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HyperCard Comes Back From the Dead to the Web
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jun 07, 2008 05:24 PM
from the in-many-ways-it-never-really-went-away dept.
from the in-many-ways-it-never-really-went-away dept.
TedCHoward writes "On the heels of the recent mention of HyperCard comes the launch of a brand new site called TileStack. Cnet's Webware blog writes, 'The idea behind it is to bring old HyperCard stacks back to life by putting them on the Web, meaning you can take some of those long lost creations from the late '80s and early '90s and make them working Web apps. You simply upload them to TileStack's servers and they'll be converted and hosted for just you or the entire world to use once again... Since the service runs without Flash... TileStack is perfect for the iPhone and other devices that run on the Web.' They also have a video showing the upload process."
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HyperCard, What Could Have Been 159 comments
bobwrit sends us to Wired for a look back by the author of HyperCard, Bill Atkinson. Quoting: "HyperCard is a programming environment that can create applications as diverse as utilities and games by linking 'cards' arranged into 'stacks.' Commands are executed through a natural-language scripting language called HyperTalk... The software has been phenomenally successful and highly influential. But Atkinson feels that if only he'd realized separate cards and stacks could be linked on different people's machines through the Net — instead of cards and stacks on a particular machine — he would have created the first Internet browser."
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Freaky. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Freaky. (Score:5, Insightful)
Years later I tried to do similar simple interactive animations for adobe flash. It faced me with multitudes of concepts, each with their own drop-down menus and rules, before I could even start drawing something. Maybe it was more easy as a child because I had no idea of what I was doing, but more likely HyperCard was just designed very elegantly.
Parent
So easy a child could do it... (Score:3, Insightful)
With Hypercard, you could do just about anything from presentations to simple adventure games. It was quite robust.
~Michael
But can we make new stacks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But can we make new stacks? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
3.5 inch floppy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:5, Informative)
It's worse than that. Apple floppy disks were written with constant linear velocity --- i.e., as the head moves towards the centre of the disk, the rotation speed goes up so that the magnetic medium still passes the head at the same velocity.
PCs, and therefore all modern hardware, use constant angular velocity floppy disks --- the disk spins at a constant speed, so that the speed at which the magnetic medium passes the head varies depending where the head is. Yes, this is clearly a bad idea, but that's PCs for you.
This means that no modern hardware can read old Apple floppy disks. It's just not possible. You'll need an old Macintosh floppy drive and (probably) an old Macintosh floppy drive controller to plug it into, which basically means you need an old Macintosh. You still have yours, right? Right?
Have fun!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:3.5 inch floppy CAN read old 400/800 McFloppys (Score:4, Interesting)
The high density Apple floppies (1.44, etc) can be moved back and forth between PC's and Apples.
The lower density Apple floppies used GCR recording, much like the Apple ][ floppies. Hell, in fact, it was exactly like the Apple floppies, except that the number of sectors per track varied. Apple sped up/slowed down the drive motor while doing disk I/O.
I found out you could read these disks on a standard PC 300 RPM drive with a custom disk controller of about five chips. No speed changing. The disk controller changed its disk I/O frequency. The product we sold to do this (and to run Mac software on the 68000 Atari ST platform) was called "Spectre GCR"), and yep, it would boot Apple floppies, or hard disks, right out of the box.
(This did not make Apple happy.)
The only significant bugs that showed up were noise from the switching power supply near the frequency of the outer tracks and impedance mismatch on the read-data line.
If I had to read Mac 400/800 floppies these days, I'd pick up a Mac on eBay with the "Super Woz Integrated Machine" that could read both formats, and bring the data over.
All of this taught me that Steve Wozniak was one smart, smart guy. His low chip, very elegant solution was wonderful to learn. Writing the formatter was a bitch, yes
One of the problems with the DMCA is that people learn so much about coding by looking at other people's coding. Same for hardware design. I learned a great deal about 68000 coding from Andy Hertzfeld's beautiful Macintosh coding. I learned a great deal about elegant hardware design from John Ridges, who is possibly the best overall hardware and software person I've ever met.
Thanks,
David Small
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It is like magic. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's about right. Emacs still works the way it did in 1984, despite improvement. GCC, G77, LaTex, ImageMagick, Xfig, gnuplot, grace, StarOffice and just about any software you can think of still works with documents written at the time. Free software rarely wrecks a user's work.
Parent
You want Inkscape with integrated GIMP, no? (Score:3, Interesting)
An under $50 (call it $100 now) drawing program with multiple layers, on-screen coordinates for precise placement of objects, the ability to switch seamlessly between bitmap and object modes for creation (with "outline" ability), a really huge palate of available shapes, and a few other goodies I've forgotten over the years. I can't seem to buy anything like that these days.
So it looks like you want an SVG editor with an embedded paint program that lets you edit the PNG files in SVG image elements. Have you tried requesting this feature in Inkscape's issue tracker?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.inkscape.org/ [inkscape.org]
http://www.gimpshop.com/ [gimpshop.com]
http://www.getpaint.net/ [getpaint.net]
You can even get an Alpha of Krita 2.0 for Windows these days. All of those are free.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm new around here... (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of early games, especially choose your own adventure style ones, as well as multimedia presentations, and educational tools were created as HyperCard stacks. This Web site is just allowing people to dig them up, dust them off, and play with them again (without paying for one of the commercial HyperCard programs still out there, or using a VM).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What's more, even the original Myst was a set of HyperCard stacks [wikipedia.org].
Re:I'm new around here... (Score:5, Funny)
Have you accepted Google [wikipedia.org] as your personal Search Engine.
Salvation is at hand!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:HyperCard had a really cool syntax (Score:4, Interesting)
A perfect example is "the location of me". You can't say "my location", which is a far more common idiom.
Of course the saving grace of HyperTalk was that it was also a pretty darn good language for its time, aside from the syntax.
Parent