marrvelous

My favorite HyperCard story is mostly well known: Myst was written entirely in it.

HyperCard had some primitive reflection capabilities, where you could open a different HyperCard file and read its scripts.

I was pretty blown away when I used this truck to read in clear text the entire source code for Myst. Teenage me was pretty proud of myself.

Reading this made me miss BeOS. Blazingly fast UI. Mandatory to use separate threads for app rendering and processing user input to stay responsive under load. File system was implemented as queryable database with arbitrary metadata, so scanning for media was almost instant. Built in components for text rendering, media playback, etc, all had extremely performant implementation.

I remember easily playing half a dozen video files simultaneously, butter smooth, with the system still being instantly responsive as if it was doing nothing. On a 200mhz 603e. Those were the good old days.

Agreed. The conclusion of the article feels pretty unsupported, especially considering that AppleTalk still survives to this day.

Which lead to a pretty magical moment for me as a kid. Turns out it’s trivial to write a HyperCard program that opens another HyperCard stack and extract its source code.

Imagine the look on our faces when my best friend and I tried this... and ended up getting the full source code to Myst in plain text. They didn’t even try to obscure it.

It really DeMystified (heheh) the act of professional development. They had used the exact same tools that I was proficient in to build something as meaningful and impactful as Myst, which literally changed the gaming world.

With the walled garden, Apple can set enforceable timelines for the software ecosystem to adopt to architectural changes.

Remember the transition to arm64? Apple forced everything on the App Store to ship universal binaries.

Without the App Store walled garden, software isn’t required to keep up to date with architectural changes. Instead, keeping current is only a requirement to being featured on the App Store (which would just be a single way to install software, not the only method).