Ziggy Gets Out! This feels like a great medium for children's books, and also for a way for kids (and adults) to express themselves in a constrained way. Reminds me a bit of KidPix.

I have some vague memory of this, I think this is what made me want to get into web development/Flash.

if you're looking to selfhost a modern alternative you could try tiddlywiki

there's an active community and people use it in very different ways

Rummy circle all jokar follow me

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