Talk:HyperCard

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News This article has been cited as a source by a media outlet. See the 2004 press source article for details.
  • "Apple ditches HyperCard" (April 22, 2004). Macworld Daily News. [1].

The HyperCard FAQ, now maintained at the Pantechnicon site, is likely the best source of historical information on Hypercard. (Full Disclosure: I wrote the original FAQ and maintained it for several years.) It was well-researched with participation by the community. Pfhyper 23:32, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Open questions for further work

  • When was the first version of the this software released?
  • Is there an open source version of a similar system? --Kwaku
    • Yes, there is, and it's called the World Wide Web, based on open-source server software called Apache HTTP Server and AOLserver and open-source client software called Konqueror and Mozilla. --Damian Yerrick
    • For anyone else reading this, WWW and HyperCard are utterly unrelated. How one could come up with a comment like the one above mystifies me.
    • No, about 10 years ago, I realised that Hypercard was apple's greatest missed opportunity - it allowed easy creation of hyperlinked documents, accessible over a network. It could have been the model for the web before the creation of http, had apple had the vision - Andy D
    • There's a project for an open-source version of HyperCard called FreeCard. I added a link to it in the article. CHz
      • It would be great if a free open-source version of HyperCard was avalaible Pfv2 03:35, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Someone should add a link to Ward Cunningham, Wiki, WikiWikiWeb or Portland Pattern Repository, since Mr Cunningham developed wiki from HyperCard. I don't want to do it myself, since I have never before written anything on Wikipedia.

The information in the second link on the hypercard page is way out of date (though the copyright notice says 2002). The latest version of Hypercard is 2.4 and it is, as far as I know, not being worked on. -- Vignaux

[edit] HyperCard 3.0 Petition

I removed the link to the "HyperCard 3.0 petition," because it's a partisan use of Wikipedia, but not only that, it's obsolete.

If you go to the root page [2] you find: There is no chance in hell that I'm going to leave embarrassing things like this just lying around on the internet! Who would have suspected that shy little Alex started an internet petition when he was 13, demanding that HyperCard (his favorite thing ever) be ported to Mac OS X. Hey, it got a lot of signatures. And it changed nothing. HyperCard 3.0 was never released. Fuck you, Apple.

If there is a good reason for linking to this petition, we can do it, but I don't think it serves any purpose for readers or for the petition author.

I made minor copyedits, mostly fixing tense, and adding specificity, added a paragraph listing some of the commerical products built with HyperCard, and a reference to RunRev's HyperCard-like and HyperCard importing Revolution. Their server isn't responding so I hesitate to add a link to www.runrev.com. DigitalMedievalist 06:16, 5 Jan 2004 (UTC) Lisa

This is an odd statement. A dog is like a duck except it doesn't have wings.

The Hypercard concept is actually now familiar as it is essentially that of the World Wide Web, albeit confined to a single machine. In this respect it may be another example of being too far ahead of its time - had it been a network-based system from the start, the story of the internet may have been very different.

Roadrunner 21:38, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Not really. Tim Berners-Lee has stated that his work on creating the web was at least partially inspired by Hypercard. In addition, other commentators have noted that if something like Hypercard had been more closely modelled as the basis for the web rather then developing HTML (which is really a very 60s type of technology) then the web might have gone off in a very different direction - things like JavaScript and DHTML wouldn't have been necessary, since HyperCard already has this sort of feature built-in, and other tricks that people resort to to "fix" layouts in place are also unnecessary, since HyperCard embodies absolute positioning (layout) within its design, which HTML doesn't manage very well. Of course, HTML is also processable by non-graphical machines, but as time has passed, that necessity has diminished greatly, yet we're stuck with it. In other words, HyperCard is like an advanced web technology that never made the leap from a single machine to the wider networked world. In that light this doesn't seem such an odd statement. Graham 22:55, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Actually, hypercard had the abiltiy to access other stacks over an apple netowrk, but this was rarely used; was appletalk, not tcp/ip - Andy D

Grahm,

SuperCard did indeed have a Supercard plugin so that you could run your stacks on the web, in a web browser.

