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HyperCard

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HyperCard
Developer(s)Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer, Inc.)
Stable release
2.4.1 / 1998
Operating systemSystem Software 6, System 7, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9 (can still be used in Mac OS X's Classic mode (PowerPC Macs only) or Basilisk II)
TypeHypermedia, Development
LicenseProprietary
WebsiteN/A

HyperCard was an application program from Apple Inc. (at the time Apple Computer, Inc.) that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It most closely resembles a database application in concept, in that it stores information, and is graphical, flexible and creates files that are easy to modify. It also includes HyperTalk, a powerful and relatively easy to use programming language, to manipulate data and the user interface. HyperCard users often used it as a programming system for Rapid Application Development as opposed to a database.

HyperCard was originally released with System Software 6 in 1987, and was finally withdrawn from sale in March 2004, although it had not been updated for many years at that time. HyperCard can only be run in Mac OS versions 9 or earlier, but can be used in Mac OS X's Classic mode or in the Basilisk II emulator.

Description

HyperCard was based on the concept of a "stack" of virtual "cards." Cards hold data, just as they would in a rolodex. The layout engine was similar in concept to a "form" as used in most Rapid Application Development (RAD) environments (such as Borland Delphi or Visual Basic). A special "home" stack was available both as a launcher, a repository for shared scripts and a facility for setting preferences.

HyperCard was not only a database system — the layout of each card could be unique, just as one can write additional non-standard information on a rolodex card. A special background layer of a stack contained elements that appeared on all cards of that stack or on all cards based on a certain background. Backgrounds could include pictures (its original purpose, "background picture"), in addition to the objects also available for each card: picture fields, buttons, (static) text, (editable) text fields and other common GUI elements. Each card then could contain different data attached to the text or picture fields, thereby creating the database functionality.

For instance, an address book could be built by adding to the background a few text fields to hold the name and address. Once completed, the user adds a new card (by typing Command-N) and types into the fields. The background could be modified at any time, allowing changes to be made easily. Basic operations such as search, add and delete were built into the HyperCard environment, allowing simple databases to be set up and used by anyone able to use the Macintosh computer.

Scripting in the HyperTalk language allowed the system to be easily modified and extended. Unlike many scripting languages, HyperTalk proved to be usable by a wide range of users; allowable syntax included multiple versions of the same statement, all in more or less readable English. For instance, put the first word of the third line of field "hello" into field "goodbye" would do exactly what one would expect. HyperTalk included redundancy in the hope of making programming easier; for example, numbers could be specified either numerically (1, 2), as cardinals (one, two), or as ordinals (first, second).

Referring to objects and the items on cards or backgrounds was easy. The example above shows how to access data within a field on a particular card, but one could refer to any object in the same fashion — including the stack itself. All objects could be named, as in the example above. In addition, each object (including the stack itself) had unique numeric IDs.

HyperCard's find command would quickly navigate to cards containing text using a patented hintBits scheme. This could be made more selective with modifications such as find "Bob" in card field "hello". Similarly, it had a "sort" command that allowed evaluating entire expressions to classify sort order.

Adding scripts was also easy. The user simply "command-option-clicked" (or they could click the "Script" button in the item's property dialog) on any element in the stack, and an editor would pop up. The script could then be edited, saved, and used immediately. In addition, HyperCard contained the "Message Box", an interactive command-line in a floating window that could execute single lines of script. This also included the "find" command, so it doubled as a search dialog. HyperCard 2.0 added a debugger as well.

HyperTalk was sufficiently popular that one of the main uses of HyperCard was not as a database, but as a programming tool. Thousands of "stacks" were written and distributed as "stackware" in the few years when HyperCard was widely available.

Externals

The power of HyperCard could be increased significantly through the use of external command and external function modules, more commonly known as XCMDs and XFCNs. These were code libraries packaged in a resource fork that integrated into the system and/or the HyperTalk language — an early example of the plugin concept. Unlike conventional plugins, these did not require separate installation before they were available for use; they could be included in a stack, where they were directly available to scripts in that stack.

