Re:Think Retro: How HyperCard inspired a generation of futur...
by analog31 on Friday January 16, 2015 @08:37AM
(#8898763)
HyperCard was a revelation for me. I was a pretty accomplished programmer (so I thought, famous last words) on MS-DOS and stuff of that ilk. Then I went to work at a company that used the Apple Mac.
Some of the engineers had installed a programming language or two, and bought all of the volumes of Inside Macintosh and the typical pattern was to get just past Hello World and give up. The system was so complex and the documentation was so bad that nobody could wrap their head around it.
I'm sure Windows was just as bad, but Windows came with a stodgy but lightweight API called MS-DOS. The majority of small throw-away engineering apps (like cross assemblers) continued to be written for DOS for almost a decade, and only gradually migrated to Windows.
HyperCard obviously broke down the complexity wall of programming a windowed computer environment. I loved HyperCard -- even wrote a cross assembler in it, and a crude but workable printed circuit design program in SuperCard.
Perhaps an additional tribute to HyperCard is that folks really didn't get into Windows programming until something similar came along for Windows -- Visual Basic. The other tool that opened up programming for people was of course Excel.
Some of the engineers had installed a programming language or two, and bought all of the volumes of Inside Macintosh and the typical pattern was to get just past Hello World and give up. The system was so complex and the documentation was so bad that nobody could wrap their head around it.
I'm sure Windows was just as bad, but Windows came with a stodgy but lightweight API called MS-DOS. The majority of small throw-away engineering apps (like cross assemblers) continued to be written for DOS for almost a decade, and only gradually migrated to Windows.
HyperCard obviously broke down the complexity wall of programming a windowed computer environment. I loved HyperCard -- even wrote a cross assembler in it, and a crude but workable printed circuit design program in SuperCard.
Perhaps an additional tribute to HyperCard is that folks really didn't get into Windows programming until something similar came along for Windows -- Visual Basic. The other tool that opened up programming for people was of course Excel.