All hyped up for Hypercard: further adventures with an Apple legacy format

https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2021/07/all-hyped-up-for-hypercard-further-adventures-with-an-apple-legacy-format/

by zdw • 5 years ago

154 61 5 years ago

blogs.loc.gov

jrochkind12• 5 years ago

I wonder if it would be possible to get entries for hypercard in "magic byte" databases like https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/shared-mime-info/

The work is figuring out if it's even possible, and what the bytes would be.

Someone• 5 years ago

FTA:

For instance, a stack file begins with a stack block (signified by the hexadecimal values, “53 54 41 4B,” which correspond to the ASCII characters, “STAK”), and the file is terminated by a tail block (signified by the ASCII characters, “TAIL”

duskwuff5• 5 years ago

Fun fact: the tail block contains the constant string "Nu är det slut…", Swedish for "this is the end".

rvense• 5 years ago

You want the file type and creator code, but they're eaten along with the resource fork when you move the file to something that's not HFS, I think.

duskwuff5• 5 years ago

The work is figuring out if it's even possible, and what the bytes would be.

Easy.

    4 string STAK\xff\xff\xff\xff

jrochkind12• 5 years ago

OK, I guess now the work is getting it into the magic bytes databases! :)

Isthatablackgsd• 5 years ago

Wow, it has been a while since I play with Hypercard. I remember doing this in my 7th grade science class back in the 90s. I and my classmates have to create something out of Hypercard for the project.

dbg31415• 5 years ago

HyperCard and Excel were my programming gateway drugs.

HyperCard was a mix of like PowerPoint and HTML / JavaScript. Just was so much fun for a kid to play around with. And everything you built had a visual element you could show your friends.

I used HyperCard to re-create a MUD I really liked with a visual interface. Sort of like Myst... I had a blast. Certainly wasn't the first person to do that, but all the little coding tricks I had to learn to pull off my vision all came in handy later.

karmelapple• 5 years ago

What was the name? I played plenty of stacks back in the day!

tombert3• 5 years ago

HyperCard and Excel were my programming gateway drugs.

Same! I had played with C++ a bit, but what really made programming logic stick for me was when I made my teacher a gradebook in Excel in 9th grade. His logic for calculating the grades in class was a bit strange, and he was doing it all manually, and my grades were exceptionally bad in that class, so I asked if I could get some extra credit if I could make his grading easier. Surprisingly he said yes [1], so that weekend I really crunched through Excel and pumped out a gradebook that implemented all the rules he was using to grade.

It was the first time that "if" and "else" statements really clicked for me, and it got me interested in "real" languages.

[1] In hindsight he really shouldn't have. It was sort of an unfair bit of favoritism he was paying to me, but 15 year old me didn't really care.

beamatronic• 5 years ago

On a side note, why doesn't anybody MOO/MUD any more?

duskwuff5• 5 years ago

Sort of like Myst...

Guess what Myst was developed in.

(HyperCard! With some custom extensions to display color images and video.)

cstross• 5 years ago

Looks like the LOC folks are also unaware of the existence of HyperCard clones such as SuperCard (a compiler) and subsequently Runtime Revolution (now discontinued): before the company stopped selling its end-product cross-platform HyperCard clone there was a brief open source foray, and some folks appear to still be trying to develop an open source XTalk platform (XTalk is the generalized descendant language of HyperTalk):

https://openxtalk.org/forum/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTalk

... They also don't seem to know about how files on an HFS filesystem all have separate resource/data forks: it's a distinctly different paradigm from the familiar a-file-is-a-stream-of-bytes convention of Linux/UNIX/NTFS, and some of their problem seems to arise because they're looking at a "flattened" HFS file that has been squished to fit on a non-HFS filesystem. (Modern macOS makes almost no use of resource forks, so they're vestigial in HFS+; not sure APFS even provides them.)

