The Complete Hypercard Handbook (1988)(archive.org)
archive.org
The Complete Hypercard Handbook (1988)
https://archive.org/details/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook/
69 comments
That is a cool story, thanks for sharing.
In a similar way, when I had just graduated as a Systems Engineer, I couldn't find the kind of work I wanted, so I started as an AutoCAD drafter for a big construction company that was building a toll highway.
My job was very easy, basically drawing the measurents engineers on field took daily, so we could plot them in blueprints, and store them. The project seemed to stall, I changed jobs, and years later the highway started being built. I hope some of my drawings remained, because I've used that highway a lot, and would love to think that I put my grain of sand.
My job was very easy, basically drawing the measurents engineers on field took daily, so we could plot them in blueprints, and store them. The project seemed to stall, I changed jobs, and years later the highway started being built. I hope some of my drawings remained, because I've used that highway a lot, and would love to think that I put my grain of sand.
> GOODMAN: But we can expect to see additions?
> ATKINSON: Lots of improvements. This is not going to be abandoned like MacPaint was. Pretty much Apple put me on something else and gave the maintenance of MacPaint to someone else and then kept shuffling that from one person to another, and MacPaint never got maintained.
As far as I understand that’s almost exactly what would happen to HyperCard over the next few years as well.
> ATKINSON: Lots of improvements. This is not going to be abandoned like MacPaint was. Pretty much Apple put me on something else and gave the maintenance of MacPaint to someone else and then kept shuffling that from one person to another, and MacPaint never got maintained.
As far as I understand that’s almost exactly what would happen to HyperCard over the next few years as well.
HyperCard did get a fairly substantial upgrade with HyperCard 2.0. Indeed, the second version of The Complete HyperCard Handbook included another interview with Bill Atkinson, discussing some of the changes made and the direction HyperCard was heading in.
The real trouble for HyperCard came when it was moved to the Claris subsidiary, who started charging for it [1]. No longer was the full version bundled with every Mac sold, which had helped HyperCard become ubiquitous until that point.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-lost-decade-hypercard-a...
The real trouble for HyperCard came when it was moved to the Claris subsidiary, who started charging for it [1]. No longer was the full version bundled with every Mac sold, which had helped HyperCard become ubiquitous until that point.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-lost-decade-hypercard-a...
Yup. It was abandoned almost exactly like MacPaint was. Real shame.
Sometimes when I'm drinking at 3am I like to imagine a world where somebody wrote a hypercard server and we were all developing web apps as hypercard stacks instead of our current abomination.
We'd all be here bitching about how our stupid e-commerce stacks still need to have backwards support for 512x342 1bpp monochrome graphics.
So, HyperCard’s 1bpp limitation is fairly ingrained, but the resolution can be anything you want.
Something like CardStack?
https://cardstack.com
https://cardstack.com
Would you give https://www.blockstud.io a try?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
Thanks!
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
Thanks!
I took a look. It's a very impressive project but it's not what I personally have in mind as a hypercard replacement. I really do like the hybrid code/visual model. I'm one of the few people I know who actually did like the original Xcode/Interface Builder split since it let both parts focus on what they were good for.
I like Hypercard because it made the visual part (the UI) visual, but still gave me the programmer full control of the logic. Here it looks like you're pushing to see how far you can go with no-code.
I'm not sure if any thoughts on this I or anybody on HN would have are helpful for your stated goals of broadening computational literacy.
That said it's a very cool project and best of luck on your research!
I like Hypercard because it made the visual part (the UI) visual, but still gave me the programmer full control of the logic. Here it looks like you're pushing to see how far you can go with no-code.
I'm not sure if any thoughts on this I or anybody on HN would have are helpful for your stated goals of broadening computational literacy.
That said it's a very cool project and best of luck on your research!
Thank you for making time to check it out, for making time to share your feedback, and for the encouragement!
I thought the site was pretty cool. What's your take on using Blockstud.io over Snap or Scratch?
