Hypercard, or What the Hell Happened to Apple?

This is a message that I just sent to the “general comments” feedback section of the Apple website, but I’m also posting here so that at least one person will actually read it:

I bought a 12" PowerBook G4 today, my first Mac after 13 years of abstinence. The machine hasn’t even shipped yet, and I’m already disappointed. Why? Because I just went over the list of included software with Mac OS X, getting more excited and more nostalgic with each entry, and saw no mention of HyperCard. What happened while I was gone?

HyperCard was THE quintessential piece of Macintosh software, and the company is making a huge mistake by not acknowledging that. More than MacPaint, more than MacWrite, HyperCard represented “the Mac experience.” It was ridiculously innovative (no one even knew what hypertext was at that time, and Apple shipped it with every Mac). It had an ingenious UI design that grew in sophistication along with the user. It had, hands down, the best scripting language ever designed – I’ve been working with scripting languages for years now, and none has even come close to being as intuitive and powerful as HyperTalk, the only language that actually knew what you MEANT to say. And most of all, it not only allowed but it encouraged creativity. Thousands of stacks were created, and are still being created – a designer at my last company did the prototype for every one of his videogames in HyperCard first.

That kind of user fantacism and loyalty that the Mac is known for, that’s also true of HyperCard. I’ve obviously got a nostalgic love of the software that borders on hysteria, and I’m not alone; whenever I mention the name to other computer geeks, they get that far-off look in their eyes and talk fondly of their favorite stacks they created.

The reason, I believe, is that the HyperCard toolset came the closest to realizing the idea of “the personal computer.” Microsoft frequently refers to Windows as being “document-centric,” and claims that computers are all about creating documents. That’s wrong. Typewriters, and cameras, and paint brushes are about creating documents. Computers are about creating applications. About bringing together documents, manipulating them, setting them against each other, using them in new ways. That’s exactly what HyperCard did.

Now, Apple is touting the built-in OS X apps. And for the record, it’s working – I switched from a Windows XP laptop to a PowerBook exclusively for the built-in stuff, iTunes in particular. I don’t plan on buying any additional Mac software; if I want to buy something, I’ll get the Windows version and run it on my desktop. What the Mac is for is to act as my personal computer. To retrieve and store my e-mail, music, photos, writings, web-links, etc. and let them all work together and all work with my iPod and my PDA and my cell phone. It’s not only a great philosophy, but a great way to cell machines AND promote the brand loyalty that the Mac is known for. Free software does drive hardware purchases. Office suites do not.

As it stands, the piece of software that’s being called “HyperCard” for sale in a dusty back corner of the Apple store is just missing the point. It’s hopelessly out of date (“Exploit the power of QuickTime 3!”), and uses scaled-down versions of third-party tools; both of these are anathema to anything that gets its power from integration with the rest of the OS. And by having to purchase it separately, its use is going to be limited to the people who know they need it; good luck even figuring out what it IS based on the description on that website. Plus, of course, it’s prohibitively expensive for abandoned software.

HyperCard fits into the OS X sales model so obviously, I’m stunned to learn that it’s been left to rot. The proliferation of the Web and personal websites just proves that people have been wanting to do what HyperCard lets them do. The integration of various apps’ output was HyperCard’s strength. The innovation and creativity and design that are Apple’s selling points were all over HyperCard. Even as a PR measure, including a scaled-down version of the package would be invaluable. Burn your stacks on DVD’s or CD’s! Publish them to the web with .Mac! Organize everything how you want it organized, without having to use the included crippled “trial” versions of PC software!

As it stands now, the “killer app” for the Mac, the program that no one has anything negative to say about, the program that engenders brand loyalty and actually makes people consider buying the machine, is a program that plays MP3’s. It could be a program that lets you do anything with your computer that you can imagine.

(P.S. Hopefully Mac OS X includes a spell checker, because I clearly am in desperate need of one.)