--Sam

Let's back up here and take a 20,000 ft overview:

In HyperCard, one generally interacted with a single stack, located on a single computer. That stack was generally operated by pushing buttons, and was highly interactive. Typical stack content included images almost as commonly as text, and (critically) was often modified or entered by the user. Stacks seemed to fall into two general groups; database-like applications with editable fields, and presentation-like stacks where the user "drove" through the application's content. Another key aspect of HyperCard was that it was extremely easy for the user to create their own content, and more critically, program it.

On the Web, one generally interacts with a series of linked text pages, almost always stored on the web (as opposed to locally). Sites are generally operated by clicking on hypertext links, or "buttons" that are actually links. Interactivity is was extremely limited until recently, spawning things like Macromedia Flash in order to fill this need. Content is almost entirely read-only, and creating database-like applications generally requires a considerable amount of programming effort in tools that are essentially unrelated (like Perl or PHP) with the exception that they can create web content on the fly. More critically, web content cannot generally be edited within the user's application, and even systems like the wikipedia offer only limited editing of content itself, not the program which exists externally. In many cases, making even basic web content remains beyond the abilities of the average user.

Does anyone disagree with the basic gist of the comments above? HC was a RAD-like tool with excellent multimedia abilities. The web is a hypertext display system with many plugins. They are not similar in concept in any way. I realize that many people are confused because Berners-Lee said he liked HC when he saw it, and we all want every innovation ever to come from Apple, but unless someone can provide an in-depth description of exactly how HC inspired the web, and what features in particular, I am left thinking that a text-based read-only hypertext medium is based little if at all on an interactive data-storing GUI-based system.

Maury 18:52, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I disagree. HyperCard stacks are just a series of cards against backgrounds, which are a lot like web pages. Interactivity in HyperCard applications was carefully controlled by those applications; for instance, self-changing HyperCard stacks were largely created because there was no other way to store state information. Web sites typically use form submits, cookies JavaScript and (sometimes) Flash to perform the same functionality. HyperCard stacks themselves were frequently uneditable without bypassing significant protection put on them. The Web shares a lot more with advanced HyperCard stacks than you are giving credit for. I'll grant you that HyperCard typically used buttons beside articles instead of links within them, but that is only an evolutionary difference and not all that significant. At any rate, if you're going to challenge Tim Berners-Lee on this (which I'm not discouraging, mind) you're going to need lots of references to avoid falling into original research. -- Steven Fisher 22:45, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but these arguments are specious. HC has much more in common with Visual Basic than it does web pages -- editability, built-in coding, data storage, code accessable with control-click on the control, event-driven OO programming, etc. Yet I don't see anyone claiming that the web and VB are similar. Maury 12:24, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
If the best argument you can come up with is to declare my arguments specious without offering any additional data, you're definitely nowhere near proving your point. And VB is nothing like the web, sorry. -- Steven Fisher 14:53, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What the hell is "guavadent"???

The second sentence of the third paragraph of "History" section goes like this : "Management saw that it was being used by a huge guavadent number of people, internally and externally, and bug reports and upgrade suggestions continued to flow in from a wide variety of users; clearly people were interested in it."

In my book, if the word isn't listed in Merriam-Webster dictionary of English language, that word is unfit to be a part of an explanation in Wikipedia.

