In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not just programmers) the "bicycle for the mind" that Steve Jobs spoke of. I think this is the timeline that Atkinson envisioned, and I wish I lived in it. We've lost a true visionary. Memory eternal!
Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard did have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our future endeavors.
I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task. Multiply that by however many classrooms did something like that in the 80s and 90s. That's a lot of brains that can be influenced and have been.
We can judge it as a success in its own right, even if it never entered the next paradigm or never had quite an equivalent later on.
HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic, which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry in the same way web frameworks do today.
HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic.
I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic.
Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod.
Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from first principles.
I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he never looked at HyperCard.
Cooper's solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987, when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of the bank's employees: highly technical systems administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper recalls the moment of inspiration:
In an instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design problem: it would be a shell construction set—a tool where each user would be able to construct exactly the shell that they needed for their unique mix of applications and training. Instead of me telling the users what the ideal shell was, they could design their own, personalized ideal shell.
Thus was born Tripod, Cooper's shell construction kit.
I miss the days of For Dummies, Bibles, and all the rest. If you'd read that thing carefully a few times, you usually knew your stuff. There was a finish line.
Modern continual versioning and constant updates means there is no finish line. No Bible could ever be printed. Ah, nostalgia.
Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism, learning to think by making that so many of us still carry. I’m still trying to build software-building software. We do live in that timeline; it’s just unevenly distributed.
His legacy still exists and continues today. Even updated to modern sensibilities, cross-platform, and compatible with all your legacy Hypercard stacks!
As far as I remember, progression was Hypercard -> Metacard -> Runtime Revolution -> Livecode.
I was a kid when this progression first happened, my older brother Tuviah Snyder (now at Apple), was responsible for much of these updates and changes first at Metacard and then at its acquirer Runtime Revolution.
I even wrote some of my first programs as Hypercard compatible stacks. Was quite fun to see my apps on download.com, back in the day when that meant something :).
I always joked it required please and thank you due to its verbosity, but was super simple, accessible, and worked!
How nice, that even today one can take their legacy Hypercard Stacks and run them in the web, mobile, etc. Or create something new in what was more structured vibecoding before vibecoding :).
This seems like something completely different? Livecode looks like just another toolkit or SDK for developing standalone apps, which might be great for the handful of developers using it but certainly doesn't do anything to re-shape how users interact with their computers
Nope, is completely the same base. Scroll the homepage, and you'll see an example of Livecode (updated HyperTalk).
You can open your HyperCard stacks, or MetaCard stacks, or Runtime/Livecode Stacks in their IDE, code, edit, etc, similar to what you would have back in Hypercard days, but with modern features, updates, and additions.
It's backwards compatible with HyperTalk, its current language is an updated HyperTalk (i.e. an updated MetaTalk), that incorporates all that was, but adds new features for today.
Your Livecode apps can be deployed and run as cross-platform desktop applications (Mac, Win, *nix) , mobile applications, and as far as I remember, web applications with HTML5 deployment (so they say).
Not affiliated with them in any way, just sharing my understanding and memories.
The Web was significantly influenced by HyperCard. Tim Berners-Lee's original prototypes envisioned it as bidirectional, with a hypertext editor shipping alongside the browser. In that sense it does live on, and serves as the basis for much of the modern Internet.
IIRC, the mouse pointer turning into a hand when you mouse over something clickable was original to HyperCard. And I think Brendan Eich was under a heavy influence of HyperTalk when created JavaScript.
JavaScript felt like it took the best parts of C (concise expressiveness) and the ease of use of HyperTalk (event handlers, easy hierarchical access to objects, etc). It was pretty sweet.
I honestly don't think the modern web is a legitimate hypertext system at this point. It was already bad enough 20 years ago with flash and serverside CGI but now most of the major websites are just serving JavaScript programs that then fetch data using a dedicated API. And then there's all the paywalls and constant CAPTCHA checks to make sure you aren't training an LLM off their content without a license.
Look up hyperland, it's a early 90s documentary by Douglas Adams and the guy from doctor who about the then-future hypermedia revolution. I can remember the web resembling that a long time ago but the modern web is very far removed from anything remotely resembling hypertext.
Mr. Atkinson's passing was sad enough without thinking about this.
(More seriously: I can still recall using ResEdit to hack a custom FONT resource into a HyperCard stack, then using string manipulation in a text field to create tiled graphics. This performed much better than button icons or any other approach I could find. And then it stopped working in System 7.)
- Minecraft
- Roblox
- LittleBigPlanet
- Mario Maker
This is what kids do to be creative.
Slightly more serious (and therefore less succesful):
- Logo/Turtle Graphics
- Scratch
- HyperStudio
HyperCard was both graphic design and hypertext (links). These two modalities got separated, and I think there are practical reasons for that. Because html/css design actually sucks and never became an amateur art form.