I'm slightly biased (as the creator of BlockStudio), but I think Scratch/Snap are basically graphical editors for textual code. They solve a different problem (preventing syntax errors) than what BlockStudio is aiming for: using an extension of Graphical Rewrite Rules for programming, with an emphasis on making it accessible to beginners.
That's pretty neat, but a browser-based application just isn't the same thing.
Thanks for checking it out!
You're right that a browser-based app is not the same thing. At the same time, as an individual maintaining this entire thing, I can't invest the time and effort to port this to multiple platforms, whereas this format enables it to be used by people on (self-reported) laptops, tablets, as well as desktops.
It doesn't have to be on multiple platforms though...
One of the cool things about Hypercard was that it could access the entire machine. A sandboxed browser page will never (hopefully) be able to do that.
One of the cool things about Hypercard was that it could access the entire machine. A sandboxed browser page will never (hopefully) be able to do that.
Some online friends & acquaintances held a "HyperCard Jam" just a little over a year ago. Lots of cool/creative games and apps came out of this fun jam! I think most people developed in a Mini vMac virtual machine (rather than firing up physical Macintosh hardware). Take a look here: https://itch.io/jam/merveilles-hyperjam
That is so cool! Will they do it again? (Please!?)
I bought the first edition when it came out, read it straight through like a novel.
This is what ignited my change in career direction from a photographer who dabbled with his dad's Mac SE to programmer. I eventually learned many languages beyond HyperTalk and moved to Silicon Valley. I may have written part of this web browser.
Well, there goes my weekend. Happy to see the Hypercard love is still out there. I think about it a lot. I love the idea of a coffee shop or a bicycle shop that's run on a Hypercard stack on an old Mac.
In case you've never seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg
In case you've never seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg
Ha - Gary Kildall (who missed the opportunity to be Bill Gates) is a host.
Good Atkinson comment that illustrates how powerful of a tool this was for verticals: "A whole new body of people that have creative ideas but aren’t programmers will be able to express their ideas or their expertise..."
Good Atkinson comment that illustrates how powerful of a tool this was for verticals: "A whole new body of people that have creative ideas but aren’t programmers will be able to express their ideas or their expertise..."
Wow - thanks for posting this. It’s 30 years later and we really don’t have anything comparable to HyperCard in terms of making programming accessible to non programmers.
LiveCode.com. Very compatible with the original HyperCard (I know, I had to switch. And I'm a software guy.) AND multi-platform!
The closest we have today in terms of universal accessibility is Excel, but it's a far less charming and elegant environment than Hypercard.
I had one job during university at a café breakfast shop which the point of sale, scheduling, payrolls, and such were run by the owner's custom FileMaker program. (She did not like to spend money on commercial software.) It was not so enjoyable as we nostalgiac would think. :)
I had this book circa 1993…
I read it front to back several Times and continued to use it as a reference for years afterward.
I was using HyperCard to build an entire operating environment for myself layered on top of classic macOS. I had the equivalent of directory indexes and file management and the ability to manage and consume multi media files… Including porn, of course, but weirdly icons were the thing I kept downloading and needed to manage…. Icons and sound files…
Then I got my first UNIX shell account and never opened that book again…
I read it front to back several Times and continued to use it as a reference for years afterward.
I was using HyperCard to build an entire operating environment for myself layered on top of classic macOS. I had the equivalent of directory indexes and file management and the ability to manage and consume multi media files… Including porn, of course, but weirdly icons were the thing I kept downloading and needed to manage…. Icons and sound files…
Then I got my first UNIX shell account and never opened that book again…
They also have the 2.0 book and his AppleScript handbook which was really helpful.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Goodman%2C...
https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Goodman%2C...
My late-nineties elementary school computer class was mostly devoted to learning about and building a project in Hypercard on the school's Mac Classic fleet. The project was to build a "house" of our own design with each room being a card or collection of cards - and to allow movement between them by clicking on doors, windows, etc. like a LucasArts adventure game.
It wasn't expected that your house be based in reality, so some people went further with this than others by adding animations or hidden-object like game elements. I remember it being a lot of fun and something that seemed accessible to everyone regardless of experience with computers.
