Alas, HyperCard (1998)

I have to credit HyperCard/HyperTalk with giving me my start in programming. Although I started programming in BASIC on a Commodore setup at a pretty young age, it was HyperCard along about the seventh grade that got me thinking about more complex concepts.

When I was a high school freshman about 17 years ago (yuk), I wrote a complicated self-modifying program in HyperCard. I wanted to write a program that could understand human sentences and reply accordingly, and figured that self-modifying code would be the best way to go about that. Of course it never quite succeeded, but the program was stable and could run for a very long time, and gradually improve. Debugging it was a real adventure.

There was a way to add 'external resources' to HyperCard stacks, and then call them from HyperTalk. I can't remember what they were called now, but there were 'functions' and 'procedures' I think. With those, you could get color working, or do really almost anything on a Mac, all from HyperCard.

They were compiled bits of code, so naturally my interest shifted towards making those instead. I wanted to try writing my own, instead of browsing eWorld and the nascent AOL for stuff written by that Peter what's-his-name.

Somewhere I was told that they were written in Pascal, so I got my hands on a copy of THINK Pascal, and started playing with that. It came with a really wonderful hyperlinked library of the MacOS toolbox. From there, to C, to assembly, and on and on.

I still have a real soft spot in my heart for HyperCard. If there were a modern equivalent, it would be perfect for teaching programming to beginners.

EDIT: I have an idea. If anybody happens to have an old pile of HyperTalk laying around, please email me. Address is in my profile.

Interesting that http://apple.com/hypercard gets redirected to wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard).

Doesn't Apple realize they'd hit another big Home Run if they brought HyperCard back for the iPad, iPhone, & iTouch. It would a huge hit. Well, at least with me :-)

I first learned programming using Hypercard. This was back in the mid 90s. It was huge fun. HyperTalk was close to English and was the easiest programming language I've ever encountered. From HyperTalk I branched out to other script languages - AppleScript, PHP, Perl. I did all kinds of programming for 10 years, before I began learning "real" languages like Java.

In general, script languages make it easier for people to get started with programming, but HyperCard was an environment that simplified a great deal. It was even easier to learn that your average script language. It made assumptions for you, to help you get started. Yet it was amazing how much you could do with it.

I think HyperCard got flattened by the Web. I do not think it is coming back. Nowadays if people want an easy-to-learn environment that allows them to build a wide range of software, there is the web.

If there is a market niche to be filled, it might be a package that tames the Web somewhat. The web is a little too wide open, and the beginner is confronted with a lot of choices before they have the knowledge to make those choices. HyperCard reduced the number of decisions that you had to make up front. Yes, there are packages like Dreamweaver and Flash that help with web and multimedia production, but they do not hold your hand like HyperCard did. Both of them are for professionals, they are scary if you are first learning. A package that makes a lot of assumptions for you, to get you started, might find a niche, even now. And even more so for something like the iPhone, where it is a little easier to make starting assumptions.

For me, the story of HyperCard is one of missed opportunities. In 1995 I went to the big tech/photo expo at the Javitts Center in New York City. At the time, interactive multi-media CD ROMs were suppose to be the next big thing (there is a scene in Jurassic Park, which came out in 1994, where the young girl expresses excitement over "an interactive CD ROM". After the web took off, it was hard to remember why CD ROMs were suppose to be a big deal). Macromedia was there, promoting Director. I looked at Director, but I was sure that this niche was going to end up being owned by HyperCard. I felt that anything so easy to learn was going to get a huge following, and then a lot of those people would evolve in serious professionals who would use the tool they were familiar with to keep building stuff (which is what made PHP successful, just a few years later).

Macromedia adjusted quickly to the Web. They took Director and stripped it down and came out with a simple product called Flash. Which eventually grew up to take over the space in exactly the way that I thought HyperCard was going to do.

Apple had something important in their hands in 1995. But they made bad decisions. Really, it is remarkable how many bad decisions they made in the mid 90s.

This article is a great insight about what was hot 12 years ago - a little time capsule, if you will. The web (or browser to be precise) is mentioned only in passing; the author could to not have seen that it would be the platform which most of the software innovations (and a significant number of social ones) in the following decade would rely on.

For a long time I've had a wonderful HyperCard application (not written by me), and I've dreamed for years how I would just love to be able to disassemble it and re-write it in a modern language, like Python. Unfortunately, I have no idea where to find something to even run it with, much less look into the internals. Any ideas?

Just curious -- is there some context to this twelve-year-old story?

I miss Hypercard too, but I had been building stuff on the web for four years by the time its demise became official.

I don't know if many of you have looked closely at Apple's Keynote, but it's a stones throw from being an update to hypercard. It just needs to add support for scripting and you're done.