By the time HyperCard was dropped as a product, the need for such a tool had largely been replaced by the World Wide Web. You could purchase it for $49.95, but most Mac owners got it for free as it was included with every new Mac. HyperCard existed as an Apple product for Mac and Apple IIGS until 2004. Imagining The Rocket Yard and as a HyperCard stack… While the Apple product no longer exists except on pre-macOS Macs and collector Apple IIGS machines, its legacy lives on. He referred to the first version as WildCard, but as fellow Apple employee Dan Winkler began work on the HyperTalk scripting language that would let users assign actions to objects, the name was changed to HyperCard. HyperCard development began when Bill Atkinson, one of the key designers of the graphic user interface of the Mac, envisioned the system of linked cards during an LSD trip.

HyperCard not only got a lot of Mac fans started in programming, but it also inspired some of the tools that we take for granted today. You have to understand that at the time HyperCard was first released in 1987, there was no World Wide Web, so the concept of hyperlinks was completely new. HyperCard was a powerful, yet extremely easy to use tool for creating “stacks” - essentially flat-file databases that used hyperlinks as a way of navigating a stack of “cards”. Today, I’ll talk about an Apple software product that changed the world and sadly no longer exists: HyperCard. In the past two Retro Apple articles, I’ve highlighted hardware from Apple that made an impact on the tech industry as a whole: the Apple QuickTake 100 Digital Camera, and the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100.

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