I'll never forget learning basic HyperCard usage in Computer Class in seventh grade... in 2005. My public middle school had just got brand new shiny white iMacs... which they used exclusively to run the Classic Mac (or whatever it was called) emulator, so we could learn HyperCard and use some ancient monochrome typing tutor.
I was always annoyed that "Computer Class" was taught like this--having students follow step-by-step instructions to the letter to "learn" how to use ancient software with almost zero room for creativity or exploration. Trying to "color outside the lines" and use any of these tools for anything other than the explicit purpose of the curriculum was forbidden. I remember recognizing that HyperCard seemed like an old cross between HTML and PowerPoint, and I really wanted to try making a game with it... but my teacher wouldn't allow it. "Computer Class" basically always felt like we were being rigidly instructed how to do the menial white-collar office work of a decade prior, instead of allowing us to unlock our creativity and explore all the cool stuff this fancy new technology could actually do.
I often got the vibe that these teachers really didn't know how to do literally anything with the computers they were teaching us to use, outside of exactly what they were teaching us how to do... and they were afraid that we'd figure out how to use the computers better than them.
What do kids in middle-class public middle schools learn in "Computer Class" these days? Is it still just typing, basic Office use, and HTML4? What's a "Computer Class" like now that everyone carries one around in their pocket at all times?
That's too bad. In my middle school we had an instructor who was really passionate about computers, and the kids in his class.
This was '93-95. The majority of the computers were monochrome Macs, but his instructor machine was a color computer. We did Hypercard, and other bits I've since forgotten.
What I can remember is buying tons of floppies (which I might still have - I did a couple years ago) and staying after school to play Bolo. With his color computer, and practice, he kicked the rest of our butts in the game. Floppies were to store the 'Brains' that we got off the internet, as well as maps we had made, or that we got online.
I know for me that initial foray into computers, something we wouldn't have in our house until late high school, lead to me working on web sites late at night (AOL's HTML documentation being how I learned basic HTML), which lead me to not taking any computer classes in college, but still ending up as a web developer by trade (15+ years professionally).
High school was definitely a difference experience; DOS machines at the time, with Apples being in a different room later, that were taught primarily as word processors.
Unlike middle school, I believe we got in trouble when we tried to play games (Hexen being one of them) after class.
I had a similar experience 20 years prior, replacing HyperCard with Logo and the iMac with Apple IIe (aka //e.)
The class was very rigid, giving us instructions on what to do.
However, a few of us deviated from the rules and enjoyed learning on our own, finishing the assignments quicker just so we could try out new things.
Of course we got in trouble in class, but many of these same students got into trouble in other classes. (I tended to ask too many questions, I believe I was told.)
From what I've seen lately, Computer Class is just the place where you do your homework or gone entirely because they have some laptop / tablet in the classroom. Computer Programming went the way of Shop classes, probably for a very similar reason. You need a teacher that if competent can make more money elsewhere and you need a dedicated room. From a school's eyes computer programming is logistically a vocational class.
Which is sad. A few years ago there was a push to bring “programming into schools”. I thought this was weird. We had AppleSoft Basic programming courses in 1988 when I was in 8th grade (magnet school) and at my regular old run of the mill public high school up until 1992.
Programming, BASIC in particular, was pushed very hard in the 80s and 90s because it was viewed as the next common household skill. After numerous advances in UX, it sort of returned to its professional exclusivity.
Fortunately for me my experience with HyperCard was quite different. We were encouraged --possibly even required?-- to make a game with it in middle school. That's how my very first ever game was made. Long since lost to time unless the floppy is sitting in a forgotten filing cabinet somewhere.
The HyperCard Users Guide was good, but it was after my uncle loaned me his copies of "The Complete Hypercard Handbook"[0] and "HyperTalk 2.0 The Book" that I really got obsessed. I was 9 years old and reading these thick tomes cover to cover, and building test stacks for each obscure function. The code examples were full of jokes that were way over my head but I loved it nontheless (or maybe that's part of why I did love it).
Here is a question that I don't have an answer to: why was HyperCard so good? In simple terms you could say it opened a door to a new set of possibilities, that it was the precursor to the internet, etc. But I can't escape the sense that HyperCard demonstrated the potential for things that have not been realized. Anyone else have that sense, that somethings have been lost in what we have now?