I hadn't put it together until right now, but I wonder how much that experience influenced my eventual educational and career path (among many other factors). It really was my first experience with creating something interactive on the computer, not quite programming in the way I do now but getting those same gears turning.
It wasn't expected that your house be based in reality, so some people went further with this than others by adding animations or hidden-object like game elements. I remember it being a lot of fun and something that seemed accessible to everyone regardless of experience with computers.
I hadn't put it together until right now, but I wonder how much that experience influenced my eventual educational and career path (among many other factors). It really was my first experience with creating something interactive on the computer, not quite programming in the way I do now but getting those same gears turning.
Myst was just that - a HyperCard stack (actually many of them).
I have this book! I loved Hypercard and spend many hours making silly and functional programs with it.
I wish that somehow it was continued and not sent out to the pasture at Claris.
I wish that somehow it was continued and not sent out to the pasture at Claris.
In a lot of ways, my ideal product would be a HyperCard / Excel combo that could output Java (or some other source code).
Something close to that was tried in Microsoft when I was there 1996-2000. It was extraordinarily hard to keep the visual forms designer and the output code in sync, especially when users tried to edit the code.
I don't think it needs to return trip for it to be useful. Most of the value is allowing programmers to get the business logic that expert users generate.
This book changed my life in that it introduced me to programming. Thanks archive.org for keeping it around!
I never used Hypercard back in the day. But I recently started using Obsidian, and it has the idea of cards/notes and linking to them. It’s built on Markdown files, and you can use it for Zettelkasten if you wish.
Linking notes (or even creating them) is as easy as type [[ and then type the (new) name and ]] and boom it is linked or a new note created (as you type the name it searches for existing notes of course).
A powerful idea, but it appears that it is anything but new lol
https://obsidian.md
Use for free on Mac, Windows, Linux. Support them for early access to iOS and Android beta apps. Stores all your notes as plaintext markdown files.
Optionally pay to sync (encrypted) with their sync across devices.
I really like Markdown - that’s what brought it to my attention.
Linking notes (or even creating them) is as easy as type [[ and then type the (new) name and ]] and boom it is linked or a new note created (as you type the name it searches for existing notes of course).
A powerful idea, but it appears that it is anything but new lol
https://obsidian.md
Use for free on Mac, Windows, Linux. Support them for early access to iOS and Android beta apps. Stores all your notes as plaintext markdown files.
Optionally pay to sync (encrypted) with their sync across devices.
I really like Markdown - that’s what brought it to my attention.
HyperCard is only like that at its most primitive. HyperCard, back in the day, was all about code and functionality. I remember using a HyperCard stack that could record and play back music, interactive character sheets for D&D, and tons of games.
Instead of using HyperCard to track information, like Obsidian, you might instead use it to create an information system like Obisidian.
Instead of using HyperCard to track information, like Obsidian, you might instead use it to create an information system like Obisidian.
This book was so big (5-6 cm) I had to cut it into three parts to turn it into a manageable desk reference.
I was just talking to someone today about what the programming might look like in 20 years. He was hoping for something more graphical.
I told him that HyperCard was the only graphical programming environment that I ever loved. My first real job had me making stacks and XFCNs.
I told him that HyperCard was the only graphical programming environment that I ever loved. My first real job had me making stacks and XFCNs.
So I had to post that excellent comment from DonHopkins as seen here two days ago ""
DonHopkins 2 days ago | parent [–] | on: LSD, cargo shorts and the fall of a tech CEO
I don't know how it affected Steve Jobs, but Bill Atkinson handled his LSD pretty well.
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
>The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson.
>In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.
>I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.
>I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
>It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
>But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
>The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
>My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team.
>How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
>It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself.
>Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections.
>Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?
>I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.
>This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.
>Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
>It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
>HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
DonHopkins 2 days ago | parent [–] | on: LSD, cargo shorts and the fall of a tech CEO
I don't know how it affected Steve Jobs, but Bill Atkinson handled his LSD pretty well.
https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
>The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson.
