Happy 25th anniversary, HyperCard

Written by

Kelly Guimont for TUAW:

Twenty-five years ago today, HyperCard was released at Macworld Expo Boston. Apple’s software construction kit for the rest of us began shipping on every new Mac as of August 11, 1987; you could also buy it for $49. It required 1 MB of memory (yes, one megabyte) and a pair of 800K floppy drives, or one floppy drive + a hard disk. (Announced at the same time: the ImageWriter LQ, the Apple Fax Modem, and MultiFinder.) Times have indeed changed.

HyperCard inspired a generation of Mac users to think about how they could interact with their machines in ways they never could before – creating their own stacks to do everything from keep track of recipes to business applications to games (Myst, famously, started as a HyperCard stack).



  • http://www.facebook.com/rmaclemale Richard MacLemale

    One of Apple’s biggest blunders was dumping HyperCard. It could have been to programming what GarageBand is to music, but Apple isn’t interested in letting ordinary people write helpful little Apps. And please don’t bring up that steaming pile of junk “Automator,” or the annoying, ever-changing AppleScript. Apple thinks Xcode should be easy enough. Right. Because Objective C is just as easy as HyperTalk, right? LiveCode is a great alternative but it’s insanely expensive. However, it runs on literally everything. For everything that Apple has done right, giving the common man a good, easy to use programming environment is clearly an area where they have no idea what the hell they’re doing.

    • Peter Cohen

      I agree that Apple shouldn’t have gotten rid of HyperCard, but you’re really unfairly maligning AppleScript and Automator. It’s like getting mad at a saw because it doesn’t pound nails into wood as well as a hammer does.

      Both are tools, but with very different designs and intents.

      • quietstorms

        I get the feeling that Apple will bring back something similar to Hypercard one day on iOS.

        There were numerous stories about how Scratch was removed from the App Store but in forum comments Alan Kay did say that this was not a permanent ban. I think Apple is more concerned about iOS maturing and then they will concentrate on programming for the everyday user and children which was Kay’s intent with Scratch.

  • Lon Hildreth

    After seeing the HyperCard presentation at that MacWorld Expo I said, “I have seen the future and it is HyperCard.” I was totally blown away by the hyperlinks. Well, it turned out that I had seen the future, but the future was the World Wide Web.