Hyper Card And Hyper Talk
| Field | Computers |
| Went Obsolete | Mid-90s |
| Made Obsolete By | Officially abandoned by Apple in 2000 |
| Knowledge Assumed | Basic Macintosh usage |
| When useful | Last serious commercial use in Myst 1.0, released in 1993 |
Hypercard was an innovative application using the metaphor of stacks of cards to build basic animations and multimedia presentations. Released in 1987 for Macintosh System 6, its ease of use and simple, natural-language scripting language caused it to replace Basic as many Macintosh users' first taste of programming.
Scripts written in HyperTalk? could be attached to cards, stacks, buttons or text fields to produce interactivity. HyperTalk? was highly forgiving, allowing the user to script in very natural grammar if they desired. Many users' first HyperTalk? script was a simple method of playing an animation drawn on successive cards; if the stack contained 25 cards, the script could be written as follows:
Repeat 25 Wait 1 Go to next card End repeat
HyperCard? made an awkward transition to System 7 and VGA monitors, relying on plugins for color graphics through version 2.2. HyperCard?'s high-water mark came in 1993 when it was used as the “shell” for the original release of Myst, using a customized version of Simplex's HyperTint? plugin for color graphics. An attempt to rebuild HyperCard? as an interactive QuickTime? authoring environment languished for most of the 90s, and was officially axed in 2000. Aspects of HyperTalk? live on in the modern AppleScript? language.
