Hypercard (version 2.4.1.) 'Home' card. I was a child – though our friendship was brief. Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new. The day’s lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything – or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the wonder. Half a dozen of us were invited back a week later; and then again, and again, for several delicious months. Among these pupils, I was the only one who had already dabbled in programming. Compared to the familiar of my family’s second-hand, the language seemed clunky and comically verbose. And yet there was something magical, something oddly enthralling about Hypercard as a whole. The ease with which a mostly-blank screen could be turned into an interactive, living, breathing graphical toy of my own creation was astounding, exhilarating, and addictive. After the final week, I and one other schoolboy were driven to a distant office building, where we were asked to present our unremarkable creations in front of a darkened lecture hall. The latter was full of somber-faced, suit-wearing adults idly tapping away on costly Apple portables. With their lukewarm applause, the adventure came to its rather boring end. Lacking true English fluency at the time, I never learned exactly who was behind this brief departure from the braindead routine of my early schooling. And without regular access to a Mac (given its expense, it may as well have been a as far as my family was concerned) I could not return to this fascinating plaything. My development as a programmer continued as it had begun, almost entirely -less and Hypercard-less. Though almost unknown to the sniveling digital trendoids of today, ever created. Among its satisfied users. When returned from exile to rule Apple again, he let HyperCard wither away and die. In order to answer this question, it is necessary to actually power up an old Mac (or an ) and try HyperCard on your own skin. Even today, there is still a wealth of HyperCard-related material on the Net, but I was unable to find a compact “Hello World”-style walkthrough example. So I created one: a very basic “four function” calculator. The materials needed for this recipe were: • • • (Optional) A HyperTalk manual. I fished mine out of a dumpster when I was an undergraduate student. • Around half an hour of time. Most of it was spent arranging the screenshots and writing their captions.
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