I removed it - it's not a word. My guess is that someone slipped it in as a prank, though I can't be bothered trawling through the history to find out who it was. Graham 23:37, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It was User talk:66.168.213.5 who has been doing a small amounts of random vandalism... Mozzerati 10:01, 2004 Aug 5 (UTC)

[edit] failed initiative cat

I removed this page from the category "failed apple initiatives". Hypercard is not in the same category as the stillborn projects listed there - it was very successful at the time, with many thousands of users. I suggest the person who added it gort a bit carried away! Graham 06:47, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hypercard was highly successful in the beginning. The last two commercial cardstacks I used were the fulltext plus multimedia e-book versions of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and William Gibson's Neuromancer published by Voyager. People had written lots of cardstacks for it. But the product just died.
Hypercard was surely more popular than, say, TrueType GX. Few companies did ship a GX font. And those who shipped, utilized only very few GX features. GX did not have a successful beginning. It just failed and went forgotten. And, arguably, I think Hypercard was more popular than Apple Newton because it was software.
But it does not change the fact that Hypercard failed several years later. Bad business management and lack of upgrade made it into another dinosaur. Today few people ever heard of Hypercard and Hypertalk is even less known. Despite the theory that Hypercard inspired the WWW, the WWW has nothing to do with Hypercard. You don't need to know Hypercard to access the web. No known popular browser was based on any Hypercard codes. To say Hypercard is not a failure because we're using the web is akin to say we are still using some kind of Xerox Star.
Apple II also died. But at least it enjoyed a very long reign. I will never say Apple II was a failure because no new computer today is based on Apple II. Apple II earned its investments back. It was also developed into Apple IIe, Apple II GX, ... a lot of new models. But Hypercard, as an Apple product, failed to keep on moving. It was a failure (business but technological). Hypercard was left alone and died.
Latter Apple software did not reuse Hypercard technologies (except for some plain-Englished-based computer languages, such as AppleScript, these are just concepts). And Bill Atkinson was not very proud of it.
Failed initiatives is a subjective category. I disagree with you, but I will not restore it. -- Toytoy 08:06, Aug 16, 2004 (UTC)

A successful initiative must be:

  • Technologically advanced
  • Evolved into other products

If you accept my theory, then Hypercard is a failed initiative. It was very advanced in the 80s. But it failed to spin off. Some people outside Apple might have used some Hypercard concepts. But they still had to reinvent the wheel. I don't see Hypercard integrated into latter Macintosh system software. It did not grow. It became a technological deadend. -- Toytoy 08:18, Aug 16, 2004 (UTC)

I accept parts of what you are saying, but not the overall thrust. Comparing Hypercard to most of the others in this "category" (which, personally, I see little need for really, it seems to be rather gratuitous), it's just not the same sort of failure. Copland, Taligent, Pippin, Hypercard - which is the odd one out? At least Hypercard came to market and enjoyed a good degree of popularity for some time. In fact I can't really see why you distinguish between the Apple II and Hypercard - both were "dead end" technologies as it stands now. Apple II failed to "spin off" ultimately - as did many thousands of successful technologies that ultimately get superseded. You could write a Hypercard stack today that could be useful - you couldn't write any Copland software, or a Taligent app and say the same. Who is to say that Hypercard didn't earn its investments back? I'd say it almost certainly did - Atkinson developed it in a pretty short space of time mostly on his own initiative and it wasn't as if Apple poured millions of R&D dollars into it. As for Atkinson not being proud of it, I wonder where you got that info from? I'd heard that on the contrary Atkinson was very proud of it and strongly convinced it should be bundled with all new Macs - he got his way for a while. I imagine he was rather annoyed to see it allowed to wither on the vine after several years.
I think if this category is to serve any purpose then what counts as a failure will have to be more carefully defined. I get the feeling that the only reason it's been created is to provide an outlet for the schadenfreude that some people seem to feel towards Apple when some of its projects go wrong. I don't see any similar "failed Microsoft Initiatives", or "failed Ford initiatives" here - what is it about Apple that stirs up so much emotion?Graham 23:33, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree with these criteria, particularly #2. Hypercard's original codebase doesn't exist in any shipping product today, but by that strict interpretation, Mac OS (1-9) failed as an initiative, as did the Apple II, and many other incredibly successful products (Netscape?). And NeXT would qualify as a successful initiative -- I loved my NeXT cube as much as the next guy, but I don't delude myself about its success.  :-) Second, when people outside Apple built products based on Hypercard (some of which are still shipping), they didn't have to "reinvent the wheel" -- just reimplement it. A lot of people don't appreciate that designing a user interface is a significant portion of the work of creating a program (especially one as advanced as Hypercard). -K

Sorry, when I said Atkinson was not very proud of it, I mean it was Apple's cold shoulder treatment. I do think Hypercard, a low cost but very effective invention, should have been bundled in every Macintosh and port to other systems as soon as possible. They should have develop thousands of ways to integrate Hypercard into every part of the system and application software. Anyway, Atkinson finally left Apple.

