As mentioned earlier, I bought an iBook G3 so I could play around with Mac OS 9 some more – one of my favourite operating systems. This time around, I’m also taking a look at HyperCard, something I never experienced but am quite interested in. Since I know many of you grew up with Apple machines and possibly HyperCard, I was wondering if any of you have any recommendations for fun, interesting, or otherwise fascinating HyperCard stacks.
I can see the potential all over HyperCard from the mere demos alone – and now I want to see what smart people could do with it.
Hypercard is incredible.
Back in the day, everyone used it as a Powerpoint app and it worked really well for that.
It started to get used as a small web system, of course.
But then all the Macro viruses came along and ruined it (it was pretty bad, but Apple did a great job containing the information.)
Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMRoYDc2z8 …
Powerpoint has never worked well for pretty much anyone. See IBM ads for reference. It has been awful since the beginning, and most places do not even accept power point files any more (unless in government),
I don’t think you understand how valuable powerpoint has been for companies.
Prior to power point, people would make physical charts or slide decks that took considerably more time and money to make, and couldn’t be changed last minute.
Maybe there have always been technically better solutions, but the difference between anything digital and non digital was huge.
Maybe I should send you one of the crappy point-and-click adventure games I made as a kid.
I still have most of my old stacks in a folder on my current computer. Some of them are about 25 years old at this point and have migrated to newer Macs six times.
I feel I owe a lot to HyperCard – it’s what got me into programming. We got a Mac Classic when I was eight and it came with a copy of HyperCard 2.1. My dad noticed my fascination with the tiny computer and we did a few HyperCard tutorials together. Things kinda snowballed from there, though I managed to get caught in a dead end with Klik & Play for a few years. (I do remember writing about all of this about five years ago: http://www.osnews.com/permalink?431127 .)
I’ve also got an iBook G3 laying around and the original Mac OS 9.2.2 and 10.1.2 install discs. The CD-ROM doesn’t seem to be in too good shape though. The only thing I managed to get working was the 30 MB Ubuntu minimal installation CD.
Very true, but using the built in screen of the mac or mac LC woulds be considered child abuse today.
Like Myst? (which was also written in hypercard):D
This. This is how I feel of HyperCard.
I learned a _lot_ of programming writing stacks as a kid — even the basics of OOP and event-driven programming, before I knew what it was.
I have very fond memories of HyperCard.
The University of Michigan’s Macintosh Public Domain and
Shareware Archive is still online, and has a HyperCard section:
http://www.umich.edu/~archive/mac/hypercard/
I haven’t used HyperCard too much myself, so I can’t make specific recommendations.
Come to think of it, when I was studying linguistics back in 2004 we used a HyperCard stack called “Sounds of the World’s Languages”. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find it as a download anywhere. The closest I got was this webpage which has turned the old black and white cards into HTML image maps: http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/
The mac version of the classic adventure game myst was built in hypercard if I remember correctly.
You guys are really making me have massive nostalgia for Mac OS 7.x – 9.x lately, I wish there were a better emulator for it other than Sheepshaver and Basilisk
Basilisk is almost vliv and jit compatible with os7 and os8. What you get in basilisk is pretty much what you would get on a real mac. Does no-one remember how bar 8.0 was?
Edit; Spelling
Edited 2015-02-21 20:56 UTC
Try to find a slightly older version of Basilisk II, before it was more or less unified with Sheepshaver.
It’s much, much more stable.
I made a GTK theme back in 2008 that tried to look as close as OS8/9 as possible. Today i would not even consider cloing the look of MacOS as it is so darn flat, ugly and hostile against us with impaired vision.
Hope the flat trend ends soon.
I loved hypercard. It was simply incredible, at one point I managed to get my hands on tons stacks and I might actually still have some on some old floppy discs. Sound editing software, games, graphics editing. It was simply incredible. I also made a little point and click game myself. A very bad point and click and game.
I had 2 copies of Hypercard, boxed and everything.
I planned to sell them or give them away. But I guess I threw them some years ago…
Never any OSX/Apple on me, ever again. I went back to the Windows Camp, and never looked back. Abandoned Apple when iPhones came. Apple gave me some terrible “support” on my last MacBook. (Was under warranty, but Apple did not want to fix it under warranty… They told me I had to pay for the repair.) I then paid for the repair and installed Windows XP on the MacBook just for the heck of it.
Then I bought Windows-gear and never used Apple products again. Abandoned all my Apple products and never looked back.
Have never missed any of it, ever since. Windows 8.1 is fantastic! And I love my Android gear! It works so much better than Mac/iPhone.
Love it when I see all the incompetent Apple-users struggle with their gear. They sometimes ask me for help. I just tell them I know “nothing” about Apple stuff.
(I loved PPC and OS9, though…)
You didn’t give up everything you had with Apple, though.
For example, that overpowering smugness – you’re still rocking that in full view.
There were quite a number of pretty creative things smart people did with it, but (imho) that is not what made it great. What made it great was that it was approachable and usable by anyone – no smarts required. No other “programming” tool has ever been its equal in that regard.
If only someone would re-implement it in its original simplistic form (and easily portable) – the only thing missing really was color. LiveCode is close ( http://livecode.com/ ), but I think they went to far to make it more capable and it complicated things a bit.
