Hypercard simulator

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Originally published at: Hypercard simulator | Boing Boing

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Thanks. I’m looking forward to playing with this.

A whole generation of UI/UX designers and Website builders got their start on this software. It’s an incredibly important tool in the history of tech.

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Hypercard enthusiasm? There’s a douglassy article on that.

https://douglasadams.com/dna/980707-00-a.html

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I am old.

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I still miss Hypercard.

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I miss Hypercard, Apple really dropped the ball not extending it into the color Macs and more complex programming. It really could have been the successor to the built-in BASIC of earlier PCs.

I developed a number of decks, and even made a few $K off a simple genealogy system built on Hypercard. The originals are in the basement on 800K floppies along with a Mac Plus, I haven’t a clue how I’d get them to the simulator.

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There is an excellent modern day descendant of HyperCard, Livecode. It extends HyperCard into a fully modern write once, deploy anywhere (windows, linux, pc, mac, android, iOS, html5, and server side) platform. Until recently there was a free community supported opensource version of it, but the company recently stopped supporting it since they were the only ones doing any work on the open source version (no real open source community support for it sadly).

I imagine that with some googling you could probably find a copy of the free community version somewhere to play with. Otherwise you can check out www.livecode.com to see what the current commercial license prices are like - pretty sure there is a free trial available too.

It’s a great development system if you like HyperCard - I have been using it for almost 20 years.

@joelfinkle, it opens and converts HyperCard stacks.

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HyperCard is (still!) TIGHT!

“HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following an LSD trip.”

HyperCard is the best.

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The history of computers in one game.

Myst then - Hypercard
Myst now - Unreal

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Hypercard was lovely and pretty and stuff, there was a nice yellow!

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The issue is the floppy disks. Apple used a proprietary floppy format for their 400k/800k drives that can only be read by an ancient Mac with an internal floppy drive. Even an old Mac with a USB floppy drive will not work.

So the way to do this is to find an old Mac with an internal floppy drive. That may not have modern network access so you may need to copy the data to a 1.44 Mb floppy which can be read by a more modern computer with a USB floppy drive. I have heard the latest versions of Mac OS don’t even support external floppy drives so you may need to use Linux or an older Mac.

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I once created a hypercard program that would extract a list of all the files on an inserted floppy disk and add them to an Excel-style catalog. We had hundreds and hundreds of 1.44MB floppies laying around with titles like “files” or “various.” It was a pretty simple code (I think I just copied a similar one out of the Hypercard manual), but it impressed my superiors to no end.

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Hi all, new here :grin:
I remember playing around with Hypercard but not really getting how to use it. Many years later a VJ friend put me onto Quartz composer a node based editor that could output standalone apps that would run on quicktime.
Would this be a more modern equivalent and does it still exist?
I remember having to download the developer tools so not exactly promoted by apple!

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Even in the '80s we had Ethernet … didn’t we?

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Doesn’t solve the issue of how to get the sources off of ancient floppies and onto the intarweb

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Depends on the computer you dig up to try this with. We are talking the old beige macs with the multi-color apple logo running Mac OS 9 or earlier. Not the later colorful powermacs and iMacs. Macs were among the first personal computers to have ethernet ports available and the easiest to connect to the internet at the time but I think ethernet was still an optional accessory on most if not all of that generation of computers and even within ethernet they might be only set up for appletalk and LAN sharing not TCP/IP. They certainly won’t have a browser that can handle modern webpages but if you are lucky they will have fetch and be able to upload to an unencrypted FTP server.

So: maybe you could do networking, but copying to a high density floppy disk might be easier.

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