HyperCard Simulator

It was both, really. HyperCard put the power of a GUI into your hands with simple metaphors and syntax. The language is English-like enough to feel easy to use, but not so much as to fool you into thinking it can do things it actually can't do (looking at you, Inform 7!). You'd attach code to widgets in a visual way that drove home the idea that this bit of code generated that behavior when you clicked a button, typed into a text field, etc. Oh, and, let's not forget that the HyperCard environment also implemented object persistence, which came in handy, because you wouldn't have to write file handling code, or any kind of "save state" functionality. Of course, you could also mess up a stack in such a way that it was hard to figure out and hard to fix due to said semantics, but, on balance, I'd say transparent object persistence was a pretty big win.

And, it was literally right there if you had a Mac. After selling it briefly as a standalone product for $49.95, Apple started bundling it with every new Mac for about a decade. If your Mac came with System 6, 7, 8, or 9, you had HyperCard. It also came with the Apple IIGS during that time. (Great machine, BTW!) Despite its limitations, I even remember seeing a couple of nontrivial apps implemented with it.

More than anything, HyperCard made personal computing personal again, in a way it hadn't been since computers would boot straight into a BASIC interpreter, and that was a very good thing.

If my little spiel wasn't convincing enough, take a look at this excerpt: http://www.cvxmelody.net/HyperCard%20IIGS%201.1%20-%20The%20...

It is hard to separate out HyperCard from where I was in life when I was using it.

It was 1991, my family had just bought a Mac LC, and I was 8 years old. I had learned BASIC from reading an old book from 1978 that a co-worker of my dad had given me when I expressed interest in computers. That same friend said I should try HyperCard.

It literally changed my life. It is hard to explain to people who have grown up with the internet, but at this point my family had no internet access at all (we didn't even get a modem for a few more years) and I didn't know anyone who knew how to program. Everything was self taught from reading books that I either got from my dad's co-worker or from the library.

HyperCard was so easy to learn for me as a kid. For one, it was all visual. If you wanted to add a button for someone to click, you would select "Add Button" and drag it to where you wanted it to be. In addition, you could learn how to do things from other HyperCard stacks by clicking on various buttons and reading what the script for those buttons did.

Since I was self taught (and very young), I didn't know anything about data structures or algorithms. However, HyperCard made everything intuitive to me. To persist data, you could output it into 'fields' (which like buttons, could be created by clicking 'new field' and placing it where you wanted). While I later learned how to make these fields invisible, when I first started I would just make them really small and put them in a corner behind something else. I would then write data to them from button scripts, allowing me to persist data.

Since I didn't know about data structures, I would treat everything as strings that I would store in these fields. I didn't know what an array was, so I just would create a long string of comma separated values that I would read in, act on, and then write back out to the fields. I created primitive databases by having each line of the field be a different record... I had never heard the term 'csv' at the time, but it just seemed natural to me.

Debugging was easy; I could just expand the fields into my visible view to see what was being written to them. Things being 'object oriented' was very natural, since everything in HyperCard is a visual object you can interact with.

I learned SO MUCH hacking around with HyperCard. It made me love programming, and it was so much fun. I didn't even realize how much I was learning until much later in life; I avoided majoring in computer science because I feared ruining my favorite hobby if I pursued it as a career. Later (after not finding an alternative to pursue after graduating college) I decided to give software development a try, and I realized how much I already knew just from HyperCard. Event driven architectures just made sense, because that is how HyperCard always worked. I had a pretty good grasp of data structures because I had created them visually as I needed them, without realizing what I was doing.

33 years later, I still get a thrill from programming that HyperCard instilled in me.

So yeah, HyperCard changed my life.

Yes.

It was a well-done Smalltalk-like language with a RAD component that made making, albeit limited, GUIs about as complicated as using PowerPoint.

You could give it to a "smart" kid, and they could, at the very least, make interactive fiction with it with very little instruction. The vast majority of HyperCard stacks could be considered to be non-linear PowerPoint slide decks---cards with buttons that called goto statements that jumped to other cards.

When I was in 5th grade, HyperCard was akin to early software development for me. I would spend hours after school creating games and choose your own adventures. You could put in goto statements, loops, animations, simple functions (play this sound when clicked and then go to this page), and more. I was totally hooked and it probably led to my passion for BBS development.

