Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
loper-os.org
Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
1–10 of 171 posts
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#2>HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the "use" and "programming" of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple's walled garden aesthetic has no place.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#3On a Podcast, Bill Atkinson theorized the reason Steve Jobs killed Hypercard was because it was the reason Bill had refused to leave Apple to join Steve at NeXT.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#4Interesting article from November 2011
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#5Honestly, people need to get over HyperCard.
Yes it was cool, but there’s no conspiracy behind its demise. It died because the World Wide Web accomplished basically the same thing, not initially as elegantly or powerfully, but open and universal (and today, very much more capable than HyperCard was).
HyperCard usage declined and Apple gave up on it. It’s not complicated.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#6If you’ve got something important to say, why say it like a mad, embittered old crank?
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#7Past discussions:
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#8I liked seeing the examples of creating a calculator in HyperCard, but I don’t think that Steve Jobs killed it because it was some existential threat to Apple’s profits. Apple gives away its software for free when you buy a Mac, and to my knowledge they don’t make a large fraction of money on selling software licenses.
It’s also completely possible to run your own code today on a Mac, so we would have to believe that Jobs was only out to get the in-house easy to use programming language.
More likely is that Jobs wanted to use work from NextStep for OSX which would mean rewriting HyperCard to work with NextStep, and Apple wasn’t exactly flush with cash when Jobs returned.
One of the commenters notes that there was a clone for NextStep called “HyperSense” which failed to sell. So another possibility here is that HyperCard just wasn’t as popular as we’d want it to be.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#9Part of the actual answer is buried way down at the bottom, and has nothing to do with the (probably imaginary) Jobs agenda angle:
> Either way, expect no HyperCard (or work-alikes) from Apple. But how about other vendors? What about open-source projects? Nothing there, either. Oh, there is no shortage of attempts. And all of them are failures for the same reason: they insist on being more capable, more complexity-laden than HyperCard. And thus, none of them can readily substitute for it.
That's it, not some conscious agenda by Jobs. A Mac will let you run anything you want, so why has nobody else made something like Hypercard? Why isn't there one for Linux or Windows or as a SPA web app?
Because of the second system effect and the general trend toward gratuitous unnecessary complexity at every level of the stack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
The other half of the answer is in my other reply. TL;DR: there are more programmers today than there were back then, but there are orders of magnitude more passive users who aren't "computer people" and just want a gadget that does a few specific things.
Walled gardens primarily service the latter, and do it acceptably well from their perspective. For the former there's Linux, FreeBSD, and commercial "real computer" OSes like MacOS and Windows that will let you run whatever you want with the proper incantations.
Re: Why Hypercard had to die (2011)
#10On a Podcast, Bill Atkinson theorized the reason Steve Jobs killed Hypercard was because it was the reason Bill had refused to leave Apple to join Steve at NeXT.
This assumes Jobs was a particularly petty person.