Hypercard was a thrust in the direction of the Engelbart/Kay/Papert vision of personal computing, one where there wasn't so much of a division between "programmers" and "users" (Hypercard users were even called "authors"!) This vision of computing has fallen out of fashion for a few reasons, and it's a real shame. We have, instead, allowed our personal media to become arcane devices of dubiously "necessary" complexity. You can see this in any cafe where a web developer is using a teletype emulator to create a UI, or when someone cannot take the logical "next step" in processing some information in their spreadsheets (like retrieving data easily) because the system is not set up to allow them to explore that possibility without first learning a full fledged programming language top to bottom.
One lesson from this Kay/Papert line is that, when it comes to personal computing systems, metaphor is key. Hypercard worked in large part because the metaphor of cards, stacks, and live objects acting on cards and stacks was highly intuitive to a lot of people. Add in the fact that you "do Hypercard" in Hypercard itself, and that the home stack is itself an explorable example of how the whole system works. Imagine if web developers could work this way, making their sites and applications in the browser. Good luck copying and pasting that button!
> Hypercard was a thrust in the direction of the Engelbart/Kay/Papert vision of personal computing, one where there wasn't so much of a division between "programmers" and "users"
I couldn't agree more with this conception, and I wish that philosophy was more widespread within our industry. Sadly, it seem that the predominant philosophy is the opposite: users are mere consumers, cattle really, who should be grateful their programmer masters deign to provide them anything.
Lots of good thoughts! I ended up at constructionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... and wonder if perhaps that is a key concept? The points about metaphor, authoring and others in your reply are significant as well. As a contstructionist, my next question is how to build a modern hypercard? What would that look like?
Constructionism seems to be one of Kay's sticking points -- this is one of the ways children can learn best (but what about adults?)
Obviously a modern Hypercard cannot simply be a contemporary reimplementation of Hypercard, with extended APIs for the online world etc. That, in fact, exists and it's called Livecode.
What was great about the later versions of Hypercard is how they fit holistically within OS8/9. You could interface with Applescript and access key APIs in the rest of the operating system in the plain way. What really should have happened next is that many of the basic applications should have themselves been implemented in "a hypercard" For example, imagine a Finder that let you peek under the hood to see all of its scripts and, after some kind of "unlocking" allowed you to change it. You get access to a lot of the power of the OS's API for free at that point, and users can easily figure out how to script something like a "every three days move files from here to there" or something.
The switch to Unix also meant a switch to and older, more complicated, less intuitive bundle of methods for system scripting. Useful UI metaphors go away at that level and are replaced with bad and outdated metaphors, like the teletype. Leaving aside things like Applescript which have been largely left to die on the vine, personal computing operating systems seem to have regressed from the contructionist perspective.
I guess what I'm suggesting is that you cannot have a "modern hypercard" without having a different kind of operating system, which itself might require a different hardware architecture.
An ideal system would be "layered." For example, at Layer 1 you have "a hypercard" and most of the GUI, including Finder-like things, windows, basic buttons, can be manipulated easily at this level. Users can also peek. But one they reach the limits of that high level hypercard system, then can "peel back" a layer and are introduced to lower level APIs and a new language. It has access to all the same objects and APIs as the hypercard layer, but in a different way, along with more APIs that were previously invisible. You could then have a third layer that is the systems language and APIs at the lowest user accessible level -- this is where "professionals" would live, but because it would be exporable and "peel back-able," determined users could get there by example.
Something like a lisp machine at layer 3 that runs a smalltalk at layer 2 that runs "a hypercard" at layer 1 would fit the bill. But take those as analogies.
I've come to a variant definition of constructionism, based not as a way to learn, but construction as a way to explore/understand. Especially when being entrepreneurial, analysis only takes you so far. In one of the YC video things someone said something to the effect that in Silicon Valley more people tend to talk about "what if you could?" rather than "why you can't", which sums it up for me.
The best example of a constructionist approach I can think of is complex adaptive systems (CAS)- the way to understand a CAS is to build one, taking one apart only gets you so far.
I see where you are going about the lisp and I like that! What a cool idea! lispercard? :-)
I was 9 years old in 1987 when my dad bought the first family computer: a Macintosh SE. HyperCard immediately captured my imagination and I remember spending many long hours working on my stacks and pouring over this very guide, and pining for the critical second half of the documention the HyperCard Script
Language Guide.
