Comment by RossBencina

Pretty sure the next after Hypercard was Macromind (later Macromedia) Director. I recall running an early version of a Director animation on a black and white Mac not long after I started playing with Hypercard. Later I was a Director developer. I recall when Future Splash released -- the fast scaling vector graphics were a new and impressive thing. The web browser plugin helped a lot and it really brought multimedia to the browser. It was only later that Macromedia acquired Future Splash and renamed it Flash.