A thread from 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730997

^ It can, but I've found it to be not particularly pleasant to use. Lots of weirdness, particularly around input. It may have been my setup, but still.

Mini vMac by contrast is quick, pleasant, and plug n' plug. (It's also emulating a completely different era of course, but it's enough for hypercard.)

There are also turn-key OS7 and OS9 apps that can be run under Catalina with minimal fuss

Just as an interesting technical note, MacDraw Retro is another one that supports Tiger through Mojave.

And of course, there's a lot of small programs that support the range as well, sometimes just by chance (a Tiger-era program just happens to work), but you're right it's rare for bigger, more-complex stuff.

He's looking to offload it to someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17911573.

Such a great documentary. Really recommend it to anyone considering. Myst / Riven were both awesome games.

Before Rand and Robyn Miller developed Myst, they created "The Manhole" and "Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel" in HyperCard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole

The Manhole is a notable computer game because like Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx it has no goal and no end; as a software toy the object is simply to explore and have fun.

Reception

Describing The Manhole as "the first children's software to require a hard disk", Macworld in March 1989 stated that its "realistic sounds, the fantasy-filled graphics, and the stack construction are truly impressive". The magazine "highly recommended [the game] for young children[, and] it's hard to imagine a playful soul of any age who wouldn't enjoy exploring the mind-tickling world inside The Manhole".

The Manhole won a Software Publishers Association Excellence in Software Award in 1989 for Best New Use of a Computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Osmo_and_the_Worlds_Bey...

Cosmic Osmo was created by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who went on to form the company Cyan and develop the best-selling adventure game Myst.

It was created, and runs, using HyperCard. Animated portions were made using MacroMind VideoWorks, a linear animation program that later became Macromedia Director. A XCMD plug-in enabled VideoWorks animated sprites to be displayed with an alpha mask on top or behind HyperCard's graphic layer.

Cosmic Osmo (Apple Macintosh):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K30UmVsqTn8

I will never forget the fun of watching a friend's little kid delightedly playing around with Cosmic Osmo, excitedly explaining and demonstrating everything to all the bewildered adults!

Navigable games like Myst, Cosmic Osmo, and Manhole are so memorable, thanks to the Method of Loci:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

"What did you expect from a blind mouse playing a piano made of Swiss cheese?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K30UmVsqTn8&t=14m00s

(Then at 14:25: Yo dawg, Cosmic Osmo in Cosmic Osmo!)

There is documentary called General Magic which used old footage and interviews to describe their rise and fall. In one scene, Bill is said to have written a big chunk (don’t remember exactly what but I was in awe) of it very quickly. I saw it on a plane when browsing through Emirates’ catalogue.

Thank you so much for sharing, Don!

Bill Atkinson has always been one of my personal programmer heroes.

He is evidence that you can be 95% right and ten years ahead of the market, yet still miss the boat.

I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple...

There was a HN post earlier today about what people miss after leaving (mostly) big tech companies, and it almost was entirely about tooling.

There's also org structure (done right, this can be empowering), access to ideas, and ways of seeing the world. Like Atkinson realized, these can also be blind spots.

Yeah I love this site! So much to take inspiration from.

Everybody thought NCP's 8 bit host ids were enough, until TCP/IP happened. Then everybody thought OSI was going to take over and rule the world, until TCP/IP didn't stop happening. And then everybody though IPV6 would quickly take over, until IPV4 refused to die. And everybody thought the world was going to run on SGML, until HTML happened. And then everybody thought SGML might rise from the dead until XML happened. And then everybody thought XML would never just go away and die, until JSON happened. Just goes to show, you never know!

I was describing how HyperCard was used as an authoring and runtime tool to implement one of the earliest interactive and graphical web applications.

It took a screen snapshot of the HyperCard stack, and showed you an image of it in the web browser. And you could click on the image, which would map back to a simulated click on the stack, run whatever handlers and make whatever changes to the card or stack that HyperCard was programmed to do (draw something, switch to the next page, etc), and then it would download the next screen snapshot showing the change. Also it rendered any user interface widgets (text input fields, checkboxes, dropdown menus, etc) as html form fields below the image, that you could fill out in the browser and submit, whose values were then stuffed back into the actual HyperCard control fields. So you could use HyperCard stacks over the web that created, updated, and queried HyperCard databases, flipped between different cards and backgrounds, drew dynamic graphics, or did any arbitrarily programmed stuff like that.

Unfortunately, it seems to be lost to history unless there is an active mirror to the old Info-Mac archives.

It’s referenced here:

http://mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.cdrom.com/pub/cdrom/cdrom...

search for “Professor X”. I first used a MacinTalk HyperCard plug in and later used a PlainTalk plug in.

That was actually my second version. My first version was written in AppleSoft Basic for the Apple //e and used Software Automated Mouth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth)

Here is the Usenet reference. The professor still works for the same University.

