HyperCard on the Macintosh
32 points by abareplace
32 points by abareplace
HyperCard was awesome, and sorely missed.
Not only what you could build (things like you can with HTML and JavaScript now), but most especially the development environment and the easy access to the handlers for any given button or field, or the card itself.
Unfortunately, HyperCard itself was programmed at too low a level, with too many assumptions built deeply into it, and had a hard time being adapted to different screen sizes and greyscale/colour, and was not portable to PowerPC or OS X.
The "SuperCard" clone ( Silicon Beach Software, 1989) took all those transitions in stride, and was a better HyperCard in every way. It was even made x86 native, though never made the transition to 64 bit and so is not compatible with macOS Catalina (2019) or later.
In some ways Visual Basic was a bit like HyperCard, but not as slick in the way handlers are added to UI elements.
In some ways Userland Frontier was in the same space too, though it started from Outlining, added the ability to build apps with simple menu & dialog box UIs, and ended up more as a web back end development system. As it integrated with AppleScript you could get Frontier to launch a web browser and generate content for it locally as the Frontier program's UI.
What was the problem with the PowerPC port? Too many 68k assumptions in HyperCard?
Among other problems with porting the HyperCard application itself, stacks could embed 68k machine code resources, which in turn could have non-portable dependencies on low-level operating system or hardware facilities. The complete absence of sandboxing in HyperCard made it very flexible and powerful but for precisely the same reasons made it a portability and security nightmare.
I loved, and miss, HyperCard. The first program I "shipped" (to a very small set of customers) was a HyperCard stack (with a couple of XFCNs for interacting with hardware) that could monitor a label printer (cloth labels that got sewn into clothing, not paper labels) and start paging people (it was the 1990s; if you were on call, you had a pager) if something was awry. It was effective, took very little time to make, the customers loved it, and I was hooked.
A sane man would skedaddle upon seeing the 1,000 (!) pages of The Complete HyperCard 2.0 Handbook, 3rd Edition by Danny Goodman, but not this man. Make of that what you will.
I may still have that in my basement. That was a great book!