I'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing.
As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.
People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications.
And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.
This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
>>> And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.
This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.
By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.
HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.
Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.
The Fallout analogy is perfect. Limitation stimulates imagination. I think that’s part of why essentially limitless AI models produce things that are so devoid of it.
It took browsers and web dev until, IDK, maybe 2010? to match the interactivity and capability of Hypercard circa 1994.
The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.
It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.
> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.
And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.
I am not quite the right age for hypercard as well, but I did have my chances to interact with a variety of game making tools aimed at kids that were amazing for creating event-driven logic. Likewise in the professional world, tools aimed at business professionals (like MS Access), that kinda were abandoned - and there used to be a whole spectrum of stuff that connected WYSIWIG editors and simple languages to various levels of programming tools.
Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few years ago. These were user developed applications, done by people who may have been a bit technical, but who didn’t to know a full programming language.
If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?
I've seen people (non IT) do similar things (i.e. develop small applications) with Excel.
I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.
In the past, we used to refer to these as 4GL systems [1] - and as far as I'm concerned, this is really a wide open field for innovation - especially in the era of AI/LLMs.
Sure. Oracle APEX is popular. You never hear about it on HN because the target user base for low code stuff doesn't overlap with the HN set much, but it's huge.
It’s more that I haven’t really seen many examples of Access or FileMaker applications in the wild for a while. Most of these were CRUD apps that were able to be moved to the web. But that doesn’t mean that typical users are any more capable of navigating hosting setups for modern CRUD web apps.
The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was being added.
But I’m sure there are more examples in the wild than I would have seen. I was curious what the larger HN community has seen or has experience with.
I mean, for me, I’d probably put something in a SQLite database and build a simple web GUI on top of it. But I know that’s an option. What does a typical office worker do these days? Put everything in Excel? (That’s probably the answer)
Well thats the crux. While the display may seem simple (a grid, a few controls), a Web UI CRUD app, while routine today, is NOT simple.
While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with either, you can create table, get a navigable (and perhaps other features), and a CRUD detail screen in just a few minutes of drag and drop.
And it's right there, on your machine, no cognitive load about, well, anything, and ready to go. Another 10 minutes and you have a printable report spewing out on your laser printer.
It's quite a first step to go beyond the wizard based stuff into BASIC and such, but the fundamentals are there. And the fundamentals are useful out of the box.
You can set up a usable Access DB and MS Word Mail Merge in probably 1/2 hour of reading some tutorials.
Finally, out of the box, the screens look "ok". Your collection of fields conveniently fill the window nicely. You don't have a 21" x 12" white, barren canvas with Name, Address, C/S/Z and two buttons crammed up in the upper left corner. "Gee why is the font so small?" So now you don't have to fall down the rabbit hole to try and make your simple form even baseline "presentable".
It is curious that MS (afaik) does not have a way to drag and drop an Access application and have it "deploy" to the web, and (afaik), Access isn't part of Office 365 either.
Which is fair, if FileMaker existed in a vacuum. The inflation-adjusted cost of software and hardware has consistently trended downwards over the past 40 years.
As someone that pays for commercial software, only if you are talking about race to the bottom on mobile stores.
A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting.
In terms of software, commercial quality software is now often free and/or open source. Maybe the best application software is still expensive, but free software is better than anything that existed a two decades ago let alone four decades. The only people deploying Windows Server these days are doing so for legacy reasons, not by choice.
In terms of hardware, a Macintosh Plus vs a MacBook Neo. The latter is many orders of magnitude superior in any metric you could possibly imagine, and it's 1/10th the price in real dollars. Even if you insist on a "serious" laptop it's still 1/4th the price.
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Compaq Portable II (286) $3,500 $10,700
1996 Dell/Gateway Pentium 166 $2,500 $5,300
2006 Dell XPS (Core 2 Duo) $2,200 $3,650
2016 Dell XPS 15 $1,500 $2,100
2026 Dell XPS 14/16 $2,000 $2,000
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Macintosh Plus $2,599 $7,900
1996 Power Macintosh 7200 $2,000 $4,300
2006 20" iMac $1,699 $2,800
2016 13" MacBook Pro $1,699 $2,360
2026 14" MacBook Pro (M5) $1,999 $2,000
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Novell NetWare $3,000 $9,100
1996 Windows NT Server 4.0 $1,100 $2,400
2006 Windows Server 2003 $1,000 $1,660
2016 Windows Server 2016 $900 $1,250
2026 Linux $0 $0
Year Example Price Real 2026
---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
1986 Early pro NLE systems $50,000 $152,000
1996 Adobe Premiere 4.2 $800 $1,700
2006 Final Cut Pro $1,000 $1,660
2016 Final Cut Pro X $300 $420
2026 Da Vinci Resolve $0 $0
And all of these tables are actually unfair because the newer stuff is way, way, way, way better than any of the older stuff. If we were being fair, the old computers should be absolute top-of-the-line models and the 2016/2026 models should be a Raspberry Pi.
