HyperCard: What Made it Leet

I posted a blog entry on HyperCard yesterday on The Huffington Post: HyperCard: The Original Bridge Over the Digital Divide. From the comments and tweets that I got it was pretty clear that us older hackers have fond memories of HyperCard. But there’s the rub–Us older hacker. Kids today, i.e., people in their twenties, missed out on the whole HyperCard phenomenon.

The children of HyperCard are  ubiquitous! Every web browser, every  presentation app, and even Apple’s iBook Author tool and Adobe’s AIR environment are Jar Jar Binks to HyperCard’s Qui-Gon Jinn.

But like Jar Jar himself, HyperCard’s children are flawed. All these apps and tools that link, animate, and script are over-specialized or over-complicated.  iBook Author is a great example. It’s a quick and easy (and free) way to create an app that runs on iPhone and iPad but only if you want that app to look and feel like a  high school  text book. Not sexy!

On the other end of the spectrum is RunRev’s LiveCode. It’s the most HyperCard-like of HyperCard’s successors, allows you to import HyperCard stacks (originally), uses many of the same stack and card metaphors, and provides a programming language very similar to HyperTalk. Unfortunately LiveCode has become a tool for creating serious desktop and mobile apps. It’s become as complex as Adobe Flash/Flex/AIR and almost as expensive. I have to give points to RunRev for keeping the dream alive and they deserve to generate a profit but it’s not about 10-year-old kids and school teachers making interactive lessons anymore.

Here’s my list of what made HyperCard great. I hope someone picks it up and runs with it.

• You could do a lot but you couldn’t do everything with HyperCard. Limitations are a great way conserve complexity and keep doors open to the general public.
• HyperCard was a general “software construction kit”. You could create a presentation but it wasn’t optimized for presentations or anything else. In its  heyday  HyperCard was used for everything from address books to to calculators to role playing games but it always felt a little  amateur and  frivolous.
• HyperCard was free, preinstalled, and came with a great set of sample stacks. Some people just used the stacks as they came out of the box. Others noodled around with a bit of customization here and there. A few brave souls created new stacks from  scratch. But it didn’t cost a dime (originally) and was easy to find.
• HyperCard’s authoring tools were bundled with it’s runtime environment. Any stack (originally) could be opened and every script inspected. If a stack did something cool you could easily cut-and-paste that neat trick into your own stack.
• HyperCard’s scripting language, HyperTalk, was very very English-like. More English like than AppleScript and 10,000 times easier for the  amateurs  and kids to master than JavaScript, Python, Ruby, or Processing. I’m sorry but “for (var i = 0; i < x; i++)” is just not as readible as “repeat with x equal to the number of words in line 1” to normal literate humans. (Python comes close, I give it props for trying.)
• HyperCard stacks looked like HyperCard stacks. You could easily spot a stack in a crowd of icons and when it was running HyperCard stacks had their own visual language (originally). This visual identify made HyperCard authors feel like members of a special club and didn’t require them to be User Experience experts.

Limited, Free, Simple, Open, Accessible, Generalized, Frivolous,  Amateur; The characteristics of greatness that also define what is great about the World Wide Web (originally).

Note: The careful reader might wonder why I’m clarifying my statements with the phase “(originally)”. Towards the end of its life HyperCard added complexity and locking and became something you had to buy. The  parallels  with the closed gardens and paywalls of today’s  Inter-webs   are a bit uncanny.