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Comment by faddotio | Hacker News Reader

Hypercard/HT was just used to stitch it together, most of the presentation was done with the help of a crapload of XCMDs. I doubt the HyperTalk involved was particularly complicated, but I can't say for sure, because they managed to make the stacks resistant to introspection.

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How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs? As in, were they commonly exchanged or reused in any sort of open-source way, or were they written in-house? I know we're talking about Myst specifically, but I wonder if there's any community parallel to what we see with libraries & APIs now.

Although I'm just flipping over rocks looking for similarities, it's a blast to see when and how certain structures have been tried-out.

Holy Smokes.. the more I read about Hypercard, the more I realize that Myst was quite a huge hack!

The XCMD part is clutch. I'm curious what that community looked like, and how that code was exchanged. Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net?

> How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs?

There was something of a free and paid market for these, but it never really took off. Discoverability was an issue in those days.

> Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net?

Not that I remember.

The closest thing to a repo that I can think of is ripping off the XCMDs/XFCNs from other people's stacks using ResCopy/ResEdit. :)

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