GeekyBear• 5 years ago

The original version of Windows NT Server allowed you to install Services for Macintosh and act as an AppleTalk file server, so support for resource forks was added to NTFS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_stream_(AD...

p_l3• 5 years ago

Alternate Data Streams are pretty interesting, cause I'm pretty sure Services for Macintosh weren't the only users - it's also way more powerful (closest thing on Unix would be Solaris-style extended attributes) and pretty fundamental part of NTFS on-disk structures (in fact, "alternate" data streams differ from main one only by having a name - the default data stream simply has no name, and all data streams are equal in importance)

kragen5• 5 years ago

The other post linked from the one you're commenting on (https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2020/11/an-archivists-perspe...) talks specifically about the problems of preserving and reverse-engineering dual-fork files, so the problem is not what they're unaware of, Charlie. You just aren't aware of the problem they're trying to solve.

The LOC, the Internet Archive, and the UK National Archives don't benefit from proprietary compilers for proprietary operating systems like SuperCard; their remit is to preserve these files for centuries or millennia, not until the next update of macOS X. If SuperCard interprets a HyperCard stack differently than original HyperCard did, or SuperCard on a new version of macOS X displays or behaves differently than it did on the previous version, that's a failure of digital preservation. Unless, that is, you notice --- and to notice, you need to emulate the original HyperCard environment and/or be sufficiently familiar with the semantics of the file specification. If https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555959 is to be believed, SuperCard is 32-bit-only and so will not run on the most recent version of macOS X, which lack 32-bit support, which if true demonstrates the enormity of the problem.

As for streams of bytes, a disk is a stream of bytes, or rather a collection of fixed-size blocks of bytes. HFS is looking at flattened HFS files that have been "squished" to fit on a medium that does not, itself, implement HFS. Therefore anything that you can represent with an HFS dual-fork file can also be represented losslessly in a stream of bytes. (You do of course benefit from understanding the dual-fork structure.) HFS+ actually went further, implementing files with an arbitrary number of forks, like sections in ELF or PE. As GeekyBear points out, NTFS did the same, leading to path traversal vulnerabilities in early Microsoft web servers.

sokoloff• 5 years ago

Wouldn’t an effective (and seemingly easier) digital preservation approach be to virtualize an older Mac OS (System 7 even) and just run HyperCard on it?

soapdog• 5 years ago

Runtime Revolution is not discontinued, it is alive and well, it just rebranded to https://www.livecode.com many years ago.

pstuart• 5 years ago

It seems like it would be reasonably straightforward to create a hypercard clone on top of js and the DOM. Or maybe that's already been done? (a lazy search did not reveal this to be the case).

ksherlock• 5 years ago

The HyperCard stack's resource fork contains icons, sounds, xcmds, xfcns, and probably some other miscellanea. Most of the stack is stored in the data fork.

APFS doesn't specifically have resource forks. They're handled as the com.apple.ResourceFork extended attribute (which is also one way OS X exposes them on HFS+ but with HFS+ the fork/xattr always exists; on APFS it has to be explicitly created).

jfrunyon• 5 years ago

it's a distinctly different paradigm from the familiar a-file-is-a-stream-of-bytes convention of Linux/UNIX/NTFS

Each of those platforms has an analog to HFS forks.

JALUK• 5 years ago

There are still Apps out there that are derivatives of the HyperCard family.

LiveCode is based upon Metacard and was the subject of another Hacker News Thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24874102

There is also SuoerCard:

https://supercard.us/index.html

Which unfortunately is 32 bit only so only works on older variants of modern day OSX.

tombert3• 5 years ago

I generally hate the expression "Ahead of its time", but I think that it definitely applies to Hypercard.

I've only played a bit with Hypercard, but it's one of those things that feels almost anachronistic; it's hard to believe that something released in 1987 would be as trivial to use and be productive with as Hypercard.

jandrese• 5 years ago

It's a language that is object oriented without having to teach the programmers any of the theory. The language has a considerable amount of syntactic sugar but makes for some pretty incredible looking code.

   on mouseUp

     put "100,100" into pos

     repeat with x = 1 to the number of card buttons

       set the location of card button x to pos

       add 15 to item 1 of pos

     end repeat

   end mouseUp

tombert3• 5 years ago

That's really cool! Reminds me of some of the crazy stuff you can do with the Lua metatables to get really pretty code (if you are careful).

kragen5• 5 years ago

Although I hate to recommend proprietary software, you might be interested in looking at Inform 7, designed for authoring interactive fiction; https://rosettacode.org/wiki/FizzBuzz#Inform_7 has an example:

    The space is a room.  An item is a kind of thing.  In the space are 100 items.