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!search/HyperCard$20gcedu...

You're totally spot-on with the 'forgotten technology'.

Computer-Academia is a society which goes through cyclic periods of ignorance and dominance over industrial standard processes which produce viable exchange with the mass public, i.e. successful companies.

Between the 'cool new shit learned in school' and the 'top secret lab tech', there is a lot of re-invention, invention, refactoring, re-discovery, re-research.

Alas, the only good framework is the one in front of the user.

Apple's OpenDoc based browser, CyberDog, was also quite amazing and flexible, because it was completely component based and integrated with OpenDoc. But that plane never got off the ground, because Steve Jobs rightfully focused on saying "No" and "put a bullet in OpenDoc's head".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog

Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based Internet suite of applications, developed by Apple Computer for the Mac OS line of operating systems. It was introduced as a beta in February 1996 and abandoned in March 1997. The last version, Cyberdog 2.0, was released on April 28, 1997. It worked with later versions of System 7 as well as the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 operating systems.

Cyberdog derived its name from a cartoon in The New Yorker captioned "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-s...

“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97. As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.

As was Sun's original "HotJava" browser, implemented in Java of course, which was less formally component based than OpenDoc (since Java didn't have a comparable user interface component system like OpenDoc at the time, but it was at least very object oriented, modular, and extensible). HotJava served the purpose of opening a lot of people's eyes to the possibilities of Java and the web, but, like CyberDog, it was ahead of its time, and wasn't fully developed into a viable product, and served more as a technology demonstration and source of inspiration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava

HotJava (later called HotJava Browser to distinguish it from HotJava Views) was a modular, extensible web browser from Sun Microsystems implemented in Java. It was the first browser to support Java applets, and was Sun's demonstration platform for the then-new technology. It has since been discontinued and is no longer supported. Furthermore, the Sun Download Center was taken down on July 31, 2011, and the download link on the official site points to a placeholder page saying so.

Unfortunately, neither CyberDog nor HotJava (nor Netscape, until JavaScript finally arrived on the scene) had scripting languages built in, which I believe is an essential ingredient to the success of web browsers and component systems (and text editors like Emacs, and user interface editors like HyperCard or HyperLook or Bongo, or content management systems and blogging tools like Frontier and Radio Userland, etc). Even something as terrible as Microsoft OLE, which evolved from Visual Basic VBXs, was successful because it was built around a scripting language (Visual Basic for VBX, but OLE opened it up to any language via COM/IDispatch/ActiveX/IScriptingEngine/etc).

Ah! I did not know they were on different domains, but I should've mentioned there is an open source version yes!

hehe;

Well, I still think that allowing Javascript onto the web was a fatal mistake. HTTP/URL/HTML and eventually also CSS was a fantastic combination. This stack was progressively learnable via self-discovery.

Once the Javascript-coders infected the web it almost immediately turned into a write-only medium.

I worked at a browser vendor whilst all of this was happening. I was busy with the mechanics of building a particular browser. Couldn't make sense of the javascript/webstandards stuff in detail, but I trusted these people were smart enough. I did notice the people who were running this stuff (they were making the formerly kinda static html/css web standards dynamic by defining vast amounts of javascript API:s) were all very young people. Probably a median age of 21 or so. (Some "wunderkids" around 17 or so.) The average age of the people actually implementing stuff was closer to 28-30 in this company. Nothing against young people in general.. they can bring new thoughts etc.. but.. they do tend to lack experience.

In retrospect I regret that I didn't engage with this young crowd more. In general I wish there had been more discussion between these two camps.

I never "got it" (hypertalk). Tried to write an app to put up some menus, get some input, read and write some files. Could never figure out how to get off the ground.

For another interesting approach to sampling, customizing, and remixing existing user interfaces, check out Morgan Dixon's PhD thesis on "Prefab"!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15327767

Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's work is truly breathtaking and eye opening, and I would love for that to be a core part of a scriptable hybrid Screen Scraping / Accessibility API approach.

Screen scraping techniques are very powerful, but have limitations. Accessibility APIs are very powerful, but have different limitations. But using both approaches together, screencasting and re-composing visual elements, and tightly integrating it with JavaScript, enables a much wider and interesting range of possibilities.

Think of it like augmented reality for virtualizing desktop user interfaces. The beauty of Morgan's Prefab is how it works across different platforms and web browsers, over virtual desktops, and how it can control, sample, measure, modify, augment and recompose guis of existing unmodified applications, even dynamic language translation, so they're much more accessible and easier to use!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520967

Web Site: Morgan Dixon's Home Page. http://morgandixon.net/

Web Site: Prefab: The Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering Toolkit.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130104165553/http://homes.cs.w...

