Review: HyperCard 1.0 (1988)

Review: HyperCard 1.0 (1988)

Author: Derek July 1, 2023 Duration: 18:26

Sometimes it’s difficult to envision what a new category of products will be used for as Apple’s marketing department discovered. Jeff Walden takes an extremely database-centric view of HyperCard in Macworld, April 1988, so I hope he found Activision’s Reports! utility.

ADDmotion, a VideoWorks/Director/Flash-like animation extension for HyperCard, is a ton of fun to play with.

Bill Atkinson mentions developing new sorting and compression algorithms (1h24m57s) to “achieve [performance he deems acceptable] on the Macintosh”. I was unable to dig up the patents he mentioned. He also spoke to CHM about the necessity of saving changes on-the-fly when working with large HyperCard stacks on small machines.

Bill Atkinson talks about inspiration, the birth of HyperCard and the fight over MacBASIC. (Why bother with guests if you’re just going to talk overtop of them constantly?)

The reasons for HyperCard’s color extensions poor speed explained by M. Uli Kusterer.

Pro tip: using the word “capabilities” eight times in a 1,500 word article is fatiguing.


Derek hosts Mac Folklore Radio, a podcast that serves as a warm, nostalgic conversation about the machines that defined personal computing for a generation. This isn't a dry technical history, but rather a collection of stories, memories, and shared experiences centered on the Macintosh ecosystem from its early beige-box days through the colorful iMac era and beyond. Each episode feels like digging through a box of old software manuals and rediscovering the community, the quirks, and the sheer sense of possibility those computers inspired. You'll hear tales of first setups, beloved and baffling peripherals, the games that consumed hours, and the software that felt like magic. It's crafted specifically for those who lived through it-the users, tinkerers, and enthusiasts who remember the hum of a CRT and the distinct scent of a warm motherboard. Tune in for a dose of genuine, fond reminiscence that functions as comfort food for the Apple-centric soul, preserving the personal side of tech history one story at a time. This podcast is a love letter to the culture built around these machines, celebrating the folklore that official manuals never recorded.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 50

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