#hypercard — Public Fediverse posts

this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -
way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.

they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.

he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcgM

#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven

this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -
way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.

they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.

he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcgM

#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven

this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -
way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.

they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.

he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcgM

#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven

this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -
way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.

they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.

he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcgM

#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven

this is not well known, so i thought i'd share this -
way back in 2020, ars released a short interview with rand miller about myst and the challenges of the cd-rom format. it's mildly interesting, but obviously cut from a much larger tapestry.

they eventually released the full, 2h interview with rand, but very few people saw it. in the extended version, he talks about the very early days of working with HyperCard, from the Manhole to Cosmic Osmo to Spelunx. he goes into obscene amounts of detail with the constraints of working with HC and 80s/90s macs, writing custom XCMD and XFCNs, building in 3d with StrataVision, and using Debabelizer to build palettes.

he does an amazing job of explaining what the constraints were for computing in that era. for anyone curious about what it was like making games in the 80s/90s, i can think of few other interviews that express the realities and joys of working in confined space so well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qxg0ykOcgM

#retrocomputing #macintosh #vintageApple #hypercard #myst #riven

as far as i know, i found a software preservation zebra this week: this bit of extremely obscure archival work blends together HyperCard, Sierra On-Line and edutainment.

back in the early 90s, a company named EarthQuest started publishing educational reference titles for kids using HyperCard. the early titles were nice hypercard stacks probably drawn in macpaint. this one doesn't depart much from that format, except with nicer art and more creative page layouts

now, here's where things get weird. when saw it on ebay, only one pic buried at the bottom captured my attention: a weird stamped label on the bottom of the box that read Property OF SIERRA with the Half Dome logo. i bought it out of curiosity, and it arrived today.

back in the 90s, the larger game companies routinely maintained their own on-site libraries of competitors' games. Origin Systems in Austin had one. EA Burnaby, when it was known as Distinctive Software, had one. These were kept so marketing folks and developers could get an idea of what other studios were doing.

thing is, i've never seen mention of a library at Sierra On-Line in Oakhurst. the On-Line part of the logo is critical: Time Treks was published in 1992, and this is the year before Sierra moved its corporate offices from Oakhurst, California to Bellevue, Washington.

i have no doubt that there are other games from the Sierra On-Line corporate library somewhere out there, but i've never come across one even once in 30+ years. feel free to share this post with your fellow Sierra collectors :) it would be great if we could figure out where/when the Sierra library existed.

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/time-treks

#hypercard #macintosh #vintageApple #sierraOnline #adventureGames #retrogaming

MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh

https://github.com/SeanFDZ/macmind

#HackerNews #MacMind #HyperCard #Transformer #Neural #Network #Macintosh #1989 #AI

Computing: Home Era

Christmas 1994. Grandma Ward’s house. A huge box with a Sears computer bundle inside showed up next to the tree early Christmas Morning. I knew it hadn’t come in the car with us so it must be for my cousins? But no, this Performa 6115CD and StyleWriter II (and Global Village 14.4 modem!) was ours, and a Core Memory was unlocked.

This is probably my densest and longest era, because I had so much much free time as a tween/teen. It is also in some ways my least documented. I still have archives of many of my files, transferred over the years from Mac to Mac. I could spend a very long time curating a few of those! Maybe a retirement project. 😂 Sadly there are basically no photos of me, well, computing. Film was still a precious commodity!

Having Macs both at home and at school (and for my dad, at work) really changed things. We now had compatible files, 3.5″ 💾, and more. For 6th grade Spanish we had to draw our “dream house” and label all the rooms; I of course used a ClarisWorks Drawing document to create blueprints for several basement levels with secret passages, a movie theater, and a submarine pen.

MacAddict

We started to get online, first with eWorld (bundled with the computer), then AOL, then a full dial-up ISP called ISD (whose three-letter domain now seems to be in escrow). I also tried out some BBSes using the ClarisWorks Communication tool, but never really got into that scene. The Internet, and more specifically the Web, arrived for me a little bit later.