>In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.
>I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.
>I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced. But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
>It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
>But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
>The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
>My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth’s horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the “Blue Marble” team.
>How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
>It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself.
>Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections.
>Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?
>I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to wisdom.
>This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.
>Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
>It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
>HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. It lowers the signal/noise ratio. If you want to refer to what someone else posted, that's great, and a link will suffice.
So great. Hypercard 2.0 was great. Hook up a couple of XFCNs, get stuff done.
As the whole system environment grew, the scripting language outgrew the cards, but Apple seemed utterly blind, in contempt of any system that could not be shown as a GUI product. They could not tell a story, so they threw it away.
UserLand Frontier was fantastic.
As the whole system environment grew, the scripting language outgrew the cards, but Apple seemed utterly blind, in contempt of any system that could not be shown as a GUI product. They could not tell a story, so they threw it away.
UserLand Frontier was fantastic.
* https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/frontier
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UserLand_Software
* https://inessential.com/2014/05/24/what_happened_at_userland
Frontier is open source now and they're looking for help to port to Linux:
http://scripting.com/2021/04/28/154140.html?title=oyTheHuman...
What I wouldn’t have given for a copy of this back then!
The samples that came with HyperCard where good enough though :)
The samples that came with HyperCard where good enough though :)
I still have this book on my shelf, it got me started programming as a youngin'. Good times!
This is great, disappointed that the site won't let me download it though.
Has anyone made a serious attempt to recreate HyperCard for modern systems? Would Apple try to block it?
On a thread reminiscing about Hypercard, the only comment down-voted is the one that points to a superset of Hypercard that runs on Windows, OSX and Linux and that can also produce apps that run on iOS and Android.
And it's free to use and GPL'd.
What a weird place HN is.
And it's free to use and GPL'd.
What a weird place HN is.
Power Apps in Office365 are darned close. I never had a deep experience with HyperCard, so I'd actually love to hear folks with deeper experience contrast the two.
Except that you do not own it and apps may disappear. We can still run hypercard stacks many decades later... I doubt we will be able to run actual power apps in 15 years.
I think Supercard is still going, its sorta like a souped up version of Hypercard
I haven't used it in a looong time, but yes[1] it is, apparently.
1: https://supercard.us/
1: https://supercard.us/
Has anyone used this one? Is it good? I'm on a compatible OS but it's just so incredibly expensive...
Does not work on Catalina and Big Sur.
Wow, that's great. I wrote a printed circuit layout program in SuperCard. You basically drew your program in the card layout editor using a few allowed shapes, and it just looped through all of the shapes on the card and translated them to Gerber files. The color identified top or bottom copper. When I got my first boards back from the fab, and they were actually what I designed, I nearly fell over.
Not sure why, but the most interesting comment here to me is marked [dead]
This and "HyperTalk 2.0: The Book". I got them from my uncle when I was 8-9 years old, read them cover to cover, and that's what got me hooked on programming.
The first useful application/database I ever wrote was in Hypercard. I loved that app. 33 years later I still work in IT.
Did Hypercard 2.0 (or further versions) support QuickTime VR? Because it would be huge back in the day.
Hypercard, now that is a name I've not heard in a long time
This and the HyperCard Bible were my most read books as a kid
The polygons were entered by a team of people, from the map into a small serial-to-file program, and that file was then fed to a Hypercard stack that did the polygon intersection...
...To was to be the path of the Eurostar Lille<->Paris. The land in the middle was expropriated, sometime leaving landowner with bit of land they could not reach as the next "bridge" back to it was 20 miles away!
Anyway, I used hypercard back then for a multitude of reasons at the time. It had "plugins" to read/write stuff, it had pretty good interface, it allowed code to very easily detect errors in the digitizer input, and allowed a very, very rough preview of what the "cut" would look like.
I did quite a few cool projects in my career, but every time I drive at 300km/h on the eurostar to paris, I take a little extra pride into thinking I "did" that :-)