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This is right up my alley and I never heard of it till now!

HyperCard was a wonderful creative tool at the time. (I’m pretty sure Bill Atkinson has stated on more than one occasion something along the lines of “If only I added hyperlinks!”)

HyperCard was just ahead of its time. Back in 1987 he would have been more or less inventing the wheel with all of the networking stuff, especially on a Mac. By the time the Internet took off Apple had long since relegated Hypercard to life support.

That said, I'm not sure a Hypercard based Internet would have been ideal either. It would have been a security nightmare and AFAIK Apple never released a PC version.

HyperCard had hyperlinks, in the sense that a card can link to another card, and even to another stack. It was networking that was omitted, really.
You could just link to a stack on a network share, but yeah.

trivia: Macintosh aliases, starting with System 7 I believe, were able to link to network shares and automount them if they weren't yet mounted

Wikipedia definition: HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.
From: Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine - Last Chance to See

Excellent book, sad funny and eyeopening.

I had to convert the .img file to a .dmg using hdiutil on OS X to get to the stack. Diskcopy under OS 9 w/Sheepshaver complained of -39 unexpected end of file otherwise.
This is amazing, thank you! In the 90s I wrote way too much HyperCard and read way too much Douglas Adams, so this is bringing back great memories.
Am not sure that doing too much of either of those two things is possible...!
ALMOST DID THAT...

Soon after HyperCard was introduced I was working a 'sweet' IT position at The Phone Company, IBM AS/400 stuff. It was burning me out though, I liked the machines but not the corporate culture. The thought that I was destined to have my boss's boss's job some day filled me with a sense of dread, not triumph.

Before that I'd been into PCs since the late 70s 8086|Z80|S-100|CP/M|MS-DOS and had worked for a time doing board/memory level repair of Macs. So I contacted a good friend of mine who was also comp sci professor and colleague and told him "I'm dying here! What's the next best thing? What are you working on?" He told me I was ape-shit crazy and should get over it. The job I had was one that he groomed his students for and most had to leave town to get them, here I had one and was asking him for advice??

But he was really excited about Apple IIs and Macs with HyperCard and the way it could revolutionize High School and University learning. He had the idea that some day with HyperCard apps and networks you could have the brightest HS students begin to choose a curriculum for themselves sail off at their own pace, seamlessly getting through High School and into University courses by, say, 10th grade even?

He used to say "Now we go to school because that's where the teachers are. But tomorrow we'll go there because that's where the computers are." Notice the lack of the idea that computers could become affordable. Give us a break! He thought school was a necessary environment but he envisioned teachers more as advisors than broadcasters dispensing the same curriculum to all students. He also wanted to design his own HyperCard concepts from scratch with better networking. He was convinced that Apple was working to port everything to other PCs. He clearly had something like a modern web browser in mind but we didn't know that then!

If I was foolish enough to leave my IT job I was welcome to join his team, he had some students and other consultants working for him. But in the end I did something else entirely, left the Phone Company rejoining the PC world where offices were being networked to share documents and I stayed with the command line, which led into commercial Internet providers and unix servers.

My poor friend called me a couple years later to say that his investment into HyperCard, the learning courses he'd developed, and time spent had mostly been wasted because of Apple's platform lock-in and Claris predatory licensing and pricing.

HyperCard was a great gateway to programming for me as a kid. I've seen Vipercard.net's faithful reproduction, which is pretty cool. What's the closest thing to HyperCard that is modern?
It looks like SuperCard is still around, can't speak to how modern it is https://supercard.us
I’d love to find something like that with a modern language.
https://livecode.com/

I used this extensively in a past life. It’s a great HyperCard alternative.

Spreadsheets stole all programming fun.
I manage to have plenty of fun in spreadsheets, but I do miss doing pixel-drawing-based animation.
I'm just impressed that Mac OS 7 runs on my telephone.

Does this mean that I can make a progressive web app with HyperCard? ; )

As rendered by vMac transpiled with emscripten.
It's actually the PCE emulator, not vMac: https://github.com/jsdf/pce