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I'm afraid that HyperCard is too old for broader audience to be able to grasp how extraordinary experience it was providing.

As a 6-7yo I had a collection of English words, stored with my own definitions and pronunciations, using basic building blocks, and it was as easy and intuitive as writing these words in my notebook.

People used the same building primitives to make real games or stuff like accounting applications.

And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.

This one is really hard to describe - it's the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.

>>> And the best part - at that time it didn't looked cheap.

This is one of the things that I think we've lost. Or at least that we come close to losing. I go back even further, to the text screens of mainframe computers, and text based microcomputers. Because everything was text on a screen, a kid like me could make something that "looks just like software" even if I couldn't match the sophistication of commercial software in terms of the inner workings.

By the time I started using a graphical computer, my 68k Mac, it was already getting harder. I could write programs that ran in a terminal window, but making them "look like software" required a deep dive into the impenetrable workings of giant class libraries etc.

HyperCard was a great middle ground. Its widgets looked just like the basic UI widgets of the OS, and users could do things like click on buttons and edit text fields. Just like software.

Visual Basic got there too. I wouldn't say that VB (and the OS it ran on) was conceptually better than HyperCard, but VB got supported and HyperCard got dropped.

The Fallout analogy is perfect. Limitation stimulates imagination. I think that’s part of why essentially limitless AI models produce things that are so devoid of it.
It took browsers and web dev until, IDK, maybe 2010? to match the interactivity and capability of Hypercard circa 1994.

The actual killer app turned out to be the network itself, but for anyone who used and built things with Hypercard (a lot of people), all the patterns of components and event-driven development were like an echo from a refined past by the time it became part of the modern development toolkit.

the original Myst was created using HyperCard... which in and of itself is a crazy app with a huge impact on gaming in general.
> too old... to be able to grasp... experience

All you have to do is get people to try using it.

It's vastly smoother now, because nothing prevents adding colour and Unicode support, or more modern widgets, etc. without really changing anything essential about overall concept. Plus we're now in a world where LLMs could write Hypertalk (or whatever modestly-updated alternative) for you.

> the same uncanny valley that makes small village in Fallout 1 feel massive and full of people despite it taking two screens with just few sprites running around, while full blown 3D world of Fallout 3, with real buildings and voice overs felt flat, soulless and empty.

Again, all you have to do is show it to people. I don't think people actually appreciate the "classics" more simply because they remember them being SOTA. If anything, the passage of time has given the grognards a chance to notice that not everything at the time was nearly as good as the things that gave them the most nostalgia.

And again, the quality and fidelity of media is largely orthogonal to the aesthetic. 2d isometric tile games don't have the feeling they do because they're low resolution; not nearly so much as because the tiles intentionally fit together exactly, lines are at integer pixel ratios with no anti-aliasing, stuff like that.

I am not quite the right age for hypercard as well, but I did have my chances to interact with a variety of game making tools aimed at kids that were amazing for creating event-driven logic. Likewise in the professional world, tools aimed at business professionals (like MS Access), that kinda were abandoned - and there used to be a whole spectrum of stuff that connected WYSIWIG editors and simple languages to various levels of programming tools.

The demand for this was huge.

Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few years ago. These were user developed applications, done by people who may have been a bit technical, but who didn’t to know a full programming language.

If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?

I've seen people (non IT) do similar things (i.e. develop small applications) with Excel.

I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.

In the past, we used to refer to these as 4GL systems [1] - and as far as I'm concerned, this is really a wide open field for innovation - especially in the era of AI/LLMs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

I don't think anyone you're calling a "shop" would do anything business-critical with it, but fwiw, Tiddlywiki fits in this category.

https://tiddlywiki.com/

Why past tense, Filemaker and Access are still being sold.

A solution would probably be Airtable.

Sure. Oracle APEX is popular. You never hear about it on HN because the target user base for low code stuff doesn't overlap with the HN set much, but it's huge.

https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/organizations-ww-chose-apex

In that IDC survey it's the most popular low code product, over 2 million apps and half a million developers.

There's a SaaS version at apex.oracle.com with a free tier if you want to try it, and you can self-host it as well.