For writing and publishing we got Wiki, Obsidian et al, Blogs (RIP), forums, social media. Not meant to be interactive or programmable, but these fulfill people's needs for publishing.
(see the subsubsection "Arcs for toolpaths and DXFs")
Jupyter Notebooks come close to allowing a seamless blending of text and algorithm, but they are sorely missing on the graphic design and vector graphics front --- which now that I write that, makes me realize that that is the big thing which I miss when trying to use them. Makes me wish for JuMP, a Jupyter Notebook which incorporates METAPOST --- if it also had an interactive drawing mode, it would be perfect.... (for my needs).
I think that would be Decker (https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker). Not my project but I found it some time ago when I searched for Hypercard successors. The neat thing is that it works in the browser.
HyperNext doesn't appear to be actively developed; the most recent updates I see are from last year, and it can't be used on modern computers. Decker's most recent release was yesterday morning.
There's a fair amount of usage of it on Itch.io, if you are into that indie crowd. I was skeptical of it at first -- the whole 1-bit dithering aesthetic seems a bit too retro-twee, but I find it it is the best Hypercard-alike in terms of functionality -- it "just works" as compared to most Hyperclones that seem more like a proof of concept than a functional program.
Pretty sure the next after Hypercard was Macromind (later Macromedia) Director. I recall running an early version of a Director animation on a black and white Mac not long after I started playing with Hypercard. Later I was a Director developer. I recall when Future Splash released -- the fast scaling vector graphics were a new and impressive thing. The web browser plugin helped a lot and it really brought multimedia to the browser. It was only later that Macromedia acquired Future Splash and renamed it Flash.
Flash completely missed the most important point of HyperCard, which was that end users could put it into edit mode, explore the source code, learn from it, extend it, copy parts of it out, and build their own user interfaces with it.
It's not just "View Source", but "Edit Source" with a built-in, easy to use, scriptable, graphical, interactive WYSIWYG editor that anyone can use.
HyperCard did all that and more long before the web existed, was fully scriptable years before JavaScript existed, was extensible with plug-in XCMDs long before COM/OLE/ActiveX or even OpenDoc/CyberDog or Java/HotJava/Applets, and was widely available and embraced by millions of end-users, was used for games, storytelling, art, business, personal productivity, app development, education, publishing, porn, and so much more, way before merely static web page WYSIWYG editors (let alone live interactive scriptable extensible web application editors) ever existed.
LiveCard (HyperCard as a live HTTP web app server back-end via WebStar/MacHTTP) was probably the first tool that made it possible to create live web pages with graphics and forms with an interactive WYSIWYG editor that even kids could use to publish live HyperCard apps, databases, and clickable graphics on the web.
HyperCard deeply inspired HyperLook for NeWS, which was scripted, drawn, and modeled with PostScript, that I used to port SimCity to Unix:
Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook
>"Apple’s Hypercard was a terrific and highly successful end-user authoring system whose media was scripted, WYSIWYG, and “symmetric” (in the sense that the “reader” could turn around and “author” in the same high-level terms and forms). It should be the start of — and the guide for — the “User Experience” of encountering and dealing with web content.
>"The underlying system for a browser should not be that of an “app” but of an Operating System whose job would be to protectively and safely run encapsulated systems (i.e. “real objects”) gotten from the web. It should be the way that web content could be open-ended, and not tied to functional subsets in the browser." -Alan Kay
>[...] This work is so good — for any time — and especially for its time — that I don’t want to sully it with any criticisms in the same reply that contains this praise.
>I will confess to not knowing about most of this work until your comments here — and this lack of knowledge was a minus in a number of ways wrt some of the work that we did at Viewpoints since ca 2000.
>(Separate reply) My only real regret about this terrific work is that your group missed the significance for personal computing of the design of Hypertalk in Hypercard.
>It’s not even that Hypertalk is the very best possible way to solve the problems and goals it took on — hard to say one way or another — but I think it is the best example ever actually done and given to millions of end users. And by quite a distance.
>Dan Winkler and Bill Atkinson violated a lot of important principles of “good programming language design”, but they achieved the first overall system in which end-users “could see their own faces”, and could do many projects, and learn as they went.
>For many reasons, a second pass at the end-user programming problem — that takes advantage of what was learned from Hypercard and Hypertalk — has never been done (AFAIK). The Etoys system in Squeak Smalltalk in the early 2000s was very successful, but the design was purposely limited to 8–11 year olds (in part because of constraints from working at Disney).
>It’s interesting to contemplate that the follow on system might not have a close resemblance to Hypertalk — perhaps only a vague one ….
SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))
>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!
