Did HyperCard morph into anything that is useful today?

[Todd's keyboard]

Some years back, I fired up an old Macbook (or maybe an iBook) that could run HyperCard and manually ported a database of birthdays into a current version Calendar.

Did HyperCard morph into anything that people find useful today?

thanks, Todd's where-are-the-clicks-of-yesterday board

[p8712]

HTML? An indirect descendant.

[bfd]

Lots of people are talking about using HyperCard to catalog Trump's lies, but it broke the program just two weeks in.

[cbelt3]

p8712 wrote:
HTML? An indirect descendant.

I will agree with this. Hypercard was a definite precursor of linked information technology. Lots of other technologies were created and were subsumed by the Hypertext. Those clever folks at CERN...

[Markintosh]

I could follow that trend line in teaching technology to kids between 1985 and 2015.

There's some divergent and twisted lines but the trends are there:


HyperCard - > HyperStudio -> Keynote -> Web

HyperTalk - > Turtle/Logo - > Coding (of various types) -> Swift Playground

[samintx]

Ah Hyper Card. A blast from the past.

[pdq]

p8712 wrote:
HTML? An indirect descendant.

Yeah, HyperCard was similar in ways to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire, which later evolved into HTML and the internet as we know it.

Also, it sounds like Microsoft took cues from it for Visual Basic, but you asked about something useful. :wink:

[Sarcany]

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/...o-the-web/

[Ted King]

Sarcany wrote:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/...o-the-web/

That was a very enjoyable read. Brought back a lot of memories. For a few years I had my students create presentations using HyperCard - until PowerPoint came along. There were also some HyperCard stacks that I bought or were shared around that had excellent information on all kinds of topics in science, so I had the students use those as a source and in a couple of cases those stacks were used in several days of curriculum. I knew HyperCard could do more than slide shows but I didn't give HyperTalk the value I should have and didn't teach the kids how to use it.

My son, on the other hand, took to HyperCard like breathing air. At about 11 or 12 years old he showed me that he had used HyperCard and HyperTalk to create a piano keyboard that when a key was clicked on it would play that note and then make a notation of it. A series of clicks were recorded as a "score" that could be played out in sequence. It kinda blew my mind. He was always good with that kind of stuff. When he was about 7 or 8 I taught him how to use Apple Logo. I also just for fun had figured out how to use my color TV as a monitor (though most of the time just stayed with the standard gray scale monitor). I came home one day and he showed me this geometrically intricate animation he had done in color. Not saying he was a genius, but he was pretty sharp with respect to that kind of thing. Not surprisingly he is a Cloud Infrastructure Architect now.

[Speedy]

Ted King wrote: he is a Cloud Infrastructure Architect now.

And after showing so much early promise…