It's hard to describe how out of reach basic documentation seemed to a child at the time compared to today where anything you want to learn about programming is readily available for free to anyone with an internet connection.
I didn't have any programming books when I was 12, so I learned entirely by reading the source code of other people's stacks. For a little while I thought all variables had to be named box1, box2, etc, because one of the stacks I played with was a kind of mad libs game and all of its variables followed that convention. Finding out that I could name variables whatever I wanted was a revelation.
I was 14, and HyperTalk took over my life for a few years. My out-of-reach documentation was the spec for writing an XFCN in C. I wanted better sprite animations for game development.
There is a direct line from HyperCard to where I am now.
I started programming as a hobbyist on the Apple //e in BASIC and 65C02 assembly language. But, I released a much better version of Eliza written in HyperCard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) and submitted it on AOL and to the freeware FTP archives around 1993. It also used an XFNC that let me use the original MacinTalk text to speech engine and the newer PlainTalk.
A professor at another college had been looking for an Eliza HyperCard stack to use with his HyperCard based Gopher server. He reached out to me on AOL and that was my first paying side gig.
Having some freelance software under my belt in college at the no name school I was attending helped me stand out and get an internship my junior year in 1995 in the much larger city where I still live.
That led to my first job when I came back a year later at the company where I interned.
Side note: Writing the Eliza clone has been my go to “Hello World” program for years. I’ve written versions in AppleSoft Basic that used SAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth), GW-Basic, DEC VAX DCL, VB6, C# on Windows Mobile, JavaScript, and PHP.
Hypercard powered the first, afaik, multimedia yearbook, at South Eugene high school, in Oregon, in 1991. I designed the UI. Hypercard was perfect for pulling that photo and text data together, and we burned it onto 650MB CDROMs, velcro'd to the inner back of each hardbound yearbook.
I got started with QBasic, but really it was Hypercard that showed me the power of programming when I built a multi-media presentation that included laser disc cut-scenes for a school project.
Hypercard was really the gateway drug to programming, like web/JS is today.
I used Hypercard to design UI back then, UI was primitive compared to today, but the knowledge of how to design functional and useful UI was also very early. Hypercard made it easy to create interactive design you could actually interact with instead of just looking at.
Especially when the alternative was incredibly hard. Getting a simple UI running on the Mac involved using their IDE, learning a ton of Pascal, understanding the application framework, and memorizing dozens of Toolbox calls to get elements built and displayed.
HyperCard let you prototype the exact same thing in a matter of seconds.
I wouldn’t normally just post a link to an HN search, but I happen to have just searched HN for HyperCard... and well it’s definitely a favorite of HN:
Never saw this before, how cool. It makes you think about the current state of software: the main difference is that we can do the same things as is seen here, but in the browser. Apart from that our day-to-day software might even be less advanced. Apps like Notion come to mind as a modern day equivalent. The only thing is that this is more than 30 years ago!
If you have the time, grab Sheepshaver and boot up the last version of Hypercard. You will see that it did a lot of things that a browser simply cannot. For example, you can copy a button from anywhere and paste it into your own stack using copy/paste. Think of what it takes to do that on the web!
I was always annoyed that "Computer Class" was taught like this--having students follow step-by-step instructions to the letter to "learn" how to use ancient software with almost zero room for creativity or exploration. Trying to "color outside the lines" and use any of these tools for anything other than the explicit purpose of the curriculum was forbidden. I remember recognizing that HyperCard seemed like an old cross between HTML and PowerPoint, and I really wanted to try making a game with it... but my teacher wouldn't allow it. "Computer Class" basically always felt like we were being rigidly instructed how to do the menial white-collar office work of a decade prior, instead of allowing us to unlock our creativity and explore all the cool stuff this fancy new technology could actually do.
I often got the vibe that these teachers really didn't know how to do literally anything with the computers they were teaching us to use, outside of exactly what they were teaching us how to do... and they were afraid that we'd figure out how to use the computers better than them.
What do kids in middle-class public middle schools learn in "Computer Class" these days? Is it still just typing, basic Office use, and HTML4? What's a "Computer Class" like now that everyone carries one around in their pocket at all times?