Pretty soon after getting this machine I used my allowance to subscribe to MacAddict Magazine, which really helped forge me into an Apple fan. Those included discs came with a ton of cool demos, some of which drove me to buy some software, or at least wish for it. I also loved paging through the old MacWarehouse catalog. I bought basic 3D home modeling software to make fun floor plans (I was always interested in architecture) which I also used for some school projects.

MacAddict was where I found out about OpenDoc and tried using CyberDog as my web browser briefly. All those embeds may have been a dead end but it feels like they’ve kinda be realized by modern web technologies. I was really following along with all of Apple’s weird ’90s experiments back then.

Gaming

Much of my game playing in this era was built around pseudo-educational games like Civilization II and Dr. Brain and of course the Many Maxis games, but most especially SimFarm, SimTower, and of course, SimCity 2000. I still have many of my original save files and they run fine under emulation. At some point we upgraded from 8 MB to 24 MB of RAM. I remember trying to arrange direct dial games of Command & Conquer with friends, as well as a lot of Myst, among others. (Continuing a trend, after playing Riven, I was briefly really into D’ni.)

I especially got into the shareware offerings, mostly Atari clones, from Ambrosia Software. I didn’t just play these games; I also was modifying and making my own plugins for the Escape Velocity games using ResEdit (sadly most of my work was lost to a resourceforkpocalypse migrating files at some point). Definitely some Star Trek/Star Wars visual inspiration. I don’t remember what 3D tool I used, but it wasn’t Bryce 3D. (The incantation to get these files into portable form was sips --format jpeg ship.pict --out ship.jpg).

Of course this was also a time where it seemed like niche shareware was about the only thing you could play on the Mac, or you’d be waiting for some MacPlay port for years, with a few exceptions. A Windows-using classmate would jokingly ask me when Reader Rabbit 6 was coming out. In some ways it was a tough time to become a MacAddict, as Jason and Myke noted on a recent Upgrade… at least we had Marathon?

This was when I got a Zip drive as a Christmas gift from my Mac-loving uncle Mike (I remember seeing his early PowerBook and being amazed). If you’ve followed me for a while you’ve probably seen my photographed excitement? This drive enabled even faster data exchange with school (which, with faster than dialup speeds I often used to FTP download new software) and bringing larger multimedia documents back and forth. (It may have also been used to share larger applications with friends).

The Web

Sometime around 1996 I picked UltraNurd as both my Yahoo! Games profile and my AIM username. (I don’t recall for sure which one came first.) I’m sure I was kinda unsafe posting a/s/l in too many places. The name has obviously stuck, especially once I committed to it for my personal domain. It’s not entirely accurate but it still makes for an interesting conversation when I have to give someone my email. While I know I used Gopher a few times at school my first regular web use would have been Netscape Navigator. (Or maybe even Communicator?)

I remember using Fetch (wild this is still actively developed on macOS) on faster school connection to FTP some SITs and SEAs that I then brought home on a Zip disk. One of those shareware servers was the first place I encountered fanfic without realizing what it was: a short story about Barney being a harbinger of the apocalypse responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs, among other past events.

I don’t remember the exact grade, 8th maybe?, where Ms. Passoneau, the computer teacher, offered an after school mini class on HyperCard and HTML. I think we also learned some AppleScript? I made some silly games and animated presentations and learned the basics of making a web page, skills I still use today. I also remember an I think HyperCard-based game where you had to bloodily massacre Barney. The ’90s were a strange time when it came to PBS related content. We also had access to a Sony Mavica which was my first exposure to digital photography. Later in high school I got involved doing layout for the yearbook, although desktop publishing didn’t grab me the same as some other kids.