A Macintosh Plus was only affordable under university student discounts in Portugal, and hardly seen anywhere.
MacBook Neo is a nothing to talk about with its 8 GB and phone motherboard, I specifically mentioned "A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting."
Neo isn't such device, my current hardware has 32 GB.
Your examples miss the relation of salaries, life cost and related percentage to hardware prices, per country.
SQLite doesn’t have a built-in user interface. The value of something like FileMaker isn’t the underlying storage mechanism, it’s the WYSIWYG user interface building that lets you quickly build custom apps around it
I miss HyperCard and I love projects like this at a nostalgia level - but if you're going to have aspirations that this is useful today (2026) with a real project then its a complete waste of time.
I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.
A lot of these modern HyperCard reinterpretations get stuck on the black-and-white aesthetics of the original. That's cool, but it limits how broadly appealing they become. Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product.
A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.
Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.
> Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product
They never hacked color into HyperCard 2 since their plans for HyperCard 3 were too grand - it was going to be a part of QuickTime, so that HyperCard stacks would be multimedia applications delivered as QuickTime movies, including embedding on the web. This was when Apple was spiraling though and it got cut.
You said it well. The aesthetic is so much more about building your project within the project itself (like what Jupyter and Marimo did for Python, but more so because you also lay out GUI this way), having built-in components, designing around very simple "multimedia" integrations (push a button and a sound plays! With a single command in the event handler!) etc. than about any of the technical limitations.
To me, a properly modern "Hypercard" would be something like if Marimo and Pygame had a baby, and that baby was IDLE except it didn't suck.
And in the final releases of HyperCard, Apple even bundled a third-party color XCMD in order to pretend that HyperCard supported color. It was really limited though (insert PICT files from disk! change the color of buttons! use the paint tools in color? what are those?)
Never used HyperCard, but from descriptions and screenshots in the article reminds me a lot of Delphi/Pascal/Lazarus IDE’s. Appeal is understandable, because it is so cool to be snore to from a few lines of code to a clickable intractable executable, that is the sort of Feedback loop that I miss in python and go GUI builders that I’ve used previously, and why I keep c inning back to Lazarus.
Woah, this is something I've wanted for forever! Only, without the "quirky" aspects of its design. I can appreciate the charm, but it does obstruct utility, and this sort of tool -- a super-general digital whiteboard -- would be oh so useful. I never knew of its predecessor, "HyperCard," either, which looks to be essentially what I wish for, only modernized.
This reminds me of LiveCode[1] (aka Revolution and MetaCard) which I’ve used quite a bit about a decade ago. Was also inspired by HyperCard. Just checked their site again and it seems they’ve discontinued the open source version and have pivoted to an AI-assisted drag and drop UI builder.
I'm using LiveCode for a dozen personal applications (and for just the fun of coding; I'm a retired s/w engineer). It's no longer free, but I started with HyperCard and LiveCode is an excellent replacement, at least for me.
Thanks for letting me know, maybe I need to get back into it. I always enjoyed the speed with which I could prototype new ideas and even get them installed on a phone or tablet.
If you want the "agentic future" version of this (sorry), tldraw just relased "tldraw offline"[1] which in some ways has a lot of overlap with HyperCard as well.
It is actually definitely yes! You can script with JS. Steve Ruiz demonstrates having an LLM do that for you in his intro video to this "offline" version of tldraw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCyENfxgyYA
It seems application state is mainly maintained in the widgets. Reminds me of Delphi. Is there a similar concept for representing state in a well-suited data structures, that can be created and composed visually like the UI widgets?
The HyperCard legacy lives on! The self-contained single-file HTML export alone makes this a fantastic medium for web zines and indie games, and the dithered aesthetic gives it immediate charm. Looking forward to diving into Lil.
Decker is neat. I was in the process of using it the other day, but discovered it did not have much by way of font size adjustment in text fields. You could make a heading, but I didn't see a way to make it bigger or larger than simply being a heading.
Decker fonts are composed of fixed-size bitmaps. The included example "fonts.deck" has a variety of additional fonts to choose from in various sizes, and an editor:
awesome, already love the detailed feature set. one thing I'd love is the option to change themes. for eg. i'd like a more modern theme if i want to create a presentation and send it across. retro is a bit of a cognitive overload on users who are now habitual of navigating a different type of UI.
Decker prefers integral upscaling. On most browsers, "Decker -> Fullscreen" in the menu (or "app.fullscreen:1" from a script) will enable "stretching", but this feature is not supported by Safari on iPhones last time I tested.
As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.
People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications.
And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.
This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.
By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.
HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.
Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.
The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhole
All you have to do is get people to try using it.
It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.
> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.
Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.
And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.
The demand for this was huge.
If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?
I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...
https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/organizations-ww-chose-apex
In that IDC survey it's the most popular low code product, over 2 million apps and half a million developers.
There's a SaaS version at apex.oracle.com with a free tier if you want to try it, and you can self-host it as well.
A solution would probably be Airtable.
The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was being added.
But I’m sure there are more examples in the wild than I would have seen. I was curious what the larger HN community has seen or has experience with.
I mean, for me, I’d probably put something in a SQLite database and build a simple web GUI on top of it. But I know that’s an option. What does a typical office worker do these days? Put everything in Excel? (That’s probably the answer)
While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with either, you can create table, get a navigable (and perhaps other features), and a CRUD detail screen in just a few minutes of drag and drop.
And it's right there, on your machine, no cognitive load about, well, anything, and ready to go. Another 10 minutes and you have a printable report spewing out on your laser printer.
It's quite a first step to go beyond the wizard based stuff into BASIC and such, but the fundamentals are there. And the fundamentals are useful out of the box.
You can set up a usable Access DB and MS Word Mail Merge in probably 1/2 hour of reading some tutorials.
Finally, out of the box, the screens look "ok". Your collection of fields conveniently fill the window nicely. You don't have a 21" x 12" white, barren canvas with Name, Address, C/S/Z and two buttons crammed up in the upper left corner. "Gee why is the font so small?" So now you don't have to fall down the rabbit hole to try and make your simple form even baseline "presentable".
It is curious that MS (afaik) does not have a way to drag and drop an Access application and have it "deploy" to the web, and (afaik), Access isn't part of Office 365 either.
It is about as expensive as it ever was.
A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting.
In terms of hardware, a Macintosh Plus vs a MacBook Neo. The latter is many orders of magnitude superior in any metric you could possibly imagine, and it's 1/10th the price in real dollars. Even if you insist on a "serious" laptop it's still 1/4th the price.
And all of these tables are actually unfair because the newer stuff is way, way, way, way better than any of the older stuff. If we were being fair, the old computers should be absolute top-of-the-line models and the 2016/2026 models should be a Raspberry Pi.MacBook Neo is a nothing to talk about with its 8 GB and phone motherboard, I specifically mentioned "A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting."
Neo isn't such device, my current hardware has 32 GB.
Your examples miss the relation of salaries, life cost and related percentage to hardware prices, per country.
There's a zillion of under/over-developed solutions. Too much fragmentation for something to get enough traction to reach critical mass? Tricky space.
Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments)
Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments)
Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)
I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice
I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.
There are over 300 games, zines, visual novels, and toys built with Decker on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker
Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the...
We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.
A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.
Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.
They never hacked color into HyperCard 2 since their plans for HyperCard 3 were too grand - it was going to be a part of QuickTime, so that HyperCard stacks would be multimedia applications delivered as QuickTime movies, including embedding on the web. This was when Apple was spiraling though and it got cut.
To me, a properly modern "Hypercard" would be something like if Marimo and Pygame had a baby, and that baby was IDLE except it didn't suck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst
https://www.mackiev.com/hyperstudio/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode
https://www.openxtalk.org/
[1] https://offline.tldraw.com/
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
Which answer after searching is yes and no:
https://tldraw.dev/docs/driver
You can create "contraptions" as specialized data containers/editors for specific applications:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/decker.html#customwidgets
For example, "WigglyKit" offers several contraptions which operate on a shared convention for representing animated images:
http://beyondloom.com/decker/wigglykit.html
You can also represent composite data as a series of cards in a deck, or use cards as encapsulated "objects" that you communicate with via events:
http://beyondloom.com/blog/sketchpad.html#cardsarerecords
In a pinch, you can also easily encode arbitrary data in fields as a JSON superset with their ".data" attribute.
https://beyondloom.com/decker/fonts.html
We also recently gained a library for working with vector-based text:
https://beyondloom.com/decker/hershey.html
“classic Mac OS”
not
“classic macOS”
This is beautiful. I loved Hypercard when I was a kid. If they added networking to it, it would have been superior to web browsers!
Please people, have some joy and stop taking people down a peg for vibe coding apps. Let people have fun again for once.