Just came upon my sealed copy of #hypercard. Used to be so much fun little games and software in this back in the day. Not sure what version this is? @hypercard
Throwback to the annular solar eclipse of May 10, 1994, which I videotaped from the roof of the Physics, Engineering, & Geoscience building at Mount Allison University and reproduced on the booklet and disc I produced for Dr Robert Hawkes in 1995. #eclipse
The Fundamental Astronomy disc ran a series of #HyperCard stacks & had video interviews w David Levy (at the height of his SL-9 fame), Alan Hildebrand (of Chicxulub fame), and the late David Lane (of the Burke-Gaffney Observatory). #MacOS
Most of you may already know that #HyperCard was a big influence on Tim Berners-Lee when he created the WWW. We are told that HyperCard missed its chance since it wasn't networked. Without support for connecting up a global network of HyperCard Stacks, it had no chance against the WWW.
Well that was then and this is now. In 2024 we DO have a global AppleTalk network to publish HyperCard Stacks on - #GlobalTalk! The dream is finally a reality!
I just had a terrible #MARCHintosh thought… I could hook the ADB I/O up to a machine that's linked in to #GlobalTalk, and y'all could use #HyperCard to make lights blink and motors turn and whatnot. Which I'd probably have to set up to livestream over Twitch or something, otherwise you'd just be pressing buttons and not knowing if anything was happening 💁
every 5 seconds, a hypercard stack scans dialup cafe's "user_images" folder and emits every image in that folder to a static web page.
that web page is served on the same LC475 (running WebSTAR httpd) to the entire world at https://globaltalk.network
want to add something to the web page? drag and drop a .jpg, .gif, or .png into "user_images" on the dialup cafe's AppleTalk share. the only rules are: filenames can't contain spaces or the usual !$%&'" characters, and must be in a browser-compatible format.
yes. i know. this is truly a bad idea. the world is full of those.
i can't believe that i had to search for over an hour to find out that XCMDs have to be installed via..... ResEdit (!?) into a stack just to call their functions?
The speed of development of this network is astounding. A few days ago we were discussing if HyperCard chat ever existed -- here we are chatting with one across continents!
I was going to play some #SimAnt or #SimCity this weekend to celebrate #MARCHintosh, but now I'm thinking I may just do an evening #HyperCard dev stream to show off the #zine I've been working on (slowly).
Downpour is extremely exciting because it carries a bit of the #hypercard spirit. Something less intimidating, accessible on mobile, easy to share, and friendly.
Around 2000 a friend and I were both designing full color print ads for a magazine and I remember him coming in on Mondays with new fonts from Emigre to test out. Clients were always surprised by what we did with them.
Here's a poster from Emigre from years ago, which is beautiful.
for the past few years i've been working to preserve as much of the multimedia era as i can.
brian thomas's If Monks Had Macs is a weird collection of hypercard modules that brian made, and collected them together into a fascinating piece of multimedia. equal parts interactive book, point and click text adventure, journaling software, art analysis, and social commentary - i wouldn't even know how to review it!
there were two editions of the program. the first was all made in Hypercard by brian in black and white in 1988. this one has a special place in my heart because all of the artwork was done in macpaint. you can play it in-browser here: https://archive.org/details/ifmonkshadmacs_1988
the second was remade by brian and his friends in 1995, using Voyager Expanded Books' Toolkit - which was basically a massive re-implementation of hypercard. it is in full colour this time, with some rendered artwork in place of the old macpaint art. disc image here: https://archive.org/details/IfMonksHadMacs
pushing adventure game studio into territory it was never made for has always been a joy
spent half of the day manually creating 2304 buttons on a GUI, for a 1-bit game i'm working on called Shima no Shima
why? now players can create their own avatar's portraits and modify in-game art as they play the game. imagine a game that plays more like a hypercard stack: you have to modify the game itself in order to progress through the story.
it was an idea that came from a game called Else Heart.Break() which went criminally unnoticed in its time.
while doing some hypercard research, i stumbled upon jim stephenson's classic Hypercard Heaven site, which used to be found at members.aol.com/HCHeaven/ back in the 90s and early 2000s. thankfully WBM kept a copy mostly intact.
it is a treasure trove of old hypercard articles and news. i've archived a copy here. hopefully jim won't mind:
i don't think i've ever seen this documented anywhere, so here goes:
Myst was built with Apple Hypercard, using a ton of third-party extensions to pull off an extremely atmospheric first person experience.
what is less known is that because Myst is a hypercard stack, it is possible to load the game in black & white mode despite color being a stated system requirement. the result are scenes that have been dithered and posterized from 8-bit colour, down to 1-bit. they look almost like a silhouetted photograph of a georges seurat painting, eery and beautiful in their own way.