During HyperCard's peak popularity in the late 1980s, a whole ecology of vendors offered thousands of these externals for everything from HyperTalk compilers to graphing systems, database access, internet connectivity, and animation. Oracle offered an XCMD that allowed HyperCard to directly query Oracle databases on any platform. This was later superseded by Oracle's Oracle Card product.

Applications

HyperCard has been used for all sorts of hypertext and artistic purposes. Before the advent of PowerPoint, HyperCard was often used as a general-purpose presentation program. Examples of HyperCard applications include simple databases, "choose your own adventure"—type games, educational teaching aids, and the first (off-line) wiki.

Due to its rapid application design facilities, HyperCard was also sometimes used for prototyping of applications, and sometimes even for version 1.0 implementations. Inside Apple, the QuickTime team was one of HyperCard's biggest customers.

File:Hypercard stack on Beethoven's Ninth 1.png
Beethoven's Ninth stack

A number of commercial software products were created in HyperCard, most notably the original version of the interactive game narrative Myst, the Voyager Company's Expanded Books, and multimedia CD-ROMs of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony CD-ROM, the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, and the Voyager MacBeth.

The prototype and demo of the popular game You Don't Know Jack was written in HyperCard.

Activision, which was until that time primarily a game company, saw HyperCard as an entry point into the business market. Changing their name to Mediagenic, they published several major HyperCard based applications, most notably Danny Goodman's Focal Point, a personal information manager, and Reports For HyperCard, a program by Nine To Five Software that allowed users to treat HyperCard as a full-fledged database system with robust information viewing and printing features.

The HyperCard-inspired SuperCard for a while included the "Roadster" plugin that allowed stacks to be placed inside Web pages and viewed by browsers with an appropriate browser plugin. There was even a Windows version of this plugin allowing computers other than Macintoshes to use the plugin.

History

HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson. Work for it began in March of 1985 under the name of WildCard (hence the creator code of 'WILD'). In 1986 Dan Winkler began work on HyperTalk and the name was changed to HyperCard. It was initially released in August 1987, with the understanding that Atkinson would give HyperCard to Apple only if they promised to release it for free on all Macs. Apple timed its release to coincide with the MacWorld Conference & Expo in Boston, Massachusetts to guarantee maximum publicity. HyperCard was a huge hit almost instantly. Many people who thought they would never be able to program a computer started using HyperCard for all sorts of automation and prototyping tasks, a surprise even to its creator.

Apple itself never seemed to understand what HyperCard was. Management saw that it was being used by a huge number of people, internally and externally, and bug reports and upgrade suggestions continued to flow in demonstrating it had a wide variety of users. However, it was also free, which made it difficult to justify dedicating engineering resources to improving it.

HyperCard 2.0

In late 1989, Kevin Calhoun, then a HyperCard engineer at Apple, led an effort to upgrade the program. This resulted in 1990's HyperCard 2.0. The new version included an on-the-fly compiler that greatly increased performance of computationally intensive code, a new debugger and a number of improvements to the underlying HyperTalk language.

At the same time HyperCard 2.0 was being developed, a separate group within Apple developed and in 1991 released "HyperCard IIGS", a version of HyperCard for the Apple IIGS system. Aimed mainly at the education market, HyperCard IIGS had roughly the same feature set as the 1.x versions of Macintosh HyperCard, while adding support for the color graphics capabilities of the IIGS. Although "stacks" (HyperCard program documents) were not binary-compatible, a translator program (itself a HyperCard stack) allowed stacks to be moved from one platform to the other.

Then, Apple decided that most of its application software packages, including HyperCard, would be the property of a wholly owned subsidiary called Claris. Many of the HyperCard developers chose to stay at Apple rather than move to Claris, causing the development team to be split. Claris, in the business of selling software for a profit, attempted to create a business model where HyperCard could also generate revenues. They wrote a new "viewer only" version, the HyperCard Player which Apple distributed with the Macintosh operating system, while Claris sold the "full" version commercially. Many users were upset that they had to pay to use software that had traditionally been supplied free and which many considered a basic part of the Mac.

