Kevin Altis covers what appears to be the official death of HyperCard. As he points out, HyperCard was never updated for Mac OS X, and hasn't been updated since 1998. There are successors and projects inspired by HyperCard, including PythonCard. But I just want to take a brief moment about my experience with HyperCard.
I never programmed in this environment, but it did introduce me to something very useful: HTML. Back in 1996, there were no real HTML editors on the market. But it wasn't obvious yet (to me) how to do it by hand. While looking around for one just to help me learn, I came across an HTML editor implemented as a HyperCard stack. It was great. I can't remember if it gave me any previews (HTML was pretty simple at the time - paragraphs, headers, lists, and images). All I remember is that it helped. From there, I graduated to briefly using SimpleText and then BBEdit Lite (and ultimately BBEdit). But that HyperCard stack remains in my head as where my personal experience with writing for the web began.
Last October, News.com published an interview with John Sculley. There's a very interesting part of the interview that's always stuck out in my mind:
Any missed opportunities that you wish you could do over? As I look back on things that I wished we would have done differently when I was at Apple, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities, and it was on my watch, so I feel responsible and disappointed that we didn't do more with it, was Hypercard. It was created back in 1987 by Bill Atkinson, Apple's first software programmer. We could never figure out exactly what it was. We thought it was a prototyping tool. We thought it was a database tool. It was actually used by people as a front-end communications device for TCP/IP to connect the Internet to large Cray computers.I also remember some other article about a difference between Apple and Sun in the late eighties / early nineties was that Apple was still treating computers as individual boxes, whereas Sun realized there were networks connecting all the boxes together. While Macs have long had built in networking, it's certain that Apple could have put that to better use. And who knows? Maybe HyperCard would be driving the web instead of HTML and Flash.
We weren't insightful enough to recognize that what we had inside of Hypercard, essentially, was everything that later was developed so successfully by Tim Berners-Lee with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). We didn't call it that. But essentially, we had all that hypertext, radio buttons and linking capability architected in the original Hypercard. In hindsight, I wish Apple had recognized that we had a huge opportunity to go take our user interface culture, and our know-how, and applied it to the Internet. I think we would have had a very different story for Apple during the 1990s. But that, of course, is hindsight.