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."
Wow, like 10 minutes ago i was looking for a spare phone in this box and found a case of floppy disks from my middle school computer class. If the disks are good i think there are a couple of hypercard stacks on there... Weird.
Same here. I was just talking with my wife about this programmable slideshow program we used in highschool. Although i'm sure ours ran on DOS. Although the basic premise of the program seems quite similar. I remember doing an x-wing fighter animation in highschool. I even had music and everything. Apart from LOGO, it was probably my first exposure to programming.
As someone who used HyperCard as a 10-12 year old, without using the manual ever, I realize only now that I never realized that by using HyperCard I was actually programming. The program must have been made in such a way that you could perform pretty complex operations with it, without even knowing that what you are doing is complex.
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.
Yes, Hypercard was simply well-engineered so that anyone from a child to a high-end programmer (familiar with scripts, etc.) could use it from day 1 (more or less). I always like Hypercard. I was sorry to see it go. Newer program have been created that do similar things, but generally not with the elegant ease of Hypercard.
With Hypercard, you could do just about anything from presentations to simple adventure games. It was quite robust.
i clicked the links, and it's a good chance i'm just an idiot, but I couldn't tell if there was going to be anyway to create new stacks. The beauty of hypercard, from what I recall, was that it had a pretty simple interface for creating the stacks. I remember doing an entire multimedia presentation with hypercard back in highschool in the 90s. while everyone else did powerpoint and thought the clip art was cool, i was making stuff move using sound and embedding quicktime video. granted, all that is easy (easier?) to do now, but back then, it was cool stuff.
i clicked the links, and it's a good chance i'm just an idiot, but I couldn't tell if there was going to be anyway to create new stacks. The beauty of hypercard, from what I recall, was that it had a pretty simple interface for creating the stacks. I remember doing an entire multimedia presentation with hypercard back in highschool in the 90s. while everyone else did powerpoint and thought the clip art was cool, i was making stuff move using sound and embedding quicktime video. granted, all that is easy (ea
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.)
I recently tried to put an old 5-1/2" drive in my parents' home computer so that they could copy their old diskettes. As it turns out, modern PC motherboards only support at most one floppy drive, so it would have cost them their actually-useful 3-1/2" drive.
There is actually a market for this. Anyone know a good provider?
Can't you buy them a USB 3.5 inch drive, then use the 5.25 drive on the mobo connector?
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.
Don't worry, you can still get parallel ports [tigerdirect.ca] and 9-pin serial. That board has serial, parallel, usb, IEEE 1394, PS2, RJ45, and a bunch of audio connectors. That has technology from the 1980's right up until the latest technology. Sadly, I think the only common port it is missing is ESATA.
Wrong backwoods - we're not grits people up here in the Midwest.;)
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.
Reading any high density (1.44MB) 3.5" floppy disks shouldn't be too hard. Assuming one has a method of reading the HFS file system, like the HFS module in Linux, it would be possible with any old USB or standard internal PC floppy. However, if merging the data and resource forks of a HyperCard stack into a flat file is necessary, I wish you good luck. Otherwise, scrounging up an old Mac with a floppy drive may be the only option. Old 800KB Mac floppies cannot be read by standard PC floppy drives becaus
Now all I need is a machine that can read a 3.5 inch floppy.
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?
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.
Actually, the Apple 400K and 800K drives used zone CAV [wikipedia.org]. Modern PC hard drives, magneto-optical drives, and DVD-RAM drives also use zone CAV.
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?
Yep, right. Got an Apple Performa sitting right next to my IBM XT. You mean you don't keep vintage computer hardware around?
Yep, right. Got an Apple Performa sitting right next to my IBM XT. You mean you don't keep vintage computer hardware around?
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.)
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... but it was wonderful to learn.
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.
"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."
...just send your floppies in appropriate packaging to...
i saw more kids get brave and smart on things like logo and hypercard, especially hypercard as you could get an original creation with creamy UI goodness, it did something useful and immediate and creative. the ones who were convinced mpw / pascal was the way to go would sit there like we had just given them a pile of planks and two wagon wheel hoops, waving as we sped off in our trusty gti. don't know if i'm willing to risk uploading a entire voyager expanded book... i have every one of them and nothing
I remember playing manhole as a child when my father would lug home his Mac from work every night. A really great and engaging world in retrospect. I had forgotten the name until now. I found it by looking on google for hypercard adventure, which eventually led me to this page about hypercard stacks [smackerel.net] that is amusingly displayed to look like an old hypercard stack itself.
Don't tell me - I can't download and use their software on my web server; I have to let them host my private data (private meaning, I have to trust them with it).
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. For example to make a button that you could drag around, you would just double click it in edit mode and enter the following script:
on mouseDown
repeat while the mouse is down
set the location of me to the mouseloc end mouseDown
The problem with HyperTalk/AppleScript is that they still have rigid syntax that's intolerant of ambiguity, but now it's merely verbose and expressed in a language where you might expect some constructions to work, but they don't, because they're English, not Hypertalk.
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.
And it isn't? Granted some of the features aren't there but if I remember correctly an old Mac could start up in ~30 seconds on an 8 MHZ CPU and 1 MB of RAM, while even my Linux distro takes about a minute on my low-end computer from 2002 with 512 MB of RAM, a 1.8 GHZ Celeron and loading the OS from a hard drive. Most '80s software was limited yes, but has better quality code and could run faster then modern programs because you couldn't say that in a year there will be a CPU to run it fast enough and that
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.
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?
With free software though, I can almost always manage to download an older version of the program to open it 100% legally, or if for some reason the site is down/dead I can get a copy from many other sites again, 100% legally. If I want to open a document created in Office '97 and for some reason MS doesn't let you open Office '97 documents in Office 2010, the only way to legally get it is by buying a (presumably) used copy off of E-Bay of Word 2007. And if optical media degrades to unreadable in say 20 yea
You've never opened an Office 97 document in notepad have you? There's more binary junk in there than actual text content. However, you would have better luck just opening it in OpenOffice.
Eh, well I haven't ever opened up a Word document in notepad but I remember reading some PC repair thing and it said to open up corrupted documents in a text editor to salvage content. And yes opening them up in OOo would be good, but my point was using a 100% proprietary way you couldn't have your documents and as we all know OOo is free and open source.
Yes, because in the magical free software land, file formats never change and become incompatible, even over the course of time between hypercard and now.
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.
Bah,you kids and your little baby cassette players and girlie iPods. When i was growing up we had REAL portable music players--Big honking RCA 8-tracks! One giant 12in speaker, TEN D batteries, and weighed a good fifteen pounds! Carry THAT around for awhile,why don't ya! I had mine duct taped to the handlebars of my Yamaha 125cc and since I laid it down mudding one day it could only play the 8-track that was in it,which was the first tape from KISS ALIVE!II,and we LIKED it that way! Now get off my lawn!
HyperCard [wikipedia.org] is an old application that allowed you to create files that were "stacks" of cards that contained text, media, etc and linked to one another. Consider each card to be a Web page and each stack to be a Web site, Intranet, or Web app rolled up into a single file. This all predated the Web, of course, but was pretty powerful and had a really, really easy development tool that could be used by complete novices.
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).
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.
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.
So basically it was like IE6-based world wide web around 5 years ago?
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.
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
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3.5 inch floppy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:3.5 inch floppy (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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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'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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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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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
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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.
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
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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
Two words (Score:2)
sweeeet. (Score:2)
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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.
Parent
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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.
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.
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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
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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
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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
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