HyperCard has been gone so long I’ve almost forgotten it. Thanks for reminding me what I’m missing. :dubious:

What happened to Hypercard?

HTML. Web browsers. Java. The world changed.

Hypercard could have been the first web browser, except nobody was thinking that way 15 years ago.

Hypercard was cool, but limited in many ways. You could only do so much with the scripting language. To do more, you had to write xCMDs in a traditional programming language. Heck, Hypercard still wants to show graphics in black and white.

It was cool, but the world left it behind in favor of other cool things.

Supercard is apparently still around.

http://www.supercard.us/index.html

Select some text, go to the Apple menu, choose “Services,” and there should be “Spell Checker” available. Can’t recall if it’s available for all programs, or just the ones written in the Cocoa framework.

Nah, it’s just the hot new toy du jour. Everyone knows the real killer app from Apple these days is MacOS X itself – though IMO, iMovie and iDVD are darn close…

Didn’t you get a copy of the Developers’ Tools CD with your new PowerBook? That (and the free AppleScript Studio) would fill the bill, I think.

Oi! I remember Hypercard from our old, old Apple something. Best part was when my brother made a hilarious game out of it, using one of the clip art heads as the hero, etc. Thinking back on that brings back some warm and fuzzy memories.

I remember trying to figure out how to use hypercard to make a bibiography and note cards when I first started my master’s program, on my beloved powerbook 170. Now I’m using EndNote meshed with MS Word and it grabs entries from Worldcat and OCLC. . . what a difference, but hypercard was so cool and DIY.
Jesus. . . I’ve been in grad school too long. . . I hope it was really already old school in 1996.

Screw Hypercard - where is the OS X version of Mac Playmate??!!!

And the Oscar the Grouch trash can program?!
“Cause I. . . LOVE. . . trash!”

I’d thought that was implicit in my rambling, but it obviously wasn’t. I don’t see it as a case of the world leaving HyperCard behind, but that the technology is finally in a state to realize what the HyperCard model is capable of.

Reading that article was depressing; I want to tell the guy, no, you didn’t miss the boat, it’s that it was so far ahead of its time that it needed everybody else to catch up. There have been tons of apps that have exploded in popularity – Flash, Dreamweaver, Front Page, FileMaker Pro, PowerPoint – that still haven’t captured the feeling of working with HyperCard. Where it was built into the system, where everything was intuitive and extensible and would grow as you needed it to.

Those are limitations of the initial implementation, not of the model. It would be like saying there’s no point in including a new painting program with Mac OS X, because MacPaint only supports black and white. And I’d forgotten about xCMDs, but I remember now that there’s plenty you could do without them, and there were TONS of freeware ones distributed all over the place. It’s no different than the plug-in architecture of most browsers. I don’t see how the ability to extend functionality indefinitely by providing a standard interface to any programming language could be called a “limitation.”

I guess I could be over-estimating the extensibility of HyperCard, because what I was thinking of was a built-in app that took the HyperCard model of cards & stacks, and extended it to the web. Either by translating the stack into HTML pages & images & plug-ins, or by providing a “stackplayer” browser plug-in much like Macromedia Flashplayer, that would let you navigate stacks locally or online. HyperCard wasn’t just a user-friendly database; it was a rapid-application-development system, an authoring tool, and a presentation tool.

I haven’t seen much about them yet, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting to play around with them. (The machine is still on order.) So it could be just much ado about nothing; the functionality may be there, and I’m competent enough with C programming at this point that I could do whatever I wanted.

But as with everything Mac, it’s all about presentation. HyperCard was built-in, it was unintimidating, it was there for anyone to use, and it presented itself as a creativity tool, not as a development tool. HyperCard and HyperTalk were just fun to use; I’ve never had as much fun working in C++ or even Visual Basic.

Suit yourself; but I want Dark Castle. Best videogame ever. I think going to color will ruin it, though.

There’s a Hypercard Special Interest Group, which gives you links to similar programs, and I believe there’s a Hypercard Users Group somewhere.

