[HN Gopher] The Complete Hypercard Handbook
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The Complete Hypercard Handbook
Author : lubesGordi
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-05-07 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| BaldricksGhost wrote:
| The first useful application/database I ever wrote was in
| Hypercard. I loved that app. 33 years later I still work in IT.
| peterchane wrote:
| This book changed my life in that it introduced me to
| programming. Thanks archive.org for keeping it around!
| zqfm wrote:
| I still have this book on my shelf, it got me started programming
| as a youngin'. Good times!
| thrownout wrote:
| So I had to post that excellent comment from DonHopkins as seen
| here two days ago ""
|
| DonHopkins 2 days ago | parent [-] | on: LSD, cargo shorts and
| the fall of a tech CEO
|
| I don't know how it affected Steve Jobs, but Bill Atkinson
| handled his LSD pretty well.
|
| https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/06/18/the-inspiration-for-hyp...
|
| >The Psychedelic Inspiration For Hypercard, by Bill Atkinson.
|
| >In 1985 I swallowed a tiny fleck of gelatin containing a medium
| dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete
| park bench outside my home in Los Gatos, California.
|
| >I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies each with a hundred
| billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion
| reaction as powerful as our Sun. And for the first time in my
| life I knew deep down inside that we are not alone.
|
| >I knew that life on planet Earth is not the only pocket of
| consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced.
| But we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of
| creation.
|
| >It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive.
| Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the
| universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the
| cosmic birth of consciousness.
|
| >But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness
| and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I
| lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below glowing brightly,
| each casting a pool of light but surrounded by darkness before
| the next lamp. As above, so below.
|
| >The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of
| discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by
| distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians,
| physicists, chemists, biologists, mathmeticians, and economists
| all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from
| sharing and finding the deeper connections.
|
| >My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the
| curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity
| toward its center, such that every one of us is standing at the
| very apex. Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each
| of us is a leader or captain of the "Blue Marble" team.
|
| >How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were
| captain of a soccer team, I would look for the weak link and work
| on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend
| extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
|
| >It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is
| wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to
| change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we
| seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative
| futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom
| myself.
|
| >Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the "How" connections
| between pieces of information, the cause and effect
| relationships. How does this action bring about that result.
| Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "How"
| connections.
|
| >Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger
| perspective of the "Why" connections between pieces of knowledge.
| Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one
| future over another?
|
| >I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between
| different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture
| would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop. Sort of a
| trickle-up theory of information leading to knowledge leading to
| wisdom.
|
| >This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard, a multimedia
| authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share
| ideas using new interactive media called HyperCard stacks.
|
| >Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text,
| interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or
| stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a
| library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based
| scripting made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
|
| >It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this
| mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August 1987, and included it
| free with every Mac so any user could create and share HyperCard
| stacks. Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions,
| and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
|
| >HyperCard was a precurser to the first web browser, except
| chained to a hard drive before the worldwide web. Six years later
| Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in
| HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
| cmdrriker wrote:
| I have this book! I loved Hypercard and spend many hours making
| silly and functional programs with it.
|
| I wish that somehow it was continued and not sent out to the
| pasture at Claris.
| protomyth wrote:
| In a lot of ways, my ideal product would be a HyperCard / Excel
| combo that could output Java (or some other source code).
| tomcam wrote:
| Something close to that was tried in Microsoft when I was
| there 1996-2000. It was extraordinarily hard to keep the
| visual forms designer and the output code in sync, especially
| when users tried to edit the code.
| protomyth wrote:
| I don't think it needs to return trip for it to be useful.
| Most of the value is allowing programmers to get the
| business logic that expert users generate.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Sometimes when I'm drinking at 3am I like to imagine a world
| where somebody wrote a hypercard server and we were all
| developing web apps as hypercard stacks instead of our current
| abomination.
| ksec wrote:
| Something like CardStack?
|
| https://cardstack.com
| disqard wrote:
| Would you give https://www.blockstud.io a try?
|
| I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
|
| Thanks!
| outofpaper wrote:
| I thought the site was pretty cool. What's your take on using
| Blockstud.io over Snap or Scratch?
| protomyth wrote:
| They also have the 2.0 book and his AppleScript handbook which
| was really helpful.
|
| https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Goodman%2C...
| dstainer wrote:
| Hypercard, now that is a name I've not heard in a long time
| evaneykelen wrote:
| This book was so big (5-6 cm) I had to cut it into three parts to
| turn it into a manageable desk reference.
| tobr wrote:
| > GOODMAN: But we can expect to see additions?
|
| > ATKINSON: Lots of improvements. This is not going to be
| abandoned like MacPaint was. Pretty much Apple put me on
| something else and gave the maintenance of MacPaint to someone
| else and then kept shuffling that from one person to another, and
| MacPaint never got maintained.
|
| As far as I understand that's almost exactly what would happen to
| HyperCard over the next few years as well.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Yup. It was abandoned almost exactly like MacPaint was. Real
| shame.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| HyperCard did get a fairly substantial upgrade with HyperCard
| 2.0. Indeed, the second version of The Complete HyperCard
| Handbook included another interview with Bill Atkinson,
| discussing some of the changes made and the direction HyperCard
| was heading in.
|
| The real trouble for HyperCard came when it was moved to the
| Claris subsidiary, who started charging for it [1]. No longer
| was the full version bundled with every Mac sold, which had
| helped HyperCard become ubiquitous until that point.
|
| [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apples-lost-decade-
| hypercard-a...
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| This is great, disappointed that the site won't let me download
| it though.
| [deleted]
| mimixco wrote:
| https://archive.org/download/The_Complete_HyperCard_Handbook...
| gdubs wrote:
| Well, there goes my weekend. Happy to see the Hypercard love is
| still out there. I think about it a lot. I love the idea of a
| coffee shop or a bicycle shop that's run on a Hypercard stack on
| an old Mac.
|
| In case you've never seen it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg
| w0mbat wrote:
| I bought the first edition when it came out, read it straight
| through like a novel. This is what ignited my change in career
| direction from a photographer who dabbled with his dad's Mac SE
| to programmer. I eventually learned many languages beyond
| HyperTalk and moved to Silicon Valley. I may have written part of
| this web browser.
| almost wrote:
| What I wouldn't have given for a copy of this back then!
|
| The samples that came with HyperCard where good enough though :)
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| Has anyone made a serious attempt to recreate HyperCard for
| modern systems? Would Apple try to block it?
| cmdrriker wrote:
| I think Supercard is still going, its sorta like a souped up
| version of Hypercard
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I haven't used it in a looong time, but yes[1] it is,
| apparently.
|
| 1: https://supercard.us/
| chris_wot wrote:
| Does not work on Catalina and Big Sur.
| phonon wrote:
| https://livecode.com/
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