Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)

At the bottom of the comments, a member of the Hypercard team said it was killed in 92, before Jobs returned. There still is no free development tool out there that matches what Hypercard did in terms of power and ease of use. We're still coding with languages designed for constraints that disappeared decades ago.

This doesn't seem to be anything special about Hypercard. Hypercard was the BASIC of the Macintosh in that it served the same niche. It certainly was not BASIC, but the idea was the same, a little language and environment that fit into the machine's environment that allowed novices (and then highly practiced novices :-)) to create stuff on the machine for other people to use. It was killed for the same reason BASIC, in the sense of built-in 8bit micro…

I've mentioned this several times on HN before, but I maintain a collection [1] of over 3,500 HyperCard stacks hosted by the Internet Archive. The great thing about modern technology is they're all emulated in-browser - just select the one you want and press start. You've got silly little animations[2], sound samplers[3], choose-your-own adventure stories[4], reference guides[5] and teaching materials[6]. But there's so much more in the collection. I thoroughly recommend that those unfamiliar with HyperCard have a…