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Comment by alecdbrooks | Hacker News Reader

> People didn't build real applications in Hypercard.

Remarkably, they did! Wikipedia:

>A number of commercial software products were created in HyperCard, most notably the original version of the interactive game narrative Myst, the Voyager Company's Expanded Books, and multimedia CD-ROMs of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony CD-ROM, the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, and the Voyager MacBeth.

It's true that Hypercard was not an ideal platform for development. Apparently, Myst developers had trouble making the high resolution images load quickly on machines of the time.

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As I said, Hypercard was like Flash -- so it's not surprising that all these commercial products are sort of point-n-click multimedia projects. But you couldn't, for example, build an email application in Hypercard. You could, however, build one in Visual Basic.

Many people/companies built Hypercard applications that talked to backend databases. It wouldn't be difficult to build an email application.

Sure, you could build an email application in HyperCard. I'm pretty sure there actually were several. TCP/IP was available via HyperCard plugins or extensions or whatever they were called. HyperCard's card/stack data model would work fine for email. Making the list view would kind of suck, as lists always did in HyperCard, but you could use a plugin like WindowScript.

I wrote several commercial software products in HyperCard and SuperCard back then. It provided awesome tooling leverage. I worked on an EDI application that was written in SuperCard (with the EDI processing running in a C plugin) which was working, but later the company's president decided we needed to re-write the whole thing in C++ with the MacApp framework (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp) because C++ was a "real" programming language. This was the cfront era -- build times were long, debugging meant manually de-mangling names, etc. Crazy slow. We spent a long time on it but the schedule slipped long past the end of my time there.

Had no idea that the original version of Myst was Hypercard, but it makes sense in hindsight.

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