> If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use?

There's a zillion of under/over-developed solutions. Too much fragmentation for something to get enough traction to reach critical mass? Tricky space.

SaaS seems to have largely replaced them. And, needless to say, now LLM.
an llm coding agent?
SQLite seems to me like it fits the bill.
Previously:

Decker: A reincarnation of HyperCard with 1-bit graphics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292181 - May 2024 (78 comments)

Decker – A HyperCard Replacement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38985409 - Jan 2024 (36 comments)

Decker, a platform that builds on the legacy of Hypercard and classic macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377964 - Oct 2022 (88 comments)

Thanks, I want to add https://www.arraycast.com/2025/01/04/Decker.html which introduced me to it. I wish more people had exposure to q/k/apl and think this is a great way to do it.

I think this is the first time I've seen this hit #1 which is nice

Most recently, 27 days ago with 9 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48693273
Never used HyperCard, but from descriptions and screenshots in the article reminds me a lot of Delphi/Pascal/Lazarus IDE’s. Appeal is understandable, because it is so cool to be snore to from a few lines of code to a clickable intractable executable, that is the sort of Feedback loop that I miss in python and go GUI builders that I’ve used previously, and why I keep c inning back to Lazarus.
I miss HyperCard and I love projects like this at a nostalgia level - but if you're going to have aspirations that this is useful today (2026) with a real project then its a complete waste of time.

I want HyperCard where I can build out a stack or whatever and actually present it to people as a real and tangible thing. I love living in the past as much as anyone else, but this is a little disappointing.

I use personal applications written in Decker on a daily basis.

There are over 300 games, zines, visual novels, and toys built with Decker on itch.io: https://itch.io/games/tag-decker

Last month saw the first game made entirely in Decker published on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4693460/The_Dreams_in_the...

We are neither living in the past nor wasting our time.

A lot of these modern HyperCard reinterpretations get stuck on the black-and-white aesthetics of the original. That's cool, but it limits how broadly appealing they become. Even back when HyperCard was relevant, Apple's inability to properly introduce color as a first-class feature was what effectively killed the product.

A few years ago, I think there would have been a market for a HyperCard-inspired tool that targeted modern technologies - probably web tech.

Today, I guess vibecoding is what HyperCard was in the 80s and 90s, the tool you can use to quickly and easily build a little program that fills your specific need.

HyperCardSimulator.com lets you make and import stacks anonymously and link to them online. Enjoy!
It's kind of a shame this uses its own, probably more powerful, language instead of HyperTalk.

HyperTalk is one of the most accessible languages for beginners I've ever seen. Sure it was primitive and had somewhat weak data organization capabilities, but if you're like 6 it's pretty incredible for your experience to be:

    1. Open a blank script
    2. Drag a field on the screen and name it "myname"
    3. Drag a button on the screen, open up it's script and see:
       on mouseUp
       end mouseUp
    4. You then enter the following two lines between those two lines:
         ask "What is your name?"
         put it into card field myname
    5. Then you go back and click the button and a dialog box appears asking your name and when you type it in an hit enter the name appears in the field you created.
That sort of directness is lost in modern development environments. The concept that the button's script lives inside of the button, and in fact everything on the page could have its own script. The page itself also has script, even the stack itself. Your code can of course call code in other objects if need be (typically at the page or stack level), and there is a whole message passing thing happening in the background. It's by far the most intuitive programming environment I've ever seen. It has the kind of immediate impact that helps to save off boredom or feeling like there's too much homework before the fun starts.

In the day people complained about the syntactic sugar in HyperTalk, but I think it was just right for the target audience. They did have more of a point about the difficulty in managing structured data, often having to store things in hidden fields referenced by line and word number or hacks like that.

The most incredible part is this was all in an application that came with the OS. It was the perfect opportunity for a bored kid to randomly come across it and discover a lifelong passion. There was nothing to install, no product to buy first--it was just there, asking to be discovered. And even if your parents weren't about to buy a reference book you could open up other stacks and start reading the code to learn the language. Because most scripts were small and self contained (remember that they were stored at the widget level) this was a legitimate way to understand the basic syntax and keywords.