Despite the new revenue stream, Claris did little to market HyperCard. Development continued with minor upgrades, as well as the first failed attempt to create a third generation of HyperCard. During this period, HyperCard began losing market share. Without a number of important, basic features, HyperCard authors began moving to systems such as SuperCard and Macromedia Authorware. Nevertheless HyperCard continued to be popular and used for a widening range of applications, from the game The Manhole, an earlier effort by the creators of Myst, to corporate information services and many thousands in between.

Apple eventually folded Claris back into the parent company, returning HyperCard to Apple's core engineering group. In 1992, Apple released the eagerly anticipated upgrade of HyperCard 2.2 and made many HyperCard enthusiasts happy by including licensed versions of Color Tools and Addmotion II, adding support for color pictures and animations. However, these tools were limited and often cumbersome to use; HyperCard still continued to lack true, internal color support.

HyperCard 3.0

Several attempts were made to restart HyperCard development once it returned to Apple. Because of the product's widespread use as a multimedia authoring tool it was rolled into the QuickTime group. A new effort to allow HyperCard to create QuickTime interactive (QTi) movies started, once again under the direction of Kevin Calhoun. QTi extended QuickTime's core multimedia playback features to provide true interactive facilities and a low-level programming language based on 68000 assembly language. The resulting HyperCard 3.0 was first presented in 1996 when an alpha-quality version was shown to developers at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference [1]. Under the leadership of Dan Crow development continued through the late 1990s, with public demos showing many popular features such as color support, internet connectivity, and the ability to play HyperCard stacks (which were now special QuickTime movies) in a web browser. Development of HyperCard 3.0 stalled when the QuickTime team was focused away from development of QuickTime interactive to the streaming features of QuickTime 4.0. Finally in 2000 the HyperCard engineering team was reassigned to other tasks after Steve Jobs decided to abandon the product. Calhoun and Crow both left Apple shortly after in 2001.

In the years that followed, the program saw no additional support from Apple. Apple finally ceased selling HyperCard in March 2004.

Legacy

HyperCard is one of the first products that made use of and popularized the hypertext concept to a large popular base of users.

Jakob Nielsen has pointed out that HyperCard was really only a hypermedia program since its links started from regions on a card, not text objects; actual HTML-style text hyperlinks were possible in later versions, but were awkward to implement and seldom used.

HyperCard saw a loss in popularity with the growth of the World Wide Web, since the Web could handle and deliver data in much the same way as HyperCard without being limited to files on one's own hard disk. Interestingly, HyperCard had a significant impact on the web as it inspired the creation of both HTTP itself and JavaScript (through its influence on Tim Berners-Lee's colleague Robert Cailliau). It was also a key inspiration for ViolaWWW, an early web browser.

The pointing-finger cursor used for navigating stacks later found its way into the first web browsers, as the hyperlink cursor.

Other companies were quick to see the power of HyperCard and offer their own versions. Two products are currently available which offer HyperCard-like functionality:

  • Runtime's Revolution expands on HyperCard and offers color and a GUI toolkit which can be deployed on many popular platforms (Classic Macintosh system software, Mac OS X, Windows 98 through Vista, and Linux/Unix).
  • SuperCard is a color version of HyperCard on the Mac with additional features like pixel and vector graphics, a full GUI toolkit, and support for many modern Mac OS X features.

Past products included:

  • Plus was a product similar to HyperCard for Windows and Macintosh.
  • Asymetrix's Windows application ToolBook resembled HyperCard, and included an external converter to read HyperCard stacks.
  • Oracle purchased a cross-platform clone and released it as OracleCard, renamed Oracle Media Objects, used as a 4GL for database access.

In addition, many of the basic concepts of the original system were later re-used in other forms. Apple built their system-wide scripting engine AppleScript on a language very similar to HyperTalk; it was recently discovered as a perfect fit for DTP workflow automation needs. AppleScript gained a graphical programming front-end called Automator in the most recent major release of Mac OS X, codenamed Tiger, released in April 2005. Some see HyperCard as an ancestor to Visual Basic by Microsoft. One of HyperCard's strengths was its handling of multimedia, and many multimedia systems like Macromedia Authorware and Macromedia Director are based on concepts originating in HyperCard.