Video: Prefab: What if We Could Modify Any Interface? Target aware pointing techniques, bubble cursor, sticky icons, adding advanced behaviors to existing interfaces, independent of the tools used to implement those interfaces, platform agnostic enhancements, same Prefab code works on Windows and Mac, and across remote desktops, widget state awareness, widget transition tracking, side views, parameter preview spectrums for multi-parameter space exploration, prefab implements parameter spectrum preview interfaces for both unmodified Gimp and Photoshop:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lju6IIteg9Q

PDF: A General-Purpose Target-Aware Pointing Enhancement Using Pixel-Level Analysis of Graphical Interfaces. Morgan Dixon, James Fogarty, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. (2012). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '12. ACM, New York, NY, 3167-3176. 23%.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010941/http://homes.cs.w...

Video: Content and Hierarchy in Prefab: What if anybody could modify any interface? Reverse engineering guis from their pixels, addresses hierarchy and content, identifying hierarchical tree structure, recognizing text, stencil based tutorials, adaptive gui visualization, ephemeral adaptation technique for arbitrary desktop interfaces, dynamic interface language translation, UI customization, re-rendering widgets, Skype favorite widgets tab:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4S5ZtnaUKE

PDF: Content and Hierarchy in Pixel-Based Methods for Reverse-Engineering Interface Structure. Morgan Dixon, Daniel Leventhal, and James Fogarty. (2011). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '11. ACM, New York, NY, 969-978. 26%.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010931/http://homes.cs.w...

Video: Sliding Widgets, States, and Styles in Prefab. Adapting desktop interfaces for touch screen use, with sliding widgets, slow fine tuned pointing with magnification, simulating rollover to reveal tooltips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LMSYI4i7wk

Video: A General-Purpose Bubble Cursor. A general purpose target aware pointing enhancement, target editor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46EopD_2K_4

PDF: Prefab: Implementing Advanced Behaviors Using Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering of Interface Structure. Morgan Dixon and James Fogarty. (2010). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 1525-1534. 22%

https://web.archive.org/web/20150714010936/http://homes.cs.w...

PDF: Prefab: What if Every GUI Were Open-Source? Morgan Dixon and James Fogarty. (2010). Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 851-854.

https://web.archive.org/web/20141024012013/http://homes.cs.w...

Morgan Dixon's Research Statement:

http://morgandixon.net/morgan-dixon-research-statement.pdf

Community-Driven Interface Tools

Today, most interfaces are designed by teams of people who are collocated and highly skilled. Moreover, any changes to an interface are implemented by the original developers and designers who own the source code. In contrast, I envision a future where distributed online communities rapidly construct and improve interfaces. Similar to the Wikipedia editing process, I hope to explore new interface design tools that fully democratize the design of interfaces. Wikipedia provides static content, and so people can collectively author articles using a very basic Wiki editor. However, community-driven interface tools will require a combination of sophisticated programming-by-demonstration techniques, crowdsourcing and social systems, interaction design, software engineering strategies, and interactive machine learning.

I think the first thing I ever coded was a simple game in Hypercard. It was a racetrack and you moved your mouse around the track.

While your mouse was hovering over the track it was an icon of a race car.

I used 4 different icons so that the car was pointing in the right direction as you moved around the track.

If you moved out of bounds you lost.

To be honest I didn't even know that it was "programming" as far as I was concerned Hypercard was just another app I was using like paint etc.

In retrospect it was very intuitive and might be the best version of "zero code" I have seen to date!

I have and maintain a retro computing collection, and have had a minor public exhibit of it in 2019. I have a lot of machines from the 70's to the 21st century, and have made it a bit of a passion to demo these things to folks.

I'm now unpacking and trying to work out how to proceed with further interaction in 2020, and the one machine that keeps crossing my scope is an old Macintosh Powerbook, the first with a trackball, which has indeed been loaded up with HyperCard stacks.

Now, one thing I must add to this discussion, as someone who has had to demo these things to a modern audience, is that the person you are showing it to should always be the one doing the driving. Never try to show someone a stack - always just describe them doing it for themselves.

Stacks are delightful. Get yourself an emulator, and explore them. Its a pretty good way to get some context on your newly-gained modern chops.

Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham?

SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-...

Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.

How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.

It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.

https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl...

Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990

Famham's Choice

This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.

Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”

On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.

https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer...

Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110

“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.

Hyperview is a mobile framework inspired in part by HyperCard:

https://hyperview.org

1987 Computer Chronicles: HyperCard

An introduction to Apple's Hypercard. Guests include Apple Fellow and Hypercard creator Bill Atkinson, Hypercard senior engineer Dan Winkler, author of "The Complete Hypercard Handbook" Danny Goodman, and Robert Stein, Publisher of Voyager Company. Demonstrations include Hypercard 1.0, Complete Car Cost Guide, Focal Point, Laserstacks, and National Galllery of Art. Originally broadcast in 1987. Copyright 1987 Stewart Cheifet Productions.

https://archive.org/details/CC501_hypercard