>The Axis of Eval: Code, Graphics, and Data
>Hi Alan! Outside of Sun, at the Turing Institute in Glasgow, Arthur van Hoff developed a NeWS based reimagination of HyperCard in PostScript, first called GoodNeWS, then HyperNeWS, and finally HyperLook. It used PostScript for code, graphics, and data (the axis of eval). [...]
>What’s the Big Deal About HyperCard?
>"I thought HyperCard was quite brilliant in the end-user problems it solved. (It would have been wonderfully better with a deep dynamic language underneath, but I think part of the success of the design is that they didn’t have all the degrees of freedom to worry about, and were just able to concentrate on their end-user’s direct needs.
>"HyperCard is an especially good example of a system that was “finished and smoothed and documented” beautifully. It deserved to be successful. And Apple blew it by not making the design framework the basis of a web browser (as old PARC hands advised in the early 90s …)" -Alan Kay
>[...] All this is written in PostScript, all the graphics. The SimCity engine is in C, but all the user interface and the graphics are in PostScript.
>The neat thing about doing something like this in HyperLook is that HyperLook is kind of like HyperCard, in that all of the user interface is editable. So these windows we’re looking at here are like stacks, that we can edit.
>Now I’ll flip this into edit mode, while the program’s running. That’s a unique thing.
>Now I’m in edit mode, and this reset button here is just a user interface component that I can move around, and I can hit the “Props” key, and get a property sheet on it.
>I’ll show you what it really is. See, every one of these HyperLook objects has a property sheet, and you can define its graphics. I’ll zoom in here. We have this nice PostScript graphics editor, and we could turn it upside down, or sideways, or, you know, like that. Or scale it. I’ll just undo, that’s pretty useful.
DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)! Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services!
>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.
The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages!
That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web!
What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing:
>Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done.
- Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital
You're right. Flash and its legacy would have been better if it had built in "Edit Source".
The earliest Flash projects were these artful assemblages of scripts dangling from nested timelines, like an Alexander Calder mobile. They were at times labyrinthine, like they are in many similar tools, but there were ways to mitigate that. Later on, AS3 code was sometimes written like Java, because we wanted to be taken seriously.
Many Flash community members wanted to share their source, wanted a space where interested people could make changes. We did the best we could, uploading FLA files and zipped project directories. None of it turned out to be especially resilient.
It's one of the things I admire about Scratch. If you want, you can peek inside, and it's all there, for you to learn from and build off of, with virtually no arbitrary barriers in place.
We kind of had that for a time with FileMaker and MS Access. People could build pretty amazing stuff with those apps, even without being a programmer.
I think the reason those apps never became mainstream is that they didn't have a good solution for sharing data. There were some ways you could use them to access database servers, but setting them up was so difficult that they were for all intents and purposes limited to local, single user programs.
HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL had a learning curve, but you could easily make multi-user programs with them. That's why the web won.
Yes! I used FileMaker a lot, and built my first journaling system with it. Like a cross between hypercard and a wiki. It really changed my life and this lead to programming.
"In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web..."
In yet another alternate timeline, someone thought to add something like URLs with something like GET, PUT, etc. to HyperCard, and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the Web browser never happened because Hypercard already did it all.
On one hand this would be simply amazing, on the other hand it would have been a total security nightmare that makes early Javascript look like a TPM Secure Enclave.
Not sure that sculpting clay is the best analogy. Lots of sculpting is hard, as is turning clay, especially if you want to successfully fire the result. Maybe it is an accurate analogy, but people may understand the difficulty differently.
Hypercard is more like Lego - you can simply buy completed sets (use other's hypercard programs) - or you can put together things according to instructions - but you can always take them apart and change them, and eventually build your own.
DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham?
SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.
>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.
>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.
>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.
>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.
>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”
>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.
>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.
I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious.
Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack:
Looking at the HyperTalk syntax [0] it's interesting how we take left hand variable assignment as a given while math typically teaches the exact opposite since you can't really write the answer before you have the question.
Makes you think if lambda expressions would be more consistent with the rest if they were reversed.
I actually had an experience like this yesterday. After reading Gruber talk about how Markdown was never meant for notes, I started to rethink things. I wanted plain text, to be future proof, then stumbled across CotEditor as a means to edit. Inside I was able to use the code highlighting and outline config to define my own regex and effectively create my own markup language with just a dash of regex and nothing more. I then jumped over to Shortcuts and dragged and dropped some stuff together to open/create yearly and daily notes (on either my computer or phone), or append to a log with a quick action.
It is a custom system that didn’t require any code (if you don’t count the very minor bits of regex (just a lot of stuff like… ^\s- .).
Is it a good system, probably not, but we’ll see where it goes.
inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove
