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The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

mondo2000.com

11–20 of 68 posts

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#11
post #7
post #3

A huge difference between HC and the web browser: almost anyone would make a HC stack, creating on the web is largely unavailable for most folks. HC was about creating not browsing.

> HC was about creating not browsing. Let us not forget that the very first web browsers had an edit button.

I did not know that… Mosaic had an edit button? What did it do?

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#12
post #3

A huge difference between HC and the web browser: almost anyone would make a HC stack, creating on the web is largely unavailable for most folks. HC was about creating not browsing.

Hypercard was for the tech-savvy few who could actually figure out how to use it

I don’t recall any instruction on it, and I was definitely creating stacks at age 8 or 9. I recall it being quite straightforward. I made a slide show presentation about subliminal messages for my 7th grade science class (1992 I think)

I admit we had a Mac early on, so I was very familiar with interactions by that point, but I found HyperCard being shockingly intuitive.

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#13
Thanks for this Xmas present, benbreen. I was reading Mondo2000 in the early 90s as a prepubescent while learning HyperCard. It ended up making me good friends at a particularly insane time of NYC history.

I figured out how to produce music with HyperCard, using audio samples, with the 8-bit mono 22khz audio-in on the Macintosh IIsi. Using a program called Soundedit, I could build, chop and render multitrack audio files to one file. I couldn’t hear them before rendering, so it was mostly a visual waveform editing process.

I would then get the rendered audio files into a master HyperCard stack’s resource fork using ResEdit, and sequence songs and albums through HyperTalk scripting. Albums would be a page of buttons that played individual songs, with graphics, and then a script to play songs in sequence that I could record to cassette tapes easily.

I would press the album’s “Make Tape Side 1” HyperTalk script button and record on the tape deck at the same time, then flip the tape and press “Side 2” when the tape hit the end, after hearing that old helpful mechanical button pop sound. Boom, production.

Good times, part of the foundation of my entire life. Making music that way made me some of the realest friends you can have. HyperCard ruled

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#14
post #3

A huge difference between HC and the web browser: almost anyone would make a HC stack, creating on the web is largely unavailable for most folks. HC was about creating not browsing.

Hypercard was for the tech-savvy few who could actually figure out how to use it

Every 7th grader in my middle school computer class learned to use Hypercard and I wouldn't say any of them were tech savvy at that age in 1990.

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#15

Thanks for this Xmas present, benbreen. I was reading Mondo2000 in the early 90s as a prepubescent while learning HyperCard. It ended up making me good friends at a particularly insane time of NYC history. I figured out how to produce music with HyperCard, using audio samples, with the 8-bit mono 22khz audio-in on the Macintosh IIsi. Using a program called Soundedit, I could build, chop and render multitrack audio fi…

A Mac IIsi was my own first computer, and I also spent quite a lot of quality time with HyperCard, ResEdit, and SoundEdit.

You're going to kill me with nostalgia.

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#17
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HC was about creating not browsing. Let us not forget that the very first web browsers had an edit button.

I did not know that… Mosaic had an edit button? What did it do?

Edited the page. Opened the html in notepad, or whatever your local editor was.

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#19

Thanks for this Xmas present, benbreen. I was reading Mondo2000 in the early 90s as a prepubescent while learning HyperCard. It ended up making me good friends at a particularly insane time of NYC history. I figured out how to produce music with HyperCard, using audio samples, with the 8-bit mono 22khz audio-in on the Macintosh IIsi. Using a program called Soundedit, I could build, chop and render multitrack audio fi…

Wow, this is amazing! Do you still have any of the music that resulted? Would love to hear!

Re: The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

#20
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HC was about creating not browsing. Let us not forget that the very first web browsers had an edit button.

I did not know that… Mosaic had an edit button? What did it do?

I don't recall that, but it seem quite likely. I still use HC in Basilisk II sometimes. Dragging out Xcode for something quick and easy is overkill.
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