Review: HyperCard 1.0 (1988)

Mac Folklore Radio

Sometimes it’s difficult to envision what a new category of products will be used for as Apple’s marketing department discovered. Jeff Walden takes an extremely database-centric view of HyperCard in Macworld, April 1988, so I hope he found Activision’s Reports! utility.

ADDmotion, a VideoWorks/Director/Flash-like animation extension for HyperCard, is a ton of fun to play with.

Bill Atkinson mentions developing new sorting and compression algorithms (1h24m57s) to “achieve [performance he deems acceptable] on the Macintosh”. I was unable to dig up the patents he mentioned. He also spoke to CHM about the necessity of saving changes on-the-fly when working with large HyperCard stacks on small machines.

Bill Atkinson talks about inspiration, the birth of HyperCard and the fight over MacBASIC. (Why bother with guests if you’re just going to talk overtop of them constantly?)

The reasons for HyperCard’s color extensions poor speed explained by M. Uli Kusterer.

Pro tip: using the word “capabilities” eight times in a 1,500 word article is fatiguing.