Farewell to an old friend?
HyperCard (an extensive explanation can be found here)
had many serious enthusiasts, and many of these (as would be expected) expressed their
enthusiasm on the web. But things change. As of September, 2001, the webmaster
of HyperCard Heaven announced that
no further updates were planned for his site, primarily because by then it had
become clear that Apple wasn't going to continue to develop the product. Two years
ago Wired News reported
that even though no formal death announcement had been released, the HyperCard
era was essentially over.
And, with more searching than I would have thought necessary, it's even possible
to make it official. A Google search brought me to A
Eulogy for HyperCard on a blog by someone who knows. He, in turn, was quoting
someone who gave the official death date as March 23, 2004, with the following
reason.
HyperCard: 1987 - 2004
Well it finally happened, Apple removed the HyperCard sub-directory from the
main Apple site and you can no longer buy HyperCard from the Apple store. Of
course, HyperCard was never updated for Mac OS X and I'm pretty sure the last
update to HyperCard was version 2.4.1 back in 1998. But the removal of the product
from the Apple site is the final nail in the coffin.
The International HyperCard Users Groups (iHUG)
still has a very attractive web site, but nothing later than early 2002 seems
to be on the site, meaning, I suppose, that it really is gone. And though all
these links are convincing evidence that HyperCard has most definitely become
history, Ward Cunningham, the developer of the Wiki claims that HyperCard was
his inspiration for the Wiki Wiki Web, and a group of people are apparently busy
working on FreeCard,
an Open Source alternative.
Go to: How those tables have turned, or
Go to: Internet archeology, or
Go to: Templates from hell.