Comment by asveikau

2 days ago

Maybe there's some sense of longing for a tool that's similar today, but there's no way of knowing how much hypercard did have the impact you are talking about. For example many of us reading here experienced HyperCard. It planted seeds in our future endeavors.

I remember in elementary school, I had some computer lab classes where the whole class worked in hypercard on some task. Multiply that by however many classrooms did something like that in the 80s and 90s. That's a lot of brains that can be influenced and have been.

We can judge it as a success in its own right, even if it never entered the next paradigm or never had quite an equivalent later on.

7 comments

asveikau

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lambdaone  2 days ago

HyperCard was undoubtedly the inspiration for Visual Basic, which for quite some time dominated the bespoke UI industry in the same way web frameworks do today.

  • Stratoscope  1 day ago

    HyperCard was great, but it wasn't the inspiration for Visual Basic.

    I was on the team that built Ruby (no relation to the programming language), which became the "Visual" side of Visual Basic.

    Alan Cooper did the initial design of the product, via a prototype he called Tripod.

    Alan had an unusual design philosophy at the time. He preferred to not look at any existing products that may have similar goals, so he could "design in a vacuum" from first principles.

    I will ask him about it, but I'm almost certain that he never looked at HyperCard.

    • canucker2016  1 day ago

      A blog post about Tripod/Ruby/VB history - https://retool.com/visual-basic

        Cooper's solution to this problem didn't click until late 1987, when a friend at Microsoft brought him along on a sales call with an IT manager at Bank of America. The manager explained that he needed Windows to be usable by all of the bank's employees: highly technical systems administrators, semi-technical analysts, and even users entirely unfamiliar with computers, like tellers. Cooper recalls the moment of inspiration:

  In an instant, I perceived the solution to the shell design problem: it would be a shell construction set—a tool where each user would be able to construct exactly the shell that they needed for their unique mix of applications and training. Instead of me telling the users what the ideal shell was, they could design their own, personalized ideal shell.

      Thus was born Tripod, Cooper's shell construction kit.

cortesoft  2 days ago

HyperCard was the foundation of my programming career. I treated the HyperCard Bible like an actual Bible.

  • leakycap  15 hours ago

    I miss the days of For Dummies, Bibles, and all the rest. If you'd read that thing carefully a few times, you usually knew your stuff. There was a finish line.

    Modern continual versioning and constant updates means there is no finish line. No Bible could ever be printed. Ah, nostalgia.

jkestner  2 days ago

Word. This is the Papert philosophy of constructionism, learning to think by making that so many of us still carry. I’m still trying to build software-building software. We do live in that timeline; it’s just unevenly distributed.