HyperCard Comes Back From the Dead to the Web 117
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."
Freaky. (Score:3, Funny)
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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.
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Paradoxically, I do that for the same reason that I like Hypercard: I want to use the tool that is the fastest and easiest way to do something. I use latex for large text/equations documents, but powerpoint for presentations, because the outlining
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
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Saving your work. (Score:1)
This is about avoiding the intentional waste of non free software. You could run your old hypercard program in a VM but most people no longer have the OS and software required to set that up. They are more likely to have some old notes they want to share with themselves and others and now they can. Free software users don't have this problem.
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There fixed that for you!
It's actually illegal to buy and sell Office secondhand, you don't buy "Office" you buy a licence to use Office and it's non-transferable.
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Thankfully, it's not Microsoft that decide the laws of the land.
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.
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This is only because HyperCard actually was able to make some real neat stuff - entire games were able to be made in it. Some people want to play with those still, so someone else decided "hey, let's make a way to run HyperCard stacks". Good on them! Far from being some kind of "non-free" agenda like you believe, it's more just evi
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OMG WOW! I want to run some software from the late 80s, because it is obviously superior to modern software ~
Actually, I'd like to find a replacement for something like SuperPaint. 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.
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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?
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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.
But can we make new stacks? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:But can we make new stacks? (Score:5, Informative)
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3.5 inch floppy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:4, Funny)
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When I was a kid we drew out screens from Super Mario Land onto little hand-drawn cardboard Gameboys. Oh, did we ever envy those with the IMB PCs, complete with the gramophone drive attachment. But alas, our meager salaries from working in the Atari pixel mines just wasn't enough back then. (To say nothing of that unlucky soul who was accidentally buried with the unsold copies of ET. Alas, poor Honorable Timothy.)
Wait, we were talking about HyperCard?
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There is actually a market for this. Anyone know a good provider?
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I bet you're just waiting for the drive to fail so Mom will have some deep fried grits ready for your visit.
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No, for whatever reason my dad prefers floppy disks. He is slowly getting used to flash drives for Quicken backups and the like, though. However, the desire to back up all of his 5-1/2" diskettes onto a CD (with room to spare, for sure!) still exists.
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I'm honestly surprised floppy drive connectors still exist on today's motherboards. Then again, parallel ports on a mobo lasted forever, and I can't remember the last time I even used it.
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If you don't have a twist, just fuck with the jumper settings. If you bought the $4.99 and not the $2.99 floppy drive, then you probably have enough jumpers to set the drive to any of the four IDs which it supports.
Some PC floppy controllers can actually recognize more than two IDs. I believe the PC-1s and such had a controller which would do it but you had to patch the BIOS and maybe DOS too...
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The suggestion someone else posted regarding a USB 3.5" drive is the best, and I wish I could have found such a drive for my parents. I may suggest it the next time I visit them.
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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!
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Way too much of it.
(Apple Perfoma? Pah. I have an Acorn Risc PC sitting next to my computer desk! Currently used, er, to hold up my company laptop. But it boots and everything.)
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Yeah, the old stuff is really cool and historic, but it's not precisely useful.
Unless you have a Performa and need to read some old Macintosh floppies, of course.
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Yeah, the old stuff is really cool and historic, but it's not precisely useful.
Unless you have a Performa and need to read some old Macintosh floppies, of course.
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times like these make me wish i never sold my Performa 600CD. It was special because it had a CD-ROM. A 2X CD-ROM! Man, I was pimpin'!
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
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"If you have some old HyperCard stacks lying around on floppy disks that you can't read because you either don't have a computer with a floppy drive, then we'll gladly do our best to import them on our vintage hardware here in CodeFlare labs."
Their mailing address is in the
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Send your floppies in appropriate packaging to:
CodeFlare
5919 Greenville #335
Dallas, TX 75206-1906
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I'm new around here... (Score:1)
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).
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What's more, even the original Myst was a set of HyperCard stacks [wikipedia.org].
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Inventor of the web says HC was his inspiration. (Score:1, Interesting)
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It was written in a proprietary language, it was only accessible via an application that would run on just one, proprietary, operating system, and this operating system would only run on hardware from one particular manufacturer. Although it was innovative, it was doomed for this reason. It was thought of by Apple as a tool to sell hardware (like everything else they did). The essence of the web was and is that it doesn't matter who supplies the hard
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Hypercard was what MS would probably have liked - that is, pages which could only be written on Windows, and accessed by Windows clients, and served from Windows servers. But it went one step further - all this, and only running on MS branded
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Re:I'm new around here... (Score:5, Funny)
Have you accepted Google [wikipedia.org] as your personal Search Engine.
Salvation is at hand!
Mac only? (Score:1)
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Two words (Score:2)
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ah, memories...
did you know there's a vorpal bunny FAQ? [vorpalbunny.com]
sweeeet. (Score:2)
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Hypercard never died (Score:1)
Tethered Hypercard (Score:2)
That's pretty impressive, figuring out how to tether a decades-old application that was designed to run entirely on the user's equipment.
I suppose you could just email the stack to those you really wanted to share it with. But where would they get the stack interpreter?
HyperCard had a really cool syntax (Score:2)
on mouseDown
repeat while the mouse is down
set the location of me to the mouseloc
end mouseDown
(not case sensitive)
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.
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Recently, I've been working with Inform 7 [inform-fiction.org], a rather recent language for writing text-adventures. Granted, it does have the competitive advantage of being a narrow-purpose language (kind
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on mouseStillDown
set the location of me to the mouseloc
end mouseStillDown
Myst on the web? (Score:1)
HyperCard was way ahead of its time (Score:1)
Revolution is the future (Score:1)
Revolution is Also on the Web (Score:1)
Has anyone ported Third Floor yet? (Score:2)
insecure auth to tilestack.com in demo video? (Score:2)
The entry page used in the video demo was http [slashdot.org]:. There was no indicator (that I could see) that the login process was secured in that http: page. Maybe there is an indicator and I'm just looking in the wrong place because of my limited exposure to Firefox in an OSX environment.
If not, is there any reason that an html-based authentication process not by secured by SSL (i.e. https) in this day and age? The other day I used a yahoo.ca account that I've kept around for years as a throwaway address, and I sa
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