This article was originally published on May 30, 2012, when HyperCard was about to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
Around 1988, I struck a deal with my landlord. She would buy a Macintosh computer, and I would buy an external hard drive, and we would share the system in the living room. She used the device most often because I was using an IBM 286; I just wanted to keep up with Apple's developments. But after we installed the Mac, one night I sat down to use it and found a program in the application menu. "HyperCard?" I wondered. "What is that?"
I opened the application and read the instructions. HyperCard allows you to create "stacks" of cards, which are visual pages on the Macintosh screen. You can insert "fields" into these cards that display text, tables, and even images. You can install "buttons" that link various cards within the stack and play different sounds when users click on them. You can also turn your own images into buttons.
Not only that, HyperCard also includes a scripting language called "HyperTalk," which is easy for non-programmers like me to learn. It allows developers to insert commands like "go to," "play sound," or "dissolve" into the components of the HyperCard stack.
This month, HyperCard is soon to be 25 years old [Editor’s note: In 2019, it will be 32 years old!]. What happened? I searched around and found venture capitalist and programmer Tim Oren's eulogy for the project (A Eulogy for HyperCard), written during the week Apple pulled HyperCard from the market in 2004. He believed that the problem with HyperCard was that Apple never figured out what the software was for.
"What is it?" Oren wrote. "A programming and user interface design tool? A lightweight database and hypertext document management system? A multimedia creation environment? Apple never answered that question."
As a result, Apple transferred the project to its subsidiary Claris, where it got lost among more famous projects like FileMaker and ClarisWorks. Oren's eulogy continued: "When Apple reabsorbed Claris, its die-hard supporters, especially in education, kept it alive, but only with tacit approval."
Even before it was discontinued, the inventor of HyperCard foresaw its end. In a 2002 interview (HyperCard: What Could Have Been), Bill Atkinson acknowledged his mistakes. If he had realized that "stacks" could be connected over the network rather than just installed on a specific desktop, things would have been different.
Atkinson lamented: "I missed the point of HyperCard; I grew up in Apple's box-centric culture. If I had grown up in a network-centric culture like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first web browser."
HyperCard may not have been the first web client, but as its anniversary approaches, I believe it deserves a more prominent place in internet history.
Computer Lib#
In the year HyperCard was launched, the San Francisco-based television program Computer Chronicles produced an episode about the software. The host of the episode quickly found inspiration for the show.
"HyperCard is based on hypertext," Gary Kildall told Stewart Cheifet. "The concept was proposed by Ted Nelson** and** Doug Engelbart** in the 1960s. The basic idea is this: if we try to study any subject, that subject exists in various different places. It can be books, magazines, tape recordings, CompuServe; if we could somehow digitize all of these things, then if we click on Beethoven, we could suddenly jump from one to the next... That's what hypertext is about."**
As early as 1960, Ted Nelson proposed the concept of hypertext and attempted to realize it in his unfinished Xanadu project. Nelson was undeterred and became an eloquent advocate for the idea. In his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, he defined hypertext as "forms of writing which branch or perform on request; they are best presented on computer display screens." By simplifying the process of disseminating and accessing information, hypertext and hypermedia could liberate society from what Nelson saw as an overly specialized digital information elite.
Nelson wrote: "As the saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals; guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a priesthood."
However, in the 1970s, the "priesthood" was actually doing quite well in cutting technology. Three years before the release of Computer Lib, the designers of the internet prototype ARPANET, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, unveiled their project at a public event in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, two engineers at AT&T's Bell Labs were busy developing the UNIX operating system, which later became the backbone of the "network." Fearing government antitrust retaliation if they ventured into software marketing, AT&T rented UNIX to universities at a very low price. With funding from the National Science Foundation, these schools built hundreds of ARPANET "nodes" in the 1980s.
This brought the internet to 1989, when a programmer working at CERN proposed a hypertext network.
Tim Berners-Lee explained: "Most of the systems available today use a single database. Many users access it using a distributed file system. Very few products adopt Ted Nelson's 'docuverse' concept, which allows links between nodes in different databases." (Information Management: A Proposal)
But Berners-Lee was determined to build one.
