Hypercard – Way Too Early

I think this blog post is overly caught up on the word “card” – HyperCard “cards” weren’t particularly like the cards inside android or twitter or facebook. Indeed, if HyperCard cards were like anything, it’s web pages, except designed for the limitations of the hardware of the time and targeting only one hardware platform (standard display, etc.) and running on a single non-networked computer.

Also, why “way too early”? Too early for what?

The most important feature of HyperCard, in my opinion, was that it gave end-users powerful general-purpose tools for programming and solving their own problems, in a way that was easy to get started with. Instead of being locked into someone’s existing program designed with an idealized customer’s needs, any HyperCard user could create or customize a HyperCard stack to suit their own preferences.

Unfortunately, tools requiring customer learning and mastery are very difficult to design and implement, and even more difficult to demo and sell. And so our software is designed in a very narrow and limiting fashion. The “cards” in android and facebook and twitter &c. are doing nothing to combat this, and to compare them favorably to HyperCard is in my opinion to completely (and tragically) miss the point of HyperCard.

I don’t see any particular signs of this trend toward closed systems reversing; indeed, as more people come online, and giant corporations spend billions of dollars hiring all the smartest people to work on developing software that gives them (the corporations) as much control as possible over uses of computer hardware/software, the popular machines and software systems are only getting more closed and locked down. The web itself is an open and flexible platform, but increasingly people are spending their time in a few centralized and controlled parts of it.

Yeah, I didn't get that either. To me Hypercard was really basic web with super-simple HTML holding the stacks together. I don't code much these days but I remember fondly all the little games and tools I could make with a little ingenuity and experimentation in Hypercard.

There is nothing new about the card metaphor in mobile.

The very earliest mobile web app standard, HDML (later WML), used a deck-of-cards metaphor. This was around the mid-90s.

"The fundamental building block of HDML content is the card. The user agent displays and allows the user to interact with cards of information. Logically, a user navigates through a series of HDML cards, reviews the contents of each, enters requested information, makes choices, and moves on to another or returns to a previously visited card." - HDML spec [1]

I'm not sure what Fred Wilson is getting at with "cards" today (he seems to be lamenting restricted APIs more than anything with the UI paradigm?). But in the HDML era they served a specific purpose: decks could be downloaded over high-latency networks in one shot and navigated offline, instead of waiting for each "page" to load.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_Device_Markup_Language

A card is more like a screen, not necessarily an app unto itself. Each card can be linked to other cards; buttons can be used to perform transitions between them.