On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and thousands of HyperCard ^aEURoestacks^aEUR were created using the software.
Additionally, commercial products with HyperCard at their heart came to great prominence, including the original Myst program.
Flourishing for the next roughly ten years, HyperCard slowly fell by the wayside to the growing World Wide Web, and was officially discontinued as a product by Apple in 2004. It left behind a massive but quickly disappearing legacy of creative works that became harder and harder to experience.
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hypercard, we’re bringing it back.
HyperCard is a lot of fun to play around with – I have an iBook G3 with OS9 and HyperCard installed, to play with – and this makes it far more accessible. Good work!
Well – Paul Heckels “Zoomracks” on Atari ST was first (1985).
But quite limited and text-based.
Nevertheless Heckels sued Apple and won the lawsuit.
One of the first software patents:
US Patent #4486857
“Display system for the suppression and regeneration of characters in a series of fields in a stored record”
Stupid as all software patents are…
Say what now?
Wrong article?