I admit a certain nostalgia when it comes to Hypercard. I also still believe it offers a construction tool that could benefit many and especially many in education. I have noticed several posts lately lamenting the demise of Hypercard (BBC, ArsTechnica). I guess it is the 30th anniversary of HyperCard. I am really getting old.
The BBS post focuses on HyperCard as a construction tool requiring no programming skill. This is true, but also misleading. HyperCard allowed users to apply a scripting language (HyperTalk) to create sophisticated applications. The BBS post makes an effort to identify current construction tools which require similar to HyperCard and require no programming. Scratch would probably the online of these tools familiar to tech using educators.
The ArsTechnica article offers a more complete history of HyperCard and explains how the Apple product predicting the online functionality we now call the web.
It is difficult to explain exactly what Hypercard was and appreciating this past is necessary to accept my argument that an updated tool would offer broader educational applications than many of the coding and content creation tools now used in educational settings. Hypercard was a multimedia construction/presentation tool some might compare to PowerPoint merged with a database, but it was also an object-oriented programming environment capable of implementing sophisticated coding tasks. The Arstechnica subheading summarizes it this way – “Before the web did anything, Hypercard did everything.”
WordPress (the blogging, content sharing construction tool) is gradually rolling out the Gutenberg block tool for building web content. Others are expanding the blocks that are available (e.g., Atomic Blocks) and some of the blocks add customizable functions that might be moving in the direction of a HyperCard like approach. I would watch this effort rather than the examples mentioned by the BBC as a possible future direction for a versatile content construction environment.
I have a Google alert set to notify me when a reference to Hypercard surfaces. It is fascinating just how frequently this happens.
It’s time to go out and recapture that HyperCard feeling. [the title is the last line of the BBC article].