[Paul-Craft]

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...

[frogulis]

> looking at you, Inform 7!

Oh! Good to hear this from someone else.

I imagine that Inform 7 has been a net positive for accessibility over older "code"[1] Inform syntax (personally, I bounced right off Inform 6 as a kid), but there were times where it felt like I needed a great understanding of the underlying model that would have been more self-evident from the "code" syntax.

That said, that's my experience from many years ago. Might be better now.

[1] Inform 7 is code too in a sense, but I mean syntax that doesn't look like natural language.

[sircastor]

> HyperCard made personal computing personal again

To me, HyperCard is the definitive execution of Jobs’ “Bicycle for the mind” statement.

[fredoralive]

Macs only had a free version of Hypercard for a few years in the late '80s / early '90s, before it became a commercial product again (first under Claris then back to Apple). By the Mac OS 8 / 9 era it was a moribund product on life support, not something bundled with new systems.

[brendoelfrendo]

> I even remember seeing a couple of nontrivial apps implemented with it.

Myst being perhaps the most well-known example.

[mewse]

Worth noting that while Hypercard was the glue which held everything together, most of Myst's functionality was implemented in native plugins. (or at least that's what Robyn and Rand told me when I chatted with them at a MacWorld Expo around its release). Their earlier games (The Manhole, Cosmic Osmo, etc) had been much more pure-Hypercard affairs.

Interestingly, for Riven (Myst's sequel) they were still using Hypercard to author the game, but the game no longer ran through Hypercard; instead, it ran on a custom C++ engine which ran on the data files output by the Hypercard authoring tools.

[kalleboo]

The cool thing about Myst being built in HyperCard is you can just change the file type from APPL to STAK and open it up in HyperCard and mess around. All of the color, video and audio was built with XCMDs, but the buttons and logic around the puzzles is in HyperTalk.

I think what drove them away from being HyperCard-native for Riven was the difficulty in producing a Windows version

[kalleboo]

> 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

The full story here is:

Bill Atkinson went on an LSD trip and had the idea for HyperCard (literally according to his own account), and wrote it. He gave it to Apple in return for the promise that they would bundle it with every Macintosh for free.

Eventually Apple realized that selling and giving away Macintosh software like MacWrite, MacDraw, etc, undercut their attempts at getting people to write software for the platform, so they spun off their software division as Claris, which coincided about the time of HyperCard 2.0 releasing, which became a paid Claris product. From then on, every Macintosh shipped with a copy of HyperCard Player, which just let you run stacks other people made but not author them yourself.

There were ways around the Player issue though. The copy of HyperCard on our family Mac somehow had the HyperCard application from 2.0, but the Home and other stacks from HyperCard 1, leading to me always being confused with reading any documentation, it took me literally years to realize what was going on (we didn't have AOL or anything back then, all I had were two HyperCard books from my uncle)

The last major update to HyperCard was in 1992, after which it was abandoned (but still sold, with no updates, for another decade)

There was an effort to rebuild HyperCard as a new interactivity layer for QuickTime 3.0 so that you could build multimedia applications and host them cross-platform on the web with the QuickTime plugin. This made it to an early alpha that was demoed at WWDC. Steve Jobs came back, and hated Bill Atkinson since he was a traitor who stayed at Apple instead of going to NeXT, so killed it.

[w10-1]

> Bill Atkinson went on an LSD trip and had the idea for HyperCard

There's another (to me more plausible) story. Steve Jobs had plans for a 20MB hard drive, but marketing could not find users who wanted that much space. So Steve asked Bill to create an application full of graphics and sounds/media where people would build huge documents making floppy discs too painful.

[tivert]

> If your Mac came with System 6, 7, 8, or 9, you had HyperCard.

I'm pretty sure Apple stopped development of it before System 8, and I'm certain it wasn't bundled. I'm also pretty sure (but not absolutely certain) it wasn't bundled with System 7.1.

Hypercard 2 (1990) definitely required a separate purchase (I had to talk my parents into buying it), but I think we had Hypercard 1 from being bundled with System 6.

I think Hypercard was one of last gasps of the idea that computer users should have the tools to create their own applications.

[eadmund]

> 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 in a way it hasn’t been since, either. Web browsers and Javascript just aren’t the same. Javascript, shell, even Emacs Lisp are just too low-level. HyperCard gave one a GUI builder and a simple yet powerful language to get things done in, and it was everywhere.

[PontifexMinimus]

It's a shame Apple doesn't do something like this today. (Or maybe they do and I don't know about it?)

[ingenieros]

Swift Playgrounds might be the closest thing, but it’s nowhere near as fun or intuitive as HC once was.

[rchaud]

People usually refer to MacOS Automator and iOS Shortcuts, but those aren't remotely the same thing.

[w10-1]

Aside from that excellent summary of features: the model of cards in stacks sending messages to components or up through a hierarchy was SmallTalk-inspired and enabled plain old people to do a kind of object-oriented programming long before there were any languages for it.