I don't know who started this "failed Apple Initiatives" category. Surely very few people will start a "failed Ford Initiatives" or "failed Microsoft Initiatives" category. Few other business in human history was so famous for its revolutionary looks and poor managements. Steve Jobs came back, made iPod a popular hit, but Macintosh is still a very marginal computer system today. No one will bother to write a book about creativity ran amok in ... well ... Coca Cola.

As a standalone product, Hypercard was a great but abandoned product. As an initiative, Hypercard never took off. It was not integrated into the system software. It later was sold separately by Claris. Few other applications were written to use Hypercard technologies. Personally, I think this means failure.

Let's say I invented a car that burns fried chicken vegetable oil. Whenever I am low on fuel, I drive it to a KFC's, order my food, and have the kids fill up my tank. It was a great initiative. I sold millions of my cars. But for whatever reason, my company abandoned this popular invention. I was about to build trucks, railroad trains, ships, airplanes and Warp Drive Spaceships that burns fast food oil. But my company simply killed the project and I became a photographer. Successful product, failed initiative. -- Toytoy 00:23, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)

Not that it's relevant to Hypercard, but you *can* burn vegetable oil from KFC (after filtering it) in any diesel engine.  :-) (The only catch is you can't run it in a cold engine, so people usually have 2 tanks and run diesel until the engine warms up. I have a friend who does this. Restaurants love him because they don't have to pay to dispose of their oil.) -K
Then how about Lisa? Lisa was a miserable market failure. Tons of unsold units were dumped in the desert. But Lisa changed the concept of Macintosh even before it was born. The earliest idea of Macintosh was not so complex. It was once called "Bicycle". Without Lisa, the first Macs could have been like vanilla-flavored Canon Cats. Was Lisa a part of "failed Apple Initiatives"? I really don't have a clue. -- Toytoy 01:49, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Remove Every link?

David is well known on the 'net (or used to be) for his Apple-appologist articles -- typical "everything MS did they ripped off from Apple" and "everything Apple did was great" sort of thing. In this article there is a link to a page he wrote where he basically claims that Gates saw HC and decided to rip it off.

This is patently ridiculous. The GUI container system (the origin of Windows Forms) they got from a third party, Alan Cooper, which was demoed to them in 1988. He'd already been working on it the year before. MS later put QuickBasic, which predates HC, into his engine in place of his own interpreter. Presto, VB 1.x.

Real history here: http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html

I removed the link. The article is indeed ridiculously wrong about its "history". As one of the original authors of the "Visual" part of Visual Basic, I can attest that Alan's history is correct. (The only slight inaccuracy in Alan's history is that there is a bit too much "I" and not enough "we"...) --Michael Geary 15:58, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

HyperCard Pantechnicon Link seems to be dead


I'm new to wikipedia so was hesitant to add this directly to the article. One other item to add to the "legacy" section is that Ward Cunningham (in this interview) directly cites hypercard as part of his inspiration in creating the first wiki. Here's the quote:

"I had a few things that I wanted to accomplish when I created wiki. My specific purpose for the first wiki was to create an environment where we might link together each other's experience to discover the pattern language of programming. I had previously worked with a HyperCard stack that was set up to achieve the same kind of goal. I knew people liked to read and author in that HyperCard stack, but it was single user. When we started the PLoP [Pattern Languages of Programming] series of conferences, and realized that what we really wanted to do was start a new literature, I decided that I needed to take that HyperCard stack and find a web equivalent."