In Decker, most of this example would be similar. The button's default script template would be:

    on click do
    
    end
And filling it in with an equivalent script would be something like:

    on click do
     myname.text:alert["What is your name?" "string"]
    end
There is slightly more "programming-language-like" punctuation to Lil than HyperTalk, but simple examples are still simple, and in my opinion having first-class collections (lists, dictionaries, tables) and a richer set of APL-like operators makes Lil scale up much better to more complex programs. As a child I recall struggling tremendously with HyperTalk's "almost-english" structure; it made scripts easy enough to read and understand, but provided very little help when it came to writing new scripts.

Decker has a similar Widget -> Card -> Deck event bubbling hierarchy to HyperCard, and in my opinion retains much of the same directness and simplicity for simple applications. The differences in approach won't please everyone, but they are all carefully considered, and have been refined over time based on feedback from the user community. Decker is a living, growing platform!

This reminds me of LiveCode[1] (aka Revolution and MetaCard) which I’ve used quite a bit about a decade ago. Was also inspired by HyperCard. Just checked their site again and it seems they’ve discontinued the open source version and have pivoted to an AI-assisted drag and drop UI builder.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode

Woah, this is something I've wanted for forever! Only, without the "quirky" aspects of its design. I can appreciate the charm, but it does obstruct utility, and this sort of tool -- a super-general digital whiteboard -- would be oh so useful. I never knew of its predecessor, "HyperCard," either, which looks to be essentially what I wish for, only modernized.
Decker is amazing. I've started a set of tutorials (decks + videos) as a byproduct of trying to teach my 8-year old daughter to program with it.

https://itch.io/t/6632495/decker-programming-tutorials-video...

Decker seems like it would have a lot of potential for e-ink devices like the boox note series and such.
I wrote one-off scientific applications in HyperCard for a rocket science company.

Graphics via creating HyperBasic XFCN's IIRC.

One was a simulator for trading off various optical sensors that our Director enjoyed using.

Again, IIRC, graphics output was also in EPS, that the tech pubs group could import directly into reports.

Another was a form, using built-in fields, that my boss stole (YAY) for creating documentation for a progranning project we were working on.

Output was in Postscript, basically in Unix manpage format.

When your boss steals the documentation job, it's a big win.

Fantastic rapid prototyping environment with no-brainer UI elements and persistent database.

awesome, already love the detailed feature set. one thing I'd love is the option to change themes. for eg. i'd like a more modern theme if i want to create a presentation and send it across. retro is a bit of a cognitive overload on users who are now habitual of navigating a different type of UI.
Engineers of a certain age, sitting around, kicking around ideas for a modern Hypercard… what a great pass-time.

Scripting language? Javascript? Python?

SDL3 for cross-platform rendering, audio…

Should the "cards" just be a subset of HTML?

Etc…

If you want the "agentic future" version of this (sorry), tldraw just relased "tldraw offline"[1] which in some ways has a lot of overlap with HyperCard as well.

[1] https://offline.tldraw.com/

Decker is neat. I was in the process of using it the other day, but discovered it did not have much by way of font size adjustment in text fields. You could make a heading, but I didn't see a way to make it bigger or larger than simply being a heading.
It seems application state is mainly maintained in the widgets. Reminds me of Delphi. Is there a similar concept for representing state in a well-suited data structures, that can be created and composed visually like the UI widgets?
The HyperCard legacy lives on! The self-contained single-file HTML export alone makes this a fantastic medium for web zines and indie games, and the dithered aesthetic gives it immediate charm. Looking forward to diving into Lil.
talk about serendipity: https://github.com/JGalego/HyperLab
If I could point to two major influences that directed me towards computer engineering it was Hypercard and BBS's.
Looks awesome! Very oddly super small window for it in iOS safari though.
Nitpicking:

“classic Mac OS”

not

“classic macOS”

Will it run Myst???
Wait, you are telling me people vibe created apps before LLMs? /s

This is beautiful. I loved Hypercard when I was a kid. If they added networking to it, it would have been