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Comment by rjsw | Hacker News Reader

They had A/ROSE [1], it could have been a good platform if it had a link to HyperCard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/ROSE

That seems like a really awkward fit. HyperCard wasn't a systems programming environment. As far as I can recall, it barely had two data types (strings and numbers), and the interpreter was pretty slow; I can't imagine how you would have used it to write drivers for hardware.

Interestingly there was a third-party HyperTalk compiler that could produce INITs: http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/IttyBitty/CompileIt/

You wouldn't use HyperCard to write drivers, just to create the user interface to drivers running on the A/ROSE card.

Think of it as an early version of LabVIEW.

That was indeed my experience. I used HC extensively, and loved it, but put up with its slowness. The speed advantage of the 68040 Mac over my 8088 PC somewhat compensated, but not completely.

HC allowed "code resources" to be added, like plug-ins, which I wrote in Pascal or C. That's how I created drivers. It gave me the performance benefit of course, while allowing me to deal with just the tiny bits of the OS needed to deal with my hardware.

The hardware was either homemade (microcontroller programmed on a MS-DOS machine), or plug-in boards made by National Instruments that luckily came with a C API.

While the term "jailbreaking" was introduced for the iPhpne, the concept was already familiar to me.

An odd irony is that the stuff I've worked on over the years has always involved relatively slow processes, so I've been able to live with the performance tradeoffs of "easy" programming tools.

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