HyperCard and HyperTalk

January 3, 2018

Comment from E-mail

Reading all the comments has been incredible! Your life, as well as yourself in general, is incredibly interesting. Hopefully your legacy will keep living on for decades to come. But, to keep this short: did you ever think the computer would really become this mainstream? Did you even want it to become this mainstream? Luckily, we had a lab full of Apple IIGS in grade school. My dad sprung to get a IIGS (with a RAM expansion card and 3.5″ floppy, which I thought never should’ve been called a floppy) , so I was the only 2nd grader who knew how to work the machines when something wrong happened. Ah, good ol’ open apple-control-restart. Amazingly enough, even when my dad wanted to get a real Macintosh at the time, he instead got a IIGS because I said “I want a color screen!” 🙂 I’ve still got that IIGS right around the corner here in the house, too… And of course, HyperCard is still high up on my list of priorities…I still get register’s from my first game made in HyperCard (fishing game) . Btw, I’m 15 now. Me being able to make a fishing game when I was 13 says a lot about how great a product was put out then. Did you happen to have any input on HC? Thanks a lot for your time! (this got way too long!)

Woz

Back in the earliest days we felt sure that computers belonged in every home and would one day be there, even if they were just 4K machines!

I’m glad to hear about your HyperCard game programming. Hypercard is an amazing system of a very complete environment covering many bases, and the most natural writing programming language ever, that obeys human rules before computer rules. I loved teaching how to write puzzles and games in the HyperTalk language. I’m glad for you if that’s what you’re doing.