Enter the Web#
About two years later, Berners-Lee created his own web browser and released the project's codebase for programmers to develop their own versions. Soon, a group of students in Finland developed a browser called Erwise. Unfortunately, the country was in a severe recession at the time, severely limiting Erwise's prospects.
"At that time, we couldn't start a business anywhere else in Finland," one team member explained. But other developers also downloaded Berners-Lee's code. Among them was Pei-Yuan Wei, who used a UNIX X terminal at the University of California, Berkeley's Experimental Computing Facility. Where did Wei's "ViolaWWW" web browser get its inspiration? Although he didn't have his own Apple computer, he was inspired by a program he found interesting.
"HyperCard was very striking at the time, graphical, and hyperlinked," Wei later recalled. "I got a HyperCard manual, looked at it, and basically implemented these concepts using X-windows." X-windows is a visual component of UNIX. The final browser, Viola, included components similar to HyperCard: bookmarks, history features, tables, and graphics. Like HyperCard, it could run programs.
That was around 1992. By then, real Mac-based web clients had already appeared in the works—Nicola Pellow and Robert Cailliau's Samba was also influenced by HyperCard.
A young developer named Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois was very impressed by all this activity. Andreessen's team launched Mosaic in January 1993; it was the first browser that could be used on PCs, Macs, and UNIX systems. A year later, Mosaic evolved into Mosaic Netscape.
Not long after, I downloaded a copy of Netscape onto a Dell computer. "Wow," I thought as I browsed various websites. "This looks like HyperCard."
The Legacy of HyperCard#
In its 20-year lifespan, HyperCard achieved tremendous success and gained worldwide recognition. The Victoria Museum of Melbourne has been tracking Australia's scientific and cultural history, and it published a list of how educators in Melbourne used the project.
As of August 2002, there were still about 10,000 HyperCard developers. The television program Computer Chronicles did a follow-up episode** three years after reporting on the software.** They found that HyperCard software could be used to run television studios. MIT produced an interactive video magazine through the project. A seventh-grade student wrote a timeline of Russian history on HyperCard, and even kindergarten kids were playing with the application.
So it’s no surprise that the programmers at Cyan Software initially wrote their very popular puzzle/adventure game Myst as a HyperCard stack. But even in 1987, when Apple computers had black-and-white displays, HyperCard developers and graphic artists created subtle and enchanting scenes that still circulate online today.
How did developer Bill Atkinson define HyperCard? "Simply put, HyperCard is a software erector set that lets non-programmers put together interactive information," he told Computer Chronicles in 1987.
By the mid-1990s, when Tim Berners-Lee's innovations finally became popular, HyperCard had prepared a generation of developers to understand the goals of Netscape. That's why the most fitting historical analogy for HyperCard is not some failed and forgotten innovation, but rather a remark about Elvis Presley: Before anyone did anything, Elvis did everything. Before anyone on the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did everything.
Five Super Cool Applications of HyperCard#
-
Myst is perhaps the most famous project in HyperCard's history. Cyan released the game in 1993, but founders Rand and Ryan Miller spent about two years creating the exquisite landscapes that captivated a generation. The CD included 40 minutes of music, 2,500 images, and an hour of QuickTime video.
-
Before Myst, the Miller brothers' The Manhole (1987) made a splash as a roaming game designed for children. Before its release in CD form, the original software required a small pile of floppy disks to accommodate 600 interconnected screens. Watch the masterpiece version of Manhole through this video.
-
The staff of Global Overview had even heard of HyperCard before it was released in 1987. "The range of the directory and the thick feel of its natural card size made it seem to Apple like an ideal attempt," Kevin Kelly later recalled, so Apple "funded us to tell them what we could learn by putting Global Overview into HyperCard."
-
Based on HyperCard, Time Table of History: Science & Innovation primarily narrates science and technology and was released in 1991 in CD form on Macintosh. Time Table contains over 6,000 HyperCards.
-
Last but not least is the interactive book catalog from Voyager Company. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Voyager Company released a series of groundbreaking interactive CDs, including the electronic version of Art Spiegelman's comic series Maus, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the popular Beatles film A Hard Day's Night. Choosing HyperCard was "logical." HyperCard "models the behavior of a book with a stack of cards."
Compiled from the May 2019 Ars Technica article 30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web