In 1998 I started work at the 'Advanced Techniques Department' of a traditional UK engineering company (Plessey). We primarily used Symbolics Lisp machines (and later, TI Explorer Lisp cards for Macs) but one of our contractors used HyperCard to build demos that could be easily taken to customer sites / used in exhibitions to get customer feedback. We also used it to mock user interface concepts, etc. We also made a lot of use of ResEdit which was great for creating and modifying assets such as icons, strings, bitmaps, etc.

Once I got into the Mac ecosystem, it was stunning how quickly you could build sophisticated (for the time) GUIS, demos etc. It sure beat trying to build interfaces using curses on a traditional unix box and was a lot cheaper than a Sun box or a Lisp machine!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard :

It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.

But HyperCard was not ported to OSX, now MacOS; which has Slides and TextEdit for HTML without MacPorts, or Brew,.

HTML is Hypertext because it has <a name= href=> edges and scripting IIUC.

Then there was Flash by Macromedia, which also created Dreamweaver for HTML editing before Adobe acquired Macromedia.

By now there are Open Web Standards like HTML5 and ECMAscript (ES (JS not JavaScript)), WebSockets, WebRTC, WebGL, WebGPU, WASM, and various UI-to-state bindings, as Flash called what e.g. React is used for today.

Instead of the DOM and JS addEventHandler, with React/preact you call setState(attr, val) to mutate the application state dict/object so that Components can register to be updated when keys in the state dict are changed with useState() https://react.dev/learn/adding-interactivity#responding-to-e...

The HyperTalk language has a fairly simple grammar compared to creating a static SPA (Single Page Application) with all of JS and e.g React and a router to support the browser back button and deeplink bookmarks with URI fragments that "don't break the web": https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/hypertalk/H...

TodoMVC or HyperTalk? False dilemma.

I remember being introduced to HyperCard and the idea of linked cards- hypertext, in other words- blew my mind. I imagine it was a lot of other people's introduction to hypertext too, even if they didn't realize it. It was the Adobe Flash of its era.

It was very accessible and I think it really made a difference that it appeared on a new computer that was supposed to represent the future of computering (i.e. had a GUI) yet was not meaningfully programmable out of the box, unlike the supposedly obsolete 8-bit computers it was replacing which came with BASIC. HyperCard looked like a thing that could fill that same ecological niche.

Edit: A bunch of takes from a few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40294301

It is/was a great tool to prime minds that didn't think in stack or heap. You could see it as a weird powerpoint/excel precursor, but so much more.

My favorite hypercard game is Manhole.

This was before the web or even Flash existed. It was a relatively simple multimedia/interactive program authoring tool for non-programmers that had WSYWIG layout. You could build all kinds of things in HyperCard from ways of interacting with databases to stories for school kids.

For me it was: WOW ... the internet before the internet ... we were kids who'd grown up programming Basic on BBC Micro's in school! (or Basic on Atari 800xl's at home!)

I remember it being called object oriented programming, and putting things together like jigsaw puzzles.

Power, accessibility, and execution. A doctor could make a stack to manage their office. A child could make a game. A teacher could make an interactive tool to teach a lesson.

You could learn HyperCard by reading an article in a magazine, and you could share your stack with the rest of the world.

There has been nothing like it before, or after.

And then there was Macromedia Director. Being in love with software has become such a rare experience these days.

Check out P5js and Processing, maybe those scratch the itch?

If you're looking for digital interactives that are easy, you might like p5.js. https://p5js.org/

Flash went away faster than a replacement emerged. When Flash went away, it was very clear to me that if HTML5 at that time was the future and it's immediate replacement, we were screwed.

If you're looking for something that could build next, Flutter seems to be carrying on the promise of one codebase to run on everything similar to Flash.

The other techs that I'm bullish on and are still developing are WebAssembly, and to some degree Rust.

I still believe HyperCard is the most productive development environment for end user applications ever made.

LiveCode?

https://andregarzia.com/2019/07/livecode-is-a-modern-day-hyp...

Being an "actual app on your Mac" is probably not going to be a great target for a revival of Hypercard. I would imagine a website, HTML5 "app" or some other portable technology would make way more sense and have much greater reach.