AppWare, originally known as Serius Developer, is sometimes seen to be similar to HyperCard, as they were both rapid application development system. AppWare was sold in the early 90s and was remarkable in that its application worked on both Windows and Mac systems.

On a less positive note, as HyperCard executed scripts in stacks immediately on opening it was also one of the first applications susceptible to macro viruses. The Merryxmas virus was discovered in 1993 by Ken Dunham, two years before the "Concept" virus.[2]

The Myst computer game franchise, initially released as a HyperCard stack, still lives on, making HyperCard a facilitating technology for starting one of the best-selling computer games of all time.

According to Ward Cunningham, the inventor of Wikis, ideas of the concept can be traced back to a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s, making HyperCard one of the grandparents of the Wiki idea.[3][4][5]

Trivia

Originally called WildCard during its development, the name was changed to HyperCard before official release due to trademark issues. The HyperCard application and its associated files retain a creator code of WILD, reflecting this period of development.

The last sixteen bytes of every HyperCard 2.x stack are the Pascal string "Nu är det slut …" (Now it is over … in Swedish), though this is never seen by users. Previously, stacks created with HyperCard 1.2.2 ended with the string "That's all folks…". The Swedish phrase was suggested by Apple's Martin Gannholm in homage to the 1970s Swedish children's TV show Fem myror är fler än fyra elefanter ("Five ants are more than four elephants"), where each episode ended with a pink cartoon elephant saying these words. The change symbolized the effort to make HyperCard 2.0 more internationally friendly. [1]

With a basic knowledge of HyperCard language, HyperCard could be used to bypass computer protection software such as At Ease by simply typing Close "At Ease" into the message box, for example.

Early versions of the HyperCard 2.x "demo" that shipped on the Mac OS system CDs were actually the full version, with the Home stack changed to default to a user level of 2 ("typing"). By simply typing magic into the Message Box (HyperCard's "console"), one could remove two opaque buttons covering the controls for changing the user level and regain the full feature set (except for some of the sample stacks)available.

References

  1. ^ Colby, Clifford (1996). "HyperCard's new deal: QuickTime authoring". MacWeek. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  2. ^ Pantechnicon Wiki
  3. ^ Wiki History
  4. ^ Interview: Wikinewsie Kim Bruning discusses Wikimania
  5. ^ An Evening With Wiki Inventor Ward Cunningham in Conversation with John Gage
  • Danny Goodman, The Complete HyperCard Handbook (Bantam Books, 1987), ISBN 0-9665514-2-7

See also

  • NoteCards: from Xerox PARC, a similar system which pre-dates HyperCard
  • SuperCard
  • Revolution: Rapid application development environment that can be deployed on many popular platforms
  • mTropolis: multimedia authoring using a drag-n-drop programming system
  • Automator: an easy-to-use script authoring environment
  • Stagecast Creator: one of a number of similar "if you see this, do this" programming systems
  • Morphic: a visual UI building system
  • Apple Media Tool
  • ViolaWWW: early web browser initially based upon HyperCard

External links

HyperCard clones

  • HyperNext Studio: a modern HyperCard-like software creation system for beginners that runs on Mac OS X and Windows
  • HyperStudio: a HyperCard-like product marketed for and popular with education users
  • PythonCard: a modern, Open Source GUI development system inspired by but not copying HyperCard and running on the Python scripting language
  • Revolution: a powerful development environment based on MetaCard (which they acquired); imports HyperCard stacks, supports Windows, Mac, and Linux
  • SuperCard: one of the first HyperCard clones, which still provides excellent support for current Mac features and Multimedia; imports HyperCard stacks
  • ToolBook: a versatile but Windows-only HyperCard clone, today more geared towards CBT (computer-based training).
  • FreeCard: written in Java

Discontinued

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