Why HyperCard Had to Die (2011)

7 mgrayson 4 8/28/2025, 11:02:30 PM loper-os.org ↗

Comments (4)

os2warpman · 4h ago
Hypercard died because in 1997 Apple was 3-4 weeks away from bankruptcy and 1998 wasn't that great either.

Before that, Hypercard was so valuable to Apple that they kicked it out the door to Claris and only took it back when Claris turned into a disaster (due to the Apple disaster) and everyone quit to write software for BeOS (lol).

"A friend of a friend of a friend posted to macrumors that jobs killed it because he didn't like it" has as much evidentiary weight behind it as "An elite Knights Templar strike force broke into Apple HQ and stole the source code and threatened Jobs with death if he ever released another version because if you typed 'evilmagic' into the message box, a portal to hell opened up in your room and evil sexy demons were coming out and seducing all of the wholesome pure and innocent computer nerds learning hypercarding."

watersb · 3h ago
HyperCard inspired the initial development of Tcl/Tk.

The scripting language, HyperTalk, was picked up by WingZ, which was mostly a spreadsheet sort of application... but I think the layout was similar to Numbers on macOS.

labrador · 9h ago
I've been under the impression that Hypercard was superseded by Tim Berners-Lee and his World Wide Web. I'm old enough to have used Hypercard in the early days. The author calls HTML/JS/CSS a shit soup, but it can be as simple as Hypercard with the advantage that it reaches across machines through the network.
chmaynard · 8h ago
Much more heat than light in this angry, bitter rant.