--Lynnwood 13:23, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What did I do?! Can someone revert?

I don't know what I was doing, but I have managed to damage this article. I can't figure out how to revert. Can someone revert to about three versions back?

Maury 00:39, 25 May 2005 (UTC)


Done - have a look and see if there are changes you want to put back in. Incidentally, reverting is easy - just click on "History", find the version that you want to revert to, and click the date. The article at that time is displayed. Click "Edit this page" as usual. You'll get a warning that you are editing an out of date version - click save and that version becomes current. Graham 00:46, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Viruses

Although thoroughly negative, it seems that HyperCard's ability to get infected through scripting should be mentioned. I believe this was one of the first macro viruses. Does anyone know enough about this to take a stab at it? --Steven Fisher 19:22, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Well, I was bold. Feel free to correct if you know more. --Steven Fisher 19:38, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

I remember the MerryXMas virus which infected the Home stack of hypercard. Pfv2 03:36, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] HyperCard free as in beer

HyperCard 1 (and early 2.* I think) were completely free, not just a "player". This is what spurred its widespread use in the late 80s. Of course you needed a (then expensive) mac to use it, but that is really just the same argument as with current "free" Apple software. Arru 09:23, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Moved History section further down

I've moved the History section further down in the article to just ahead of the Legacy section. I think that most people looking at this article are going to want to know what HyperCard was before they read the detailed history of its versions. Does this make sense? If the general consensus is that this is a bad idea I'm happy to move it back. Gwernol 16:14, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What? HyperCard inspired the creation of HTTP?

"... inspired the creation of both HTTP itself and JavaScript"

HyperCard inspired the creation of WWW itself, not HTTP, which is the transfer protocol.

Considering what the WWW is today, it should be put in bold letters at the beginning of the article, not in a cryptic allusion hidden in the "Legacy" section.

Given the interest in software patents, there is no mention here of Paul Henckel's claim to have been the "inventor" of the Hypercard idea. See his patent us4,736,308 and his article in Comms of the ACM, Debunking the Software Patent Myths, June 1992, Vol 35, No 6.

The Hypercard was - he suggests - based on a similar but more limited card and stack version of the metaphor in his program "Zoomracks". Apple, he claims, had seen his program earlier under a non-disclosure agreement. Apple licensed the patent. He did not have much success, though, with IBM.

PL

I used Zoomracks (briefly) on the ST, and it was similar to HC only peripherally IMHO. Zoomracks was essentially a GUI-based dBASE with a "card filing" metaphor, which is the basis of the lawsuits. In any other way the two products are entirely unlike each other. One could safely describe Zoomracks as "a database with a card-rack interface", while, as this article demonstrates, that only describes one tiny part of HC. Personally I always considered the argument meritless, the idea of representing data on cards predates either product, and the idea of making a computer-based database look like a card has "obvious" written all over it.
The claim that HC inspired the web is somewhat difficult to pin down exactly without asking -Lee directly. The claim that it inspired JS appears to be a fabrication. Maury 14:41, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
Actually the JavaScript claim can be sourced. Quoting Brendan Eich from the foreward to the 5th. Edition of Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible: "“Java-lite” syntax. Although the “natural language” syntax of HyperTalk was fresh in my mind after a friend lent me The Complete HyperCard Handbook by some fellow named Goodman, the Next Big Thing weighed heavier,...Events for HTML elements. Buttons should have onClick event handlers. Documents load and unload from windows, so windows should have onLoad and onUnload handlers. Users and scripts submit forms: thus the onSubmit handler. Although not initially as flexible as HyperCard’s messages (whose handlers inspired the onEvent naming convention)..." from the Foreward page vii. Seems like a strong inspiration from HyperTalk. Gwernol 14:51, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
I stand (well, sit) corrected -- and surprised! Well done Gwernol, I wouldn't have thought a ref would be available one way or the other, let alone such a direct one. Maury 21:05, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
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