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Comment by zeroq | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing.

As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.

People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications.

And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.

This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.

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>>> And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.

This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.

By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.

HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.

Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.

I discovered that we got that back in a sense.

If you task an llm with writing a CLI and have it use it, then it hides the "user interface" to a sufficient degree that you can pretty much build any kind of app/functionality in a couple days and it feels "professional".

AI as UI with a somewhat universal affordance.

The Fallout analogy is perfect. Limitation stimulates imagination. I think that’s part of why essentially limitless AI models produce things that are so devoid of it.

Constraints really breed creativity. The demoscene is probably my favorite example of it.

This is why the perpetual obsession with creating new genres in university art departments is so dumb. One told a prospective student (my wife's friend) "we don't do beautiful here" as if that signals erudition.

Real beauty comes from expressing something coherent within constraints such that the constraints become the means of expression.

I was happy to see gen Z art students dropping this sort of snobism when I visited a student art exhibition made for an edition of the Long Night of Museums in my city.

Instead of the usual hideous red, black, grey and white that seemed ubiquitous since at least the 80s along with the most terrible textures one could find, there was blue, yellow, different shades of green.

And one painting featuring an exchange of text messages.

It took browsers and web dev until, IDK, maybe 2010? to match the interactivity and capability of Hypercard circa 1994.

The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.

But nothing like the ease of development since FrontPage until Web Forms and they weren’t as good.

the original Myst was created using HyperCard... which in and of itself is a crazy app with a huge impact on gaming in general.

I did not know that!

Cyan shipped at least one Hypercard game, before Myst.

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

All of Cyan's games were in Hypercard up to Myst. (Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx were the other two.)

Myst ran in Hypercard in early Mac releases but switched to a cross-platform runtime Broderbund built to sell Myst on Windows CDs (and consoles and more).

Riven was also majority designed/prototyped in Hypercard as a development platform, but more directly targeted from the beginning that same runtime Broderbund built for running Myst cross-platform.

ScummVM refers to that Broderbund engine as Mohawk [0]. It's interesting all of the other games that used that engine, including several major Carmen Sandiego games. A lot of those Living Books series also felt like Hypercard stacks. I wonder if those Carmen Sandiego editions might also have been at least partially prototyped in Hypercard (though some of them seem to me like they'd be more complex than Hypercard).

[0] https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Mohawk

> too old... to be able to grasp... experience

All you have to do is get people to try using it.

It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.

> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.

Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.

And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.

I am not quite the right age for hypercard as well, but I did have my chances to interact with a variety of game making tools aimed at kids that were amazing for creating event-driven logic. Likewise in the professional world, tools aimed at business professionals (like MS Access), that kinda were abandoned - and there used to be a whole spectrum of stuff that connected WYSIWIG editors and simple languages to various levels of programming tools.

The demand for this was huge.

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