For a 10th grade science class project I set up a GeoCities site, which also had some other random nerd humor stuff. (I don’t recall my neighborhood but the archive does still exist on this domain, unlinked.) I got a huge purple hardcover book on HTML (pretty sure it was this one) and was even paid to build a website for my math teacher as well as the Minnesota Resource Recovery Association. Technically my first paid programming gig! (I made way more from babysitting.)

Upgrades

We bought my Grandma a used Performa 5300-series and set it up for her. I distinctly remember walking her through the entire Desktop Metaphor to explain where her files were. She had run a business for years, and used a DOS-based point-of-sale and inventory system, but had never used a computer personally. I grabbed a copy of PhotoShop 3 that came already installed on it before wiping it; I used that for several school projects. I think it also came with a copy of the Oregon Trail II CD-ROM which had little videos of historical characters and a very different vibe from the classic game.

By 1999 Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and the iMac had completely changed the design trends of electronics, bringing them back from the brink. I was wanting to do heavier multimedia work, and my sister and I were more frequently conflicting on needing a computer for homework, so we each chipped in from our savings for a share of a B&W G3.

I did all sorts of projects on this machine: DV editing in iMovie via FireWire, animated sequences in Bryce 3D, many school papers, and 5,772 SETI@Home compute-hours (as part of Team MacAddict!). I remember finding some QuickTime VR panoramas of the Arecibo radio telescope to use in a class presentation which super impressed everyone; I guess that kind of tech was still ahead of its time. Sadly I can’t find these archived anywhere. I should really fire up an emulator with ClarisWorks and other old applications and try to extract a few of my old projects. Game-wise, I even sometimes managed to convince my parents to let me lug the whole thing to friends houses for LAN parties of Quake III Arena or Unreal Tournament. I would sometimes use GameRanger to trick some games into operating their LAN mode over dialup, including Masters of Orion II.

There was, of course, no shortage of Star Trek… including the CD-ROM release of 25th Anniversary (complete with actual actor dialogue!) and its sequel, Judgement Rites. I had the Omnipedia with its voice search which seemed like a Trek future that is still struggling to be realized with today’s models. On the G3 I also had the Quake III powered Elite Force and its Expansion Pack. You wouldn’t think a first-person shooter would fit Star Trek but somehow they made it work and gave it a pretty interesting story!

I think by this time performance wise I had switched to surfing using Internet Explorer 5. I was using Sherlock to search Lycos, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, and more all simultaneously. Sure it was hard to figure out who had indexed a site, but there was definitely a lot less garbage to sift through.

Some time around this here I also got on Napster to very slowly get more music even over dialup. I was using SoundJam MP with this round window Atlantis theme I found. I and friends were burning CDs for sharing and car use. My afore-mentioned Zip drive or the LAN parties were another opportunity to trade MP3s for things not covered in my expanding CD collection, especially with friends who had higher bandwidth collections. This was the main way I got trance and other electronica tracks like those from trance[]control that you wouldn’t hear on the radio and generally couldn’t find on CD, at least not at our store options.

I think in many ways the B&W G3 is my favorite Mac I’ve ever owned, never mind that many others were more powerful or flexible. An extremely elegant tower with the main board mounted on the door for easy access. It seemed like I could do anything with it. I even liked the oft-maligned hockey puck mouse that came with it, and was common on the iMacs that had started showing up at school. Not to mention it had an excellent color!

Summer Jobs

In high school I had my first job in tech: a summer internship at the Minnesota Muscle Lab, where I would use Unix for the first time (with a cheat sheet!) in their Silicon Graphics lab (I’m pretty sure these were Octanes) simulating some actin protein structures. This also gave me a taste of academia.

After graduation I worked at the now-defunct Ciprico building a web interface for one of their RAID products, extending a May Program internship. It was also my first bicycle commute, zipping along the shoulder of Highway 55 to get to the next light from our neighborhood and its office park. This involved Windows 2000 machines, and working with an older C backend developer who called the web browser “nutscrape”. The team also played Counter-Strike on the network almost every day at lunch. One of the other developers was an expert sniper who went by the username Soldat and called me “Little Nicky”. At some point I used a WAD editor to make a custom level for everyone to play. I remember the ladder code being especially tricky.

