by DonHopkins | 2025-06-07 20:07:19+00:00
Flash completely missed the most important point of HyperCard, which was that end users could put it into edit mode, explore the source code, learn from it, extend it, copy parts of it out, and build their own user interfaces with it.

It's not just "View Source", but "Edit Source" with a built-in, easy to use, scriptable, graphical, interactive WYSIWYG editor that anyone can use.

HyperCard did all that and more long before the web existed, was fully scriptable years before JavaScript existed, was extensible with plug-in XCMDs long before COM/OLE/ActiveX or even OpenDoc/CyberDog or Java/HotJava/Applets, and was widely available and embraced by millions of end-users, was used for games, storytelling, art, business, personal productivity, app development, education, publishing, porn, and so much more, way before merely static web page WYSIWYG editors (let alone live interactive scriptable extensible web application editors) ever existed.

LiveCard (HyperCard as a live HTTP web app server back-end via WebStar/MacHTTP) was probably the first tool that made it possible to create live web pages with graphics and forms with an interactive WYSIWYG editor that even kids could use to publish live HyperCard apps, databases, and clickable graphics on the web.

HyperCard deeply inspired HyperLook for NeWS, which was scripted, drawn, and modeled with PostScript, that I used to port SimCity to Unix:

Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...

>"Apple’s Hypercard was a terrific and highly successful end-user authoring system whose media was scripted, WYSIWYG, and “symmetric” (in the sense that the “reader” could turn around and “author” in the same high-level terms and forms). It should be the start of — and the guide for — the “User Experience” of encountering and dealing with web content.

>"The underlying system for a browser should not be that of an “app” but of an Operating System whose job would be to protectively and safely run encapsulated systems (i.e. “real objects”) gotten from the web. It should be the way that web content could be open-ended, and not tied to functional subsets in the browser." -Alan Kay

>[...] This work is so good — for any time — and especially for its time — that I don’t want to sully it with any criticisms in the same reply that contains this praise.

>I will confess to not knowing about most of this work until your comments here — and this lack of knowledge was a minus in a number of ways wrt some of the work that we did at Viewpoints since ca 2000.

>(Separate reply) My only real regret about this terrific work is that your group missed the significance for personal computing of the design of Hypertalk in Hypercard.

>It’s not even that Hypertalk is the very best possible way to solve the problems and goals it took on — hard to say one way or another — but I think it is the best example ever actually done and given to millions of end users. And by quite a distance.

>Dan Winkler and Bill Atkinson violated a lot of important principles of “good programming language design”, but they achieved the first overall system in which end-users “could see their own faces”, and could do many projects, and learn as they went.

>For many reasons, a second pass at the end-user programming problem — that takes advantage of what was learned from Hypercard and Hypertalk — has never been done (AFAIK). The Etoys system in Squeak Smalltalk in the early 2000s was very successful, but the design was purposely limited to 8–11 year olds (in part because of constraints from working at Disney).

>It’s interesting to contemplate that the follow on system might not have a close resemblance to Hypertalk — perhaps only a vague one ….

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS))

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

>HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!

>The Axis of Eval: Code, Graphics, and Data

>Hi Alan! Outside of Sun, at the Turing Institute in Glasgow, Arthur van Hoff developed a NeWS based reimagination of HyperCard in PostScript, first called GoodNeWS, then HyperNeWS, and finally HyperLook. It used PostScript for code, graphics, and data (the axis of eval). [...]

>What’s the Big Deal About HyperCard?

>"I thought HyperCard was quite brilliant in the end-user problems it solved. (It would have been wonderfully better with a deep dynamic language underneath, but I think part of the success of the design is that they didn’t have all the degrees of freedom to worry about, and were just able to concentrate on their end-user’s direct needs.

>"HyperCard is an especially good example of a system that was “finished and smoothed and documented” beautifully. It deserved to be successful. And Apple blew it by not making the design framework the basis of a web browser (as old PARC hands advised in the early 90s …)" -Alan Kay

HyperLook SimCity Demo Transcript

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcr...

>[...] All this is written in PostScript, all the graphics. The SimCity engine is in C, but all the user interface and the graphics are in PostScript.

>The neat thing about doing something like this in HyperLook is that HyperLook is kind of like HyperCard, in that all of the user interface is editable. So these windows we’re looking at here are like stacks, that we can edit.

>Now I’ll flip this into edit mode, while the program’s running. That’s a unique thing.

>Now I’m in edit mode, and this reset button here is just a user interface component that I can move around, and I can hit the “Props” key, and get a property sheet on it.

>I’ll show you what it really is. See, every one of these HyperLook objects has a property sheet, and you can define its graphics. I’ll zoom in here. We have this nice PostScript graphics editor, and we could turn it upside down, or sideways, or, you know, like that. Or scale it. I’ll just undo, that’s pretty useful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134403

DonHopkins on Dec 26, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

Speaking about HyperCard, creating web pages, and publishing live interactive HyperCard stacks on the web, I wrote this about LiveCard:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22283045

DonHopkins on Feb 9, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)

Check out this mind-blowing thing called "LiveCard" that somebody made by combining HyperCard with MacHTTP/WebStar (a Mac web server by Chuck Shotton that supported integration with other apps via Apple Events)! It was like implementing interactive graphical CGI scripts with HyperCard, without even programming (but also allowing you to script them in HyperTalk, and publish live HyperCard databases and graphics)! Normal HyperCard stacks would even work without modification. It was far ahead of its time, and inspired me to integrate WebStar with ScriptX to generate static and dynamic HTML web sites and services!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226209

MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton, and LiveCard HyperCard stack publisher:

CGI and AppleScript:

http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...

>Cal discusses the Macintosh as an Internet platform, then describes how you can use the AppleScript language for writing CGI applications that run on Macintosh servers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865263

MacHTTP / WebStar from StarNine by Chuck Shotton! He was also VP of Engineering at Quarterdeck, another pioneering company.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110705053055/http://www.astron...

http://infomotions.com/musings/tricks/manuscript/0800-machtt...

http://tidbits.com/article/6292

>It had an AppleScript / OSA API that let you write handlers for responding to web hits in other languages that supported AppleScript.

I used it to integrate ScriptX with the web:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/1995-apple-world-wide-develop...

The coolest thing somebody did with WebStar was to integrate it with HyperCard so you could actually publish live INTERACTIVE HyperCard stacks on the web, that you could see as images you could click on to follow links, and followed by html form elements corresponding to the text fields, radio buttons, checkboxes, drop down menus, scrolling lists, etc in the HyperCard stack that you could use in the browser to interactive with live HyperCard pages!

That was the earliest easiest way that non-programmers and even kids could both not just create graphical web pages, but publish live interactive apps on the web!

Using HyperCard as a CGI application

https://web.archive.org/web/20060205023024/http://aaa-protei...

https://web.archive.org/web/20021013161709/http://pfhyper.co...

http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/cgi-and-applescript/1...

https://web.archive.org/web/19990208235151/http://www.royals...

What was it actually ever used for? Saving kid's lives, for one thing:

>Livecard has exceeded all expectations and allows me to serve a stack 8 years in the making and previously confined to individual hospitals running Apples. A whole Childrens Hospital and University Department of Child Health should now swing in behind me and this product will become core curriculum for our medical course. Your product will save lives starting early 1997. Well done.

- Director, Emergency Medicine, Mater Childrens Hospital