No matter how you describe it, Apple’s HyperCard was (is!) an amazing tool. The simple concepts behind it, together with a programming language that looked a lot like plain English, made it a tool used by many non-programmers. And it had “links”, allowing you to jump from “card” to “card”, thus offering a first glimpse of the power of hypermedia and hypertext that we all take for granted today in our web browser. Ars Technica has a good overview of “25 years of HyperCard — the missing link to the Web“. Too bad they don’t mention this little nugget: HyperCard inspired Ward Cunningham to flesh out the basic concepts of the WikiWiki software that made him famous.
HyperCard diskette from 1990
I still have the original disks that (probably) came with my first Mac, a Macintosh IIsi in 1990… I used a later version of HyperCard in 2000 (on Mac OS9) to write a small stack with simple math exercises for my kids. Nothing fancy, but it worked well, and it allowed the kids to familiarize themselves with a computer. My son now dabbles in the construction of web sites and simple web apps; I’m pretty sure he would learn more (and have more fun at the same time) by using a modern HyperCard clone, rather than writing code in C# without a serious background on classes, objects, inheritance, etc.