The whole point should be to make the environment operable on the "cheapest computer" a person may have access to - an old Android mobile.

In Sonoma, you can choose Add to Dock in Safari and make a nice little progressive web “app”. Just a cool feature.

As for the color, it’s there now. It imports any stack resources from the old AddColor extension, the buttons and fields support both color and bevel level properties in the picker, and you can use any online image as a button icon you want.

Try Basilisk 2 running MacOS 8 and HyperCard.

Dare I say, Scratch?

https://scratch.mit.edu/

For one: https://internet-janitor.itch.io/decker

It even looks a bit like Hypercard, by default (it's lo-fi, but there are colors under the hood).

My take is that there is no such thing. This is not because there aren't tools now that do "similar things" to what HyperCard did, but there is simply no longer a personal computing environment in which such a tool fits so instrumentally and seamlessly.

HyperCard came about in an era where personal computer users were still being inculcated into what using a computer even meant. That was the moment to let end-user programming and malleable systems like HyperCard take over. (A somewhat similar thing might be said of OpenDoc, but that's a bit different)

From a corporate perspective, what even was HyperCard? A way computer users could just make their own basic applications? How do you continuously make money? What about your computer's dev community? Because of these and other commercial concerns, both the way users today engage with personal computing _and_ the tools we have to manipulate our computing environments are strongly determined by a consumption model -- and there exists a strong bifurcation between users and programmers.

We have no true HyperCard equivalent today because personal computing went in a different direction.

HyperCard is more limited (which acted as a forcing function for creative solutions) and also had an approachability which far surpasses that of HTML/JS. But maybe it's the closest analog..

Even if you stick to only HTML, it's not nearly as fun to make.

I would say that HTML/Javascript is not a "tool" in the same sense that HyperCard was.

HyperCard's real strength was that it allowed mere users (not programmers) to create their own apps (or "stacks", in the HyperCard parlance) through pointing and clicking, plus an English-like scripting language (HyperTalk).

We have largely abandoned the idea that users should be able to create their own apps, so there is no popular, modern analogue to HyperCard, though some people keep trying. For instance, LiveCode is a commercial product that is directly inspired by HyperCard. And CardStock is an open source HyperCard clone that swaps out something English-like for Python as the underlying scripting language.

https://livecode.com/

https://github.com/benjie-git/CardStock

A lot of people have asked this question. There are a bunch of simple GUI-builder tools, including GUI builders for the web, but none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit.

When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.

Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."

The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.

As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

Yes. Many people would argue that HyperCard was an offline precursor to the world wide web. Web pages are very similar to HyperCard stacks and the JavaScript 1.0 manual "cites HyperTalk as a major inspiration".

Create new cards, make buttons that link to next card or wherever in the linear stack of cards. Transitions, effects, timing in a gloriously pixelated editor.

The hamburger menu has "New Stack..."

You can also Sign in

https://hcsimulator.com/mmphosis/Stack

I haven't had a chance to sit down with this simulator, but having used both Decker and HyperCard before, Decker has a much steeper learning curve for a beginner.

HyperCard Simulator is a centralized, web-based service which aims for compatibility with historical HyperCard stacks, including the HyperTalk scripting language.

Decker is an open-source standalone application which is similar in some ways to HyperCard, but differs in many details, including the use of a unique scripting language descended from APL. Decker is not designed to be compatible with HyperCard stacks.

Which stack? There are other ways of playing them today if you wanted to mess around for nostalgia-sake and also the creator of HC Simulator is quite responsive to fixing things that might not work quite right :)

Similar. My parents were teachers, and my dad had dominion of the Mac lab, even though he wasn't particularly astute with them. But, since they were idle in the summers, he was able to bring one home. First Apple IIe's, later early Mac's. I spent many, many hours screwing around in HyperCard.

We also got our first computer (an Apple II GS, the precursor to Mac. With a full color monitor!) via the "Apple for a Teacher" program where teachers were able to buy them at a significantly discounted price. I had won a creative writing contest for 3-2-1 Contact magazine where the prize was 5 games of my choice, and I was able to convince my parents I needed a computer to play them on during the rest of the year.

If you liked Get Rich Quick they made a sequel called Lost & Found that's quite a bit more expansive! You can play it on archive.org here: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_lost-and-found

It’s HyperCards all the way down.