HyperCard was a user-friendly software tool released in 1987 for creating applications on Apple Macintosh computers. It used a virtual card system to link data and execute commands, and its programming language, HyperTalk, was relatively simple. It inspired home users to create and distribute their own applications, known as stackware. It was withdrawn from sale in 2004 but can still be used on newer machines via emulation mode.
HyperCard is a set of tools used to create software applications. It was first released in 1987 and included with new Apple Macintosh computers at the time. It was one of the first widely used examples of interactive media and predated the World Wide Web by several years.
The idea of HyperCard was to allow users to create applications to perform a specific task, rather than modifying an existing application for their own needs. It has been described as simple and powerful. There are recorded examples of how it is easy enough for young children to use, yet effective enough to perform tasks including managing the lighting system for the world’s tallest building, the Peronas Towers in Malaysia.
The concept behind HyperCard and the inspiration for its name is that applications are built through virtual cards. Unlike a standard card system, such as a rotating address file, the data on the “cards” can be linked together and set up to execute commands. This means that it works similar to the way text, audio, images and video can be linked together on websites.
Unlike many programming languages and systems, HyperCard did not require the user to understand and know numerous commands and codes. Through the card system, the user can focus on working out what the application is supposed to do, with HyperCard then taking care of the code needed to perform these actions. The programming language, HyperTalk, has been kept relatively simple, allowing users the ability to see how their changes have affected the coding and have the opportunity to learn the language itself. This was somewhat similar to modern web page editing software that allows the user to switch between the “What you see is what you get” view of the page and the underlying HTML and other code that transforms the design and writing of the user in a working web page.
Because programming with HyperCard was so easy, at least in relative terms, it created a trend of home users creating their own applications and distributing them to other users. File sets distributed in this way were informally known as stackware. This name was based on the idea of a stack of “papers” that make up the application.
HyperCard’s last major update came in 1998 and it was withdrawn from sale in 2004. The software does not automatically run on Mac systems later than OS 9. However, it can be used on newer machines via emulation mode.
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