back to article Mac fans' eyes mist over: Someone's re-created HyperCard

Apple fans with a bent for nostalgia have some to wallow in after a HyperCard clone debuted on Monday. The brainchild of one Ben Fisher, ViperCard made itself known with this Tweet: We are live!https://t.co/wcpYt03O90 — ViperCard (@ViperCardDotNet) March 25, 2018 The ViperCard Website will bring pangs to anybody who …

  1. Oh Homer

    That reminds me...

    Never had a Mac, but there was something similar on the Amiga called CanDo.

    It was a bit of a novelty that quickly faded. AMOS and Blitz Basic were far more popular, and appealed more to the sort of people who might otherwise have used CanDo.

    Personally I jumped straight into SAS/C. Never really saw any point in messing around with the kiddie stuff. Oh, and ARexx. All Hail ARexx!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: That reminds me...

      Thank you, I was wracking my brain to recall the Amiga equivalent. It wasn't something I was interested in as I started with Lattice C, transitioned to Aztec C. Any scripting that would involve anything in the RKM's (ROM Kernel Manuals for the unwashed) I'd do in Khalid alDoseri's Scriptit language. Spent some sleepless nights trying to figure more things for it to do. I did have ARexx, just never saw the need.

      Fond memories.

      1. Oh Homer

        Re: That reminds me...

        Can't find much historical data on CanDo (so much for the immortality of the Interwebs), but for some reason every time I think of it an image of a bunny comes to mind. I think it may have been the program's logo or something.

        Even back then, when I was still a kid, I remember viewing these point'n'drool programming tools with disdain. There was another one called Game Constructor Kit, or something, that I found equally unappealing, mainly because I suspected the results would be bloated and slow.

        I vaguely recall seeing a spate of demos (as in the Demo Scene) all created with the same point'n'drool demo maker. Not sure what the back end was, but I suspect it was something very high level and interpreted, with a fake "compiler" that just made binary data files containing scripts. The thing that struck me most about the resultant demos is that they were all basically the same. That's stuck with me ever since. The more abstracted the development environment, the less control you have over the end results, and thus every project will basically turn out to be the same program.

        This is why I've always hated IDEs, especially anything with the word "Visual" in the title.

        Even the argument that they make great learning tools is flawed. Personally I think it's better to start as you mean to go on. Learn the hard stuff, get over it, and get good. Never mind pissing around with toys first.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: That reminds me...

          "Even the argument that they make great learning tools is flawed. Personally I think it's better to start as you mean to go on. Learn the hard stuff, get over it, and get good. Never mind pissing around with toys first."

          What you may call a toy others would call training wheels. I believe someone once said you have to learn to stand before you can learn to fly.

          1. shrdlu

            Re: That reminds me...

            One thing that's frustrating about products designed by programmers is their assumption that in their hearts users really want to become programmers. "Point and drool" products are first-class applications in their own right. Thinking of them as just an on-ramp to C++ isn't helpful. We don't just need yet another IDE for BASIC, Python or any other programming language. We need a better point and drool product designed from the ground up as such.

        2. Sandtitz Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: That reminds me...

          "There was another one called Game Constructor Kit, or something, that I found equally unappealing"

          Well, there was the Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit for C64 and others. I think I made a game or two (for my own enjoyment) until I was quickly bored because you could only define the sprites and a few bits and bobs here and there, so every game turned out to be rather similar. Performance wasn't a problem, but you could never match games like Xenon, Uridium, Parallax etc.

          I had much more fun with the Boulder Dash Construction Kit!

          1. TeraTelnet

            Re: That reminds me...

            Or possibly the mighty 3D Construction Kit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Construction_Kit

          2. Oh Homer

            Re: "Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit"

            Thank you, yes, that's the one.

            Did a quick search and turned up something new (2016) called Redpill. The site itself is a great find, but it's fascinating to dive back into the world of point'n'click programming. Apparently there were a tonne of such programs, mostly for adventure games or MUDs, but also many covering other genres.

            3D Construction Kit is especially fascinating. I'd forgotten it was far more than just a 3D renderer, unlike say Vista Pro or Scenery Animator (also fascinating).

          3. Trilkhai

            Re: That reminds me...

            I had much more fun with the Boulder Dash Construction Kit!