Aha. International Hypercard User Group. Trying to get Hypercard updated and ported to OS X.

The excellent Macintouch website has an alternatives to Hypercard section. The functionality of the basic Hypercard idea keeps improving, so I would say there is a lot of hope for you. So perhaps you can dish your disappointment over your upcoming new Powerbook!

OK, point taken. Please let me rephrase: the world changed, and HyperCard didn’t.

Atkinson lost interest in it, and nobody at Apple apparently took up the torch to keep extending the app and the programming model.

Agreed. Hypercard was amazing at the time – an object-oriented, extensible toolkit. Someone with some curiousity and free time could actually make a useful app in a short time. Your comment about rapid prototyping is well taken – you could whack together something that looked sort-of “finished” in a few hours with some skill and patience.

So, I’d venture these reasons why Hypercard went nowhere:

  1. Apple stopped caring, especially after Atkinson stopped caring.

  2. The “rapid prototyping” slack was taken up by pro programming tools (e.g. PowerPlant, etc.) and presentation apps (which can also make pretty pages that link together quickly).

  3. Eventually the web happened, and Hypercard was by then covered in dust and wasn’t there to greet it.

Thanks much for the explanations, and for the links (the last time I used a Mac was before the WWW).

After doing a little bit more reading on it online, because my new Powerbook still isn’t here, it looks as if Apple is trying to position AppleScript Studio as the closest equivalent to HyperCard for OS X. Just as rjung pointed out.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more it seems like it would be a major effort to extend it from the single-machine, local stack model to a web authoring tool. I imagine that squeegee’s explanations for how HC was left to decay are right on the money. But imagine if it had been updated! Imagine designing web applets with the HyperCard toolset instead of having to deal with the expensive web authoring tools, or straight HTML, or clumsy Java toolkits. And having local stacks run through a web browser so you can publish them online.

It does look like Apple has opened up their development process a lot, which is a nice change, so I should really check all that out before I judge them too harshly.

Ha! MacOS X is by no means a killer ap, in the sense that it ain’t killing anything. Generally, a killer ap involves things knows as ‘sales’.

Well, there’s always MetaCard. Dunno if it’s any good, but it includes all the Supercard scripting extensions, runs on Mac and Windows, has HTTP commands, and the scripts are ‘compiled’ at run time. And it reads old Hypercard stacks.

MetaCard? USD 995 to start with–WAY too expensive for the kind of ubiquity SolGrundy is talking about. This needs to be a freely-downloadable cross-platform app, ideally under the GPL.

True dat. The Macintouch website that Geoduck mentioned has a fairly long discussion about “alternatives” to HyperCard, as well as a couple of interesting (and depressing) entries from people who apparently worked on the failed HyperCard 3.0 attempt.

(And for the impatient, links to all of the kits mentioned in the thread are at the very bottom of that page.)

After reading all that, and checking into some of the websites for the “alternatives” (I still don’t have my machine yet, so I can’t actually try most of these out), I’m even more convinced that HyperCard, in any incarnation, is capital-D dead. Like any programmer, I’d forgotten all about support.

The main things that made HyperCard so ubiquitous on early Macs were: a) it was free and included with the system, b) it was really simple to get started and then grow more complex as you needed it to, c) it was supported by Apple, and d) it only had to work on a Mac, making it consistent and predictable.

As Sunspace says, the commercial packages are way too expensive to start any kind of “grassroots programming” movement. Based on what I’ve seen, they’re too complex, as well – they throw all the features at you at once. The open source attempts, assuming they ever get finished (which I’m skeptical about), are going to get the “power to the people” part of the philosophy, but they’ve still got the same problem as the commercial ones: people are going to have to know they need it, and then go find it.

HyperCard was just there, it was all over the place, and fully integrated not just into the OS but into the whole Mac philosophy. That philosophy doesn’t really exist anymore. There’s not much money in it, apparently.