Some years back, I fired up an old Macbook (or maybe an iBook) that could run HyperCard and manually ported a database of birthdays into a current version Calendar.

Did HyperCard morph into anything that people find useful today?

thanks, Todd's where-are-the-clicks-of-yesterday board

HTML? An indirect descendant.

Lots of people are talking about using HyperCard to catalog Trump's lies, but it broke the program just two weeks in.

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p8712
HTML? An indirect descendant.

I will agree with this. Hypercard was a definite precursor of linked information technology. Lots of other technologies were created and were subsumed by the Hypertext. Those clever folks at CERN...

I could follow that trend line in teaching technology to kids between 1985 and 2015.

There's some divergent and twisted lines but the trends are there:


HyperCard - > HyperStudio -> Keynote -> Web

HyperTalk - > Turtle/Logo - > Coding (of various types) -> Swift Playground

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“Live your life, love your life, don’t regret…live, learn and move forward positively.” – CR Johnson
Loving life in Lake Tahoe, CA

Ah Hyper Card. A blast from the past.

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p8712
HTML? An indirect descendant.

Yeah, HyperCard was similar in ways to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire, which later evolved into HTML and the internet as we know it.

Also, it sounds like Microsoft took cues from it for Visual Basic, but you asked about something useful.

[arstechnica.com]

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Sarcany
[arstechnica.com]

That was a very enjoyable read. Brought back a lot of memories. For a few years I had my students create presentations using HyperCard - until PowerPoint came along. There were also some HyperCard stacks that I bought or were shared around that had excellent information on all kinds of topics in science, so I had the students use those as a source and in a couple of cases those stacks were used in several days of curriculum. I knew HyperCard could do more than slide shows but I didn't give HyperTalk the value I should have and didn't teach the kids how to use it.

My son, on the other hand, took to HyperCard like breathing air. At about 11 or 12 years old he showed me that he had used HyperCard and HyperTalk to create a piano keyboard that when a key was clicked on it would play that note and then make a notation of it. A series of clicks were recorded as a "score" that could be played out in sequence. It kinda blew my mind. He was always good with that kind of stuff. When he was about 7 or 8 I taught him how to use Apple Logo. I also just for fun had figured out how to use my color TV as a monitor (though most of the time just stayed with the standard gray scale monitor). I came home one day and he showed me this geometrically intricate animation he had done in color. Not saying he was a genius, but he was pretty sharp with respect to that kind of thing. Not surprisingly he is a Cloud Infrastructure Architect now.

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e pluribus unum



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/18/2021 07:24AM by Ted King.

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Ted King
he is a Cloud Infrastructure Architect now.

And after showing so much early promise…

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

My experience with HC didn't resemble anything I later did with HTML. I think the only thing they had in common was hyperlinks. At the Fremont factory, there were SEs and Pluses running HC as a front end for assembly robots, where the operators could select what product that robot was going to work on. Granted, it was for marketing so they could say there were Macs building Macs: the little Macintosh was "running" a robot assembly cell as big as a large closet. I can't see where html would have been as good a tool for that use.

The great thing for us non-coders I remember about HC was its simple syntax. With no software skills. I wrote a stack that was a timer for my darkroom. Couldn't have done that with HTML.

I don't know of anything like HC available today.

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SuperCard.

https: //www.supercard.us/

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In tha 360. MRF User Map

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Filliam H. Muffman
SuperCard.

https: //www.supercard.us/

Just a note from their web site:

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SuperCard remains a 32-bit application and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. This means it is not compatible with Catalina (macOS 10.15) or later versions of macOS. While it is possible to run SuperCard under Catalina in a Parallels Virtual Machine, it is not natively compatible.

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e pluribus unum

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Ted King

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Sarcany
[arstechnica.com]

That was a very enjoyable read. Brought back a lot of memories. For a few years I had my students create presentations using HyperCard - until PowerPoint came along. There were also some HyperCard stacks that I bought or were shared around that had excellent information on all kinds of topics in science, so I had the students use those as a source and in a couple of cases those stacks were used in several days of curriculum. I knew HyperCard could do more than slide shows but I didn't give HyperTalk the value I should have and didn't teach the kids how to use it.

My son, on the other hand, took to HyperCard like breathing air. At about 11 or 12 years old he showed me that he had used HyperCard and HyperTalk to create a piano keyboard that when a key was clicked on it would play that note and then make a notation of it. A series of clicks were recorded as a "score" that could be played out in sequence. It kinda blew my mind. He was always good with that kind of stuff. When he was about 7 or 8 I taught him how to use Apple Logo. I also just for fun had figured out how to use my color TV as a monitor (though most of the time just stayed with the standard gray scale monitor). I came home one day and he showed me this geometrically intricate animation he had done in color. Not saying he was a genius, but he was pretty sharp with respect to that kind of thing. Not surprisingly he is a Cloud Infrastructure Architect now.

Sounds genius to me.