            I would've loved to have that as a kid; Boulder Dash & Super Boulder Dash were easily my favorite action/arcade computer games. The one I had was Pinball Construction Kit, which was initially fun to experiment with (especially the ability to change basic physics) but couldn't hold my attention for too long as pinball simply didn't appeal to me.

    2. Timmy B

      Re: That reminds me...

      Wrote a whole education / tutorial system in CanDo2. Could have used something different but it meant I could hand over the maintenance to the person I wrote it for. Quite handy.

      1. Charles 9

        Re: That reminds me...

        I may be wrong, but I think a Windows analogue also showed up, called ToolBook.

        1. John Lilburne

          Re: That reminds me...

          "I may be wrong, but I think a Windows analogue also showed up, called ToolBook."

          Apparently they were all based on an AtariST program called Zoomracks.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoomracks

    3. big_D Silver badge

      Re: That reminds me...

      Yes, I remember CanDo as well. But I went with SAS/C, ARexx and Basic for the most part.

      Having done some HyperCard, I did dabble a little with a hooky version of CanDo, but I didn't have time to get into it properly, so just reformatted the disks and put some Share And Enjoy demos on them instead. :-D

    4. macjules

      Re: That reminds me...

      Myst was originally a series of Hypercard stacks.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Knew a post grad artist who did her end of course project in this

    I think that's about as far away from the conventional view of a developer as anything.

  3. big_D Silver badge

    Training booking system

    One of my first tasks on a Mac was to learn HyperCard and write a booking system for the training department... Fun times.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Great news

    Hypercard was brilliant. There were numerous studies done on how non-programmers were bale to develop really useful little stacks in very little time, but somehow that leap to what was called "end user computing" never quite materialised - development became more entrenched and specialised (except for that one block in Accounts who discovered, then "developed" everything in terrifying and broken Access - I am sure every el Reg reader knows one....)

    After Jobs canned Hypercard, there was an attempt at a Windows based alternative called Supercard, if I recall, and Oracle bought and badged it as OracleCard. But it didn't have the utility of Hypercard, as they thought of Hypercard not so much as a generalised if inefficient applications environment as a database frontend. Another problem was cost - several hundred quid for a not really great product. In the Free Software world, there was a half hearted attempt with Pythoncard, which again missed the boat, this time thinking that the development environment was the key.

    Hypercard's many inefficiencies, generalised nature and small but genuine barrier to entry was what gave it its power - its warts gave it its beauty. It even had a sort of pseudo object-oriented way of drag n drop working if you wanted to push definitions.

    As an aside, I have often wondered what a hypercard on RaspberryPi would have done for the education space, where they have done wonders with scratch and teaching python. The understandable English of Hypertalk, almost like pseudo-code. would be more inclusive than the overt codiness even of python, opening creativity to yet more, and surely creativity was one of the things that attracts about technology in the first place.

  5. iLurker

    Supercard was ported to OSX - years ago - and is alive and well.

    Vastly superior to HyperCard in every respect.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Vastly superior to HyperCard in every respect.

      Specially regarding the price -- $179 for the essentials?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    " It is stressful at a deep level, for nearly all of us, and especially the elderly."

    Not sure about that. Have spent the last two weeks battling with web code examples that don't do what they purport to do. My fifty years of IT support and development experience means that such problems are expected - and a work-round is usually devised after trying a number of promising dead-ends.

    Frustrating - yes. A waste of my time - yes. Stressful - not really compared to when my expectations were much more naive. Let me put it this way - it is a pleasant surprise when something in IT actually works in the fashion for which it was touted.

    Probably the equivalent of doing 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles - with most of the picture being sky. People consider that a relaxing hobby.

    1. Charles 9

      "Probably the equivalent of doing 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles - with most of the picture being sky. People consider that a relaxing hobby."

      How about one of those World's Hardest jigsaw puzzles that are double-sided and the pieces are all the same (mirrored) shape?

  7. W Donelson

    It was a work of genius

    This object-based language opened the world to thousands of non-programmers.

    A work of genius.

  8. Chemical Bob
    Coat

    And the automotive version will be called...

    Vindshield Vipercard!

    Mine's the one with the squeegee in the pocket.

  9. destructo

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