HyperCard Comes Back From the Dead to the Web

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."

But can we make new stacks?

[marvelouspatric]

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.

Re:Saving your work.

[Darkness404]

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 years, by 2030 you won't be able to access your documents legally. Ever (now granted Office '97 documents are openable in a text editor to salvage at least some of the info...)

Re:I'm new around here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its inventor claims that it was "almost" the World Wide Web, several years before the web. Except for minor details, it was local to one PC and lacked networking and collaboration features.

It is like magic.

[freenix]

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.

Re:Freaky.

[pimpimpim]

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.

Re:Saving your work.

[Kalriath]

What? My god you're full of crap (I'm gonna go out on a limb and say Twitter, I recognise that rabid "non-free" hatred and insistence on changing the subject line of replies).

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 evidence of why we have Open Source - because people just want something, so they up and make it.

And don't go thinking that Open Source software is never abandoned, leaving users of it in the dust (hint: not everyone can just "fix the code" - that requires skills that relatively few people actually have).

So easy a child could do it...

[mgmirkin]

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.

~Michael