To this day I still think HyperCard should be taught in schools. The perfect age to me would be at about 8-10, much younger than most CS is taught (in the US at least). I wouldn’t even label it a CS class, it should be taught alongside other classes as an occasional lab:
1. Class covers a concept (say pi in math or something)
2. After, class has a 30 minute lab with a card stack that implements the concept in a fun and compelling way, but the student has to plug in some code here and there to get it to work.
3. Do something like this maybe once a month or every other week in classes it makes sense for (Math, Science, hell – really anything).
4. Most Important: All students get a copy of the stacks and the software (that it should be open source and run on pretty much anything is a given).
The US wants more programmers? This is how you get more programmers.
Edited 2015-02-22 23:07 UTC
I really think Visual Basic and VBA did a better job. Really. Everybody can program Visual Basic.
Hypercard was annoyingly inconsistent. I recall having to guess if it was “add 3 to the value” or “add 3 to value”. I am sure I have the syntax wrong, but I definitely recall needing to almost randomly stick “the” into commands.
I personally despise VB. However, I’ll concede that given the choice between VB and HyperCard for teaching an introductory programming course I would choose VB as well. Given any choice, I would choose Python, Ruby, or even JavaScript before either of them – but that is beside the point…
Thing is I’m not advocating using it to teach introductory programming. I’m talking about 8 year old kids. The point is simply to expose them to the fundamentals. Abstract thinking. Attention to detail. Basic control flow. Teach it inductively instead of directly.
Give an 8 year old kid Hypercard with the paint tools open and he/she is going to immediately start drawing something. Then, if they are so inclined, they are going to want to make their drawing do something.
What does he/she do with VB? Read the manual???
Yes, its a horrible language, once you’ve learned to program. It’s a wonderful language when you don’t know how. You do need to learn a bit of HyperTalk’s quirks in order to actually efficiently write code in it, but the only requirement needed to read it is understanding English. It is almost completely self descriptive.
You don’t need to know data types. You don’t need to understand what an array is. Its like baby talk for computers, which is exactly what you want if your trying to teach kids how to “speak” to computers.
Teach them programming later. But hopefully, this kind of exposure early on would make it much easier for them to grok it when the time comes.
Edited 2015-02-23 22:41 UTC
I was somewhere between 8 and 10 when I learned BASIC on a C64. Loads of kids did. Absolutely everyone in our class learned
10 PRINT “S***! F***!”
20 GOTO 10
So that they could leave it running to horrify the teachers and the next class.
By the time I was 14 I was doing 6502 assembly programming and timing the screen blank.
Kids don’t need to be coddled if they have an interest.
I really believe that it is more important for kids learning computing to have solid, consistent rules than to have to keep guessing where to stick the “the”.
As for reading a manual, I am pretty sure Hypercard had one. It was a Hypercard stack, if I remember it right.
I think I learned Visual Basic from its F1 Help file. I mean, I had the idea of Basic already down, so I just needed the details. I don’t know how other people learn it but from the evidence around me, everyone in an office has learned how to do it.
Thats the point. Introduce a spark to promote developing that interest. You taught yourself basic on a C64. I taught myself TIBasic on a 99/4A. Neither of us would have been an example of an average 8 year old…
I don’t think it is “coddling” to understand that most 8 years old would not only not be interested in VB, they would be completely bewildered by it and would find it pointless. How do they do anything fun in it?
You and i are just talking about 2 different things Im afraid.
Edited 2015-02-24 00:18 UTC
python => spend your time dealing with newbies not understanding whitespace
ruby => ugh, not as similar as other programming languages. Rails is dangerous, its the newer java swing. Easy to do easy projects on, doesn’t scale.
javascript => prototype style inheritance will damage their brains, too dissimilar to other languages.
My suggestion ( even as someone who’s not a MS fan), c#. Its easy to use, free ( with Vs studio community), simular enough to other programming languages that switching between them wouldn’t be difficult. Easy peasy gui, to keep marginally interested students engaged.
I have said this before here… It’s only a problem for people coming from other languages where whitespace is not significant. Beginners get it in about 5 minutes.
The real problem is explaining the significance of block scoping and how that works, not the syntax. You have they same challenge teaching that in any language that has block scoping…
I wouldn’t let an “Introduction to Programming” class anywhere near Rails… What does Rails, or scalability for that matter, have to do with teaching people how to program?
Why would I teach inheritance in an introductory programming class???
We just seem to have different opinions of what introductory material should be. I think starting with C#, while arguably a practical and useful language, requires way too much mental setup.
I want cross-platform. Needs nothing but an editor and a command line compiler/interpreter. Runnable from a thumbdrive, or from a website setup to run code interactively in their browser (this is fairly easy to do with python, ruby, or javascript). I’m talking about a class for someone who has literally never programmed at all.
I suppose http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/ is too complex… :p
There is a modern-ish alternative named LiveCode. I played with it a little a few years back (before it was renamed LiveCode). I hated the IDE look and moved to other things.
Still, if you are looking into hypercard, may be it is worth a look.
EDIT: Just noticed that someone mentioned it earlier in a comment.
Edited 2015-02-23 13:31 UTC