    To say the name:
            let the count be the number of items carried by the player;
            say "[if the count is the count to the nearest 15]fizzbuzz.[otherwise if the count is the count to the nearest 3]fizz.[otherwise if the count is the count to the nearest 5]buzz.[otherwise][the count in words].".

    To count:
            if an item is in the space
            begin;
                    let the next one be a random item in the space; silently try taking the next one;
                    say "[the name]" in sentence case;
                    count;
                    end the story;
            end if.

    When play begins: count.  Use no scoring.

jimbokun• 5 years ago

I worked on interactive software for learning Japanese in Hypercard many years ago. I think it's still the most productive system for building user interfaces I've encountered.

phaedryx• 5 years ago

Oh man, Hypercard and ResEdit were my gateway drugs. I don't know of anything equivalent nowadays.

The pinnacle for me was getting it to run my teacher's laser disc player.

webwielder2• 5 years ago

I've just learned that the would be de facto successor to HyperCard, SuperCard, is still being maintained/updated https://supercard.us

lr4444lr• 5 years ago

Bill Atkinson allegedly came up with the idea for HyperCard during an LSD trip

Makes me pause to think what innovations we missed out on for loss of creative inspiration from all of our anti-drug policies.

jazzyjackson3• 5 years ago

the book “what the dormouse said” is an amazing retelling of this era detailing who tripped when and what they went on to invent

IIRC photolithography and CPU architecture came out of this subculture, berkeley and harvard both had sanctioned LSD experimentation that grad students were happy to participate in, in the “center for advanced studies”

it’s been a few years since I read it so my memory is hazy

cmg• 5 years ago

Your comment made me go search for a short article that I'd seen in the past [0] with a text version at [1]. "Use of LSD-25 for Computer Programming"

"While stimulated by the LSD I was able to get the entire system wholly in my mind at the same time. I spent some time mentally visualizing various aspects of the compiler, the language and the processing which would take place. I did discover three or four design inconsistencies while being stimulated by the effect of the LSD, and I made notes for later checking."

[0] https://maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_24.pdf [1] https://slidelegend.com/use-of-lsd-25-for-computer-programmi...

golemiprague• 5 years ago

The question is how many of the LSD takers invented something in relation to all the other ones who just had some fun. Is it bigger percentage than in the general population?

anthk4• 5 years ago

"Two things came out of Berkeley: LSD and Unix. We do not believe this to be a coincidence."

hvgk• 5 years ago

Well the last dude I know who took LSD tried to call an ambulance for a pile of sacks of builders cement and pissed himself. YMMV on that one. There are probably more failures that are not romanticised and more successes that involved hard work.

gnufx2• 5 years ago

Not relevant to the article, but while people are talking about HyperCard and derivatives generally, it inspired HyperNeWS, which I remember fondly, though it wasn't free software. Perhaps that kibozes Don Hopkins: http://www.art.net/studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/hyperlook/ind...

ignoranceprior• 5 years ago

Link should end with '.html', not '.htm':

http://www.art.net/studios/Hackers/Hopkins/Don/hyperlook/ind...

anthk4• 5 years ago

Perhaps that kibozes Don Hopkins

Ask him, he is on HN regularly.

gnufx2• 5 years ago

That's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibo_(Usenet) for non-Usenetters. (Too bad what happened to Usenet.)

macintux• 5 years ago

Last year I stumbled upon a promotional card deck from Apple and took some quick photos. I've just uploaded them: https://ibb.co/album/y4t3vT

mmphosis• 5 years ago

The contents of the file appear to be a chunk file format.

https://mmphosis.netlify.app/hypercard/file-format/#chunk

All hyped up for Hypercard: further adventures with an Apple legacy format

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