Today I learned that #HyperCard was inspired, in part, by an LSD trip.
…Probably appropriate, in retrospect.
https://www.wired.com/story/bill-atkinson-apple-engineer-dies/
@inthehands @lePetomaneAncien @arroz
i have been searching for a #HyperCard replacement for decades
Here's some stuff I wrote about HyperCard in 2017:
I’ve witnessed only a tiny number of noteworthy moments in #tech, but as a summer intern in 1987 I attended MacWorld and was in the auditorium when Bill Atkinson introduced #HyperCard. Completely mind-blowing: graphics, simplicity, expressiveness.
I remember HyperTalk’s surprising use of `it` as an accumulator:
```
get the selection
put it into the message box
```
I can’t name a contemporary user-friendly #programming environment that lets you create apps/sites as easily as HyperCard did. 
I kept the "HyperTalk Programming" book all these years.
https://archive.org/details/@dckc67/lists/1/mylowestbookshelf
#grateful for Bill Atkinson and #HyperCard
HyperSchool is a HyperCard application for schools to do scheduling, attendance, and grades.
It includes thousands of lines of #HyperTalk code, plus some
C code to interface to a scantron machine and to do simulated annealing
before the user gets old.
#Hypercard was one of the formative influences on my development as a software developer and researcher. I'd done a bunch of programming in various flavors of Basic and C when I first started using it, but Hypercard was the first programming language that I used to solve real problems, ranging from writing up my HS Chemistry Lab reports, to cataloguing my coin collection, to developing a re-enactment of the climactic scene of the Merchant of Venice. I have fond memories of my high school Hypercard programming class (see the movie Hackers for a surprisingly realistic re-enactment), where we got to play with the school's scheduling system, written in hypercard (with fake data though)
RIP #BillAtkinson. Your contributions to our lives will ripple throughout time.
So, Bill Atkinson is probably the reason I stuck with computers, and definitely the reason I wound up on Macs. I'd done bits of programming before I stumbled across HyperCard (BASIC, 6502 Assembler, Pascal, shell scripting, blah blah blah—even smidgens of FORTRAN and COBOL) but it was always with disinterest: I just wanted to do a thing, and if I had to program to do it…sigh, *fine.* I couldn't wait to put the task behind me.
But HyperCard…HyperCard made programming accessible and fun. And while HyperCard (and HyperTalk) had distinct limitations and shortcomings, it was amazing what it could be pushed to do—and I enjoyed doing it, which is something I cannot say of *any* development environment I've worked with since.
I worked on games and educational titles built in HyperCard, and I created heaps of specialty and in-house systems (some of which were running until very recently). For years I ran a specialized web crawler that was (yep) built in HyperCard. Large parts of the backend for TidBITs were glued together with HyperCard. And no, none of this was rock solid, but it was very rare that HyperCard was the piece that failed.
Of course, Bill Atkinson's contributions to the Mac, to computing, and the world were much larger than HyperCard. He was a giant, and I'm privileged to have stood on a tiny portion of one of his shoulders. Thank you.
"It was Mr. Atkinson who programmed QuickDraw, a foundational software layer used for both the Lisa and Macintosh computers; composed of a library of small programs, it made it possible to display shapes, text and images on the screen efficiently."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html
Twin Peaks on #HyperCard, 1991-94; via @internetarchive.
The genius behind MacPaint, HyperCard, and so many other groundbreaking creations has left us. I like to think that Bill Atkinson is now in a better place—one where HyperCard was never discontinued, and its legacy lives on, evolving as it always should have.
I’m sure we will hear a lot about Bill Atkinson (RIP) over the next few days, but I want to point out the huge influence of #HyperCard on the Web. @timbl himself mentioned it in his original WWW proposal (https://cybercultural.com/p/1990-programming-the-world-wide-web/), early web browsers like ViolaWWW were modeled on HyperCard (https://cybercultural.com/p/1992-web-vs-gopher/), and even JavaScript owed a debt to it (HyperCard included an object oriented scripting language called HyperTalk; https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/).
So many weird things included as accessories in HyperCard 2.x instead of built in... #hyperCard #retroComputing
In three hours!
Join me this Wed., May 7th at 9PM EDT for another #HyperCard programming live-stream. I've constructed a pop-up text editor.
Join me this Wed., May 7th at 9PM EDT for another #HyperCard programming live-stream. I've constructed a pop-up text editor.
Some of My History of Hypertext
https://mdhughes.tech/2025/04/22/some-of-my-history-of-hypertext/
So in 1979, young Digital Mark is shown a computer, a TRS-80 Model I, by 4th-grade teacher. Other kids play Snake, I hit break and type LIST, seeing BASIC code, because I've been reading the instruction card. "I can read and learn this!" Nothing else now matters to Mark.
That summer, I take an
Next project I'm equally afraid and hyped about: re-implementing most of #HyperCard as #HTML form-based app. Requires:
- A working #HyperTalk (or the like) interpreter
- Card editing form that's flexible enough to build e.g. a calculator
- Script editing UI
- Smart evaluation that works well with old-school HTML-first UIs
- Server setup to handle all of these
Some of these are entirely new to me, and some don't have reasonable libs for in #CommonLisp, so I'm quite floored with the amount of work. But if I manage to make this thing, I'll have a reliable note-taking tool and a simple programming system!
(Now that I think about it, I don't really need a note-taking tool, because I use #hpda. And the simple programming system might as well be a headless HyperTalk interpreter...)
I have found that it is really hard to get pixel perfect results when trying to create classic System 6/HyperCard windows using html/css when working with Safari. It is SO OPINIONATED about dithering certain things that are pixel perfect 1-bit pngs and about rounding the corners of form fields.
I switched to using svgs to make a fill for my pinstripe title bars because of the dithering and inserting
-webkit-appearance: none; into CSS to strip out styling of the form fields. #retrocomputing #hypercard
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