Since you are someone who seems to have been in on this in the heyday, I'll share my story with you (I think it is, in a way, telling).
In short: I was a Hypercard kid. It's strange to look back on it this way, but the early/mid 90s seems like a completely different kind of computing. It was in that period where I first started seriously using computers, writing my first stacks probably at about 9 or 10 years old. I was inspired by all of the compelling stackware and, as you might guess, Myst, which was a pretty big deal at the time.
Back then I saw Hypercard as "serious" for the following reasons:
- You made "programs" that looked like the rest of the system (OS), and hence were the "real thing";
- You could make games in it yourself, but so could professionals, so it had to be "serious"
- It was not just for doing one thing, but most possible things
What happened as the years went on was that the outside world continuously told me that Hypercard was, in fact, not the real thing; it was not "real programming." Materially this became even more clear as the software was left to die on the vine by Apple. One of the reasons I did not pursue CS in college (and I'm very happy I didn't) is because I didn't like all this C++ stuff that the other kids claimed was "real programming" -- if that was the real thing, I didn't want any part of it ("how in the world do you make a button with that?").
Only in recent years have I started to read up on PARC, Alan Kay, and some of the genesis of the ideas about personal computing systems. I've realized that my younger, initial instinct was probably correct: Hypercard was more like "real computing" than anything else I've encountered. It's a shame that what I expected to happen back then didn't come to pass -- that the whole future Mac OS, as presented to the user, would be a kind of Hypercard (inspectable, adjustable, open to limitless tinkering and creation, and able to be learned by interactive live examples).
I hadn't heard of SK8 until this exchange. It is very heartening to see that the grown-ups were thinking along the same lines. On the other hand, it's easy to become crestfallen at the state of computing today by comparison.
HyperCard was pretty great, and it rapidly developed a devoted community. It had some fairly severe limitations (only about five built-in widgets and a scripting language in which the only data structure was text strings), but people still managed to make a lot of cool stuff with it--sometimes by writing extensions called XFCNs and XCMDs, generally in C.
SK8 removed HyoerCard's limitations, but it never really made it out of ATG. Well, there were a few technology-sharing projects with universities and industry.
But Apple's management had no idea what to do with HyperCard, much less SK8. They couldn't figure out what marketing category to put it in or how to charge for it. Heck, the only reason it existed at all was because of a promise they had made to Bill Atkinson to try to keep him from leaving.
I hear you about the current state of computing. I do miss the tools I was regularly working with in the early 90s.
In short: I was a Hypercard kid. It's strange to look back on it this way, but the early/mid 90s seems like a completely different kind of computing. It was in that period where I first started seriously using computers, writing my first stacks probably at about 9 or 10 years old. I was inspired by all of the compelling stackware and, as you might guess, Myst, which was a pretty big deal at the time.
Back then I saw Hypercard as "serious" for the following reasons: - You made "programs" that looked like the rest of the system (OS), and hence were the "real thing"; - You could make games in it yourself, but so could professionals, so it had to be "serious" - It was not just for doing one thing, but most possible things
What happened as the years went on was that the outside world continuously told me that Hypercard was, in fact, not the real thing; it was not "real programming." Materially this became even more clear as the software was left to die on the vine by Apple. One of the reasons I did not pursue CS in college (and I'm very happy I didn't) is because I didn't like all this C++ stuff that the other kids claimed was "real programming" -- if that was the real thing, I didn't want any part of it ("how in the world do you make a button with that?").
Only in recent years have I started to read up on PARC, Alan Kay, and some of the genesis of the ideas about personal computing systems. I've realized that my younger, initial instinct was probably correct: Hypercard was more like "real computing" than anything else I've encountered. It's a shame that what I expected to happen back then didn't come to pass -- that the whole future Mac OS, as presented to the user, would be a kind of Hypercard (inspectable, adjustable, open to limitless tinkering and creation, and able to be learned by interactive live examples).
I hadn't heard of SK8 until this exchange. It is very heartening to see that the grown-ups were thinking along the same lines. On the other hand, it's easy to become crestfallen at the state of computing today by comparison.