Middle school and high school were arguably my peak Mac time; I had the free time to experiment, the Web was booming, computers were changing rapidly, and Apple started coming out of its Dark Ages. For the next era, college, I would need my own Mac…

whenever I think about perfect interfaces for kids, two games immediately come to mind: Myst, and Amanda Goodenough’s Inigo Gets Out - both were hypercard stacks

maybe it’s time i refocused my efforts on making Exigy (https://exigy.org) kid-friendly enough that, with a little parental handholding, a kiddo could make their own Goodenough-like adventure.

but what would that UI look like? 🤔

#indiedev #indiegamedev #exigy #hypercard #macintosh #ui #ux

Working on UI tweaks to my VOID adventure game. I’ve been adjusting some icons based on feedback and would love to hear your opinions on a few variations!

Take a peek:
https://ko-fi.com/post/Icon-Experiments-H2H71WEJAU

#MARCHintosh #HyperCard #retrocomputing #retrogaming #classicmac #macintosh #vintagemac

It's #MARCHintosh, so I decided to post an update on my interactive fiction #HyperCard project.

Because I always have multiple projects in development, progress has been slow but steady—including the user interface, text parser, and other foundational under-the-hood development. The proof-of-concept UI is attached!

Please help with this project by offering your feedback, suggestions, and support:
https://ko-fi.com/post/VOID-Progress-V7V81VMLWG

The original post announcing the project is here:
https://ko-fi.com/post/aetas-nova-VOID-E1E81N2GJL

#retrocomputing #retrogaming #classicmac #macintosh #vintagemac

@jonathanhogg

Check out Decker:

https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Decker
http://beyondloom.com/decker/

Try it online:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/tour.html

#HyperCard #JohnEarnest #Decker

Internet may I present my creation in #Wigglypaint - a #decker program

https://internet-janitor.itch.io/wigglypaint
#dsi #kidpix and #hypercard

Join me this Saturday at 9 am Eastern for Today's HyperCard Stack. We'll examine The #Scientific and #Graphical #Toolkit for #HyperCard.

https://youtube.com/live/1nF7h179-z4?feature=share

Absolutely about to lose it, but am somehow going to write this absent any swears.

None of the following can apparently be made to work using resources available today unless you want to go digging in the brains of the Terminal, using commands—by the way—that no longer work on Apple Silicon because all of the path references have changed:

* Built-in Mac OS File Sharing
* AppleTalk or AFP (including Netatalk)
* SMB
* Even FTP (including via Homebrew options, FileZilla Server, etc.)

I have tried them all. Both Perplexity and ChatGPT have insisted that all of the above can be made to work, then finally admit after lengthy sessions they do not and that they were relying on old information. When confronted with the fact that I provided them with all of the specific details they needed to give accurate responses in my very first query, the “AI” has the gall to apologize but makes it clear that it has not learned anything from the interaction.

For more than three decades, Apple's image has been grounded in “it just works." Well, the simplest thing possible in computer networking—being able to access and edit the same plain text file from two different machines—does not work, and there is no way for an average technophile to make it work.

It's absolutely preposterous, disgusting, and inexcusable.

#retrocomputing #macintosh #classicmac #hypercard

Anyone have a lead on a straightforward resource on networking a Tahoe Mac with my old OS 9.2 PM G4?

I’ve tried setting up both an FTP server and Netatalk on the modern Mac using directions provided by AI and both failed miserably.

There must be a quality video or web page with detailed, failproof step-by-step instructions, but I can’t find one.

#retrocomputing #hypercard #macintosh #classicmac

🪨 HyperCard on the Macintosh 🛠️

The "software erector set" that launched careers and an entire industry, and came tantalizingly close to delivering us the world wide web 6 years early. Our last post of 2025 takes a deep look at this important title. I also muse a bit on the approach HyperCard takes in extending the definition of what it means to develop software. Happy holidays!
(Back January 2)

https://stonetools.ghost.io/hypercard-mac/
#RetroComputing #hypercard #classicmac #mac #atkinson #nocode

jobs demoing a codeless UI using NeXT/OpenStep's Interface Builder at macworld expo in 1997

making games in Adventure Game Studio taught me how fast games can be built when designers spend their time working on scenes and gameplay instead of coding scrollbar and button behaviour

i admire and get inspiration from hypercard for the same reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl0CbKYUFTY

i'm trying to implement something similar for my little game construction kit, called Exigy. if you've got UI suggestions on how to do this well, i'm all ears!
https://exigy.org

#exigy #shareware #indiegamedev #macintosh #hypercard

If you’re at the intersection (maybe not total) of interactive fiction, game exploration, HyperCard/HyperTalk, and graph theory, and have some fondness for Myst, this is clearly the article series for you.

https://glthr.com/myst-graph-1

/via @zarfeblong

#Myst #graph #HyperCard #HyperTalk #GameAnalysis #InteractiveFiction

EDIT: It has found a home.
#Free to a good home: An original Apple user manual for HyperCard. Is it spiral bound. :apple_inc: 📖
#Macintosh #RetroComputing #VintageComputers #HyperCard #UserManual

former and current apple HyperCard, macromedia Flash/Director, and microsoft Visual Basic users: what features of these IDEs made them indispensable to you as a creative person?

i've been building a shareware development kit/IDE (https://exigy.org) that tries to be as user-friendly as possible, and i'd like to borrow the best and learn the most from other great toolkits.

#hypercard #exigy

when i was a kid, you could build a simple game or application by dragging and dropping a few UI controls, and gluing them together with a few dozen lines of BASIC or Pascal or HyperTalk. it might take 15 minutes, at most, to get your little character walking around on the screen. this is how we ended up with a lot of hilariously good and cheap shareware you could share on BBSes in the 90s.

for the past year i've been quietly working on building a software thingie that doesn't exist anymore. i've been building a software toolkit that's kinda like Visual Basic and HyperCard and Borland Delphi, designed for making tile-based 2d games.

i've been using it to build my own little goofy games, and improving on the drag'n'drop IDE as i figuring things out. it's not done yet, and has a long ways to go before it's ready for other people to start making their own little applications and games. think PICO-8 or ZZT if they had grown up on a steady diet of Windows 3.1 and GeoWorks Ensemble instead.

i'm really, really bad about polishing turds to infinity and never releasing them. to break that habit, i've built a mini-website for the IDE/Shareware Creation Kit. it's called Exigy, named like a bad 80s metal hair band or richard garriott game.

https://exigy.org

i'll be posting weekly blog/devlog updates there, so i don't irritate anyone with them on this account. there is an rss feed button at the top right if you hate my demonic php and css.

#shareware #ultima #php #blog #smolweb #zzt #indiedev #hypercard #vintageApple #exigy

Тимоти Джон Бернерс-Ли – человек, который почти создал интернет

Сегодня исполняется 69 лет со дня рождения человека, без которого интернет в виде привычной нам «всемирной паутины» мог бы и не родиться. Сегодня мы будем говорить про настоящего «живого классика» информационных технологий, про Тима Бернерса-Ли. Этот человек – настоящий фанат научного прогресса. Отдать то, что мы сейчас называем «интернетом», людям бесплатно — настоящий подвиг, ему не просто так был официально присвоен титул «Сэр». Как истинный рыцарь, он поднимал вопросы ответственности в сети. Вперёд, в историю «сети» и «паука», который её плёл.

https://habr.com/ru/companies/timeweb/articles/820317/

#timeweb_статьи #Тимоти_Джон_БернерсЛи #Интернет #INQUIRE #ЦЕРН #LEP #NeXT #HTML #FTP #Usenet #IRC #NeXTStep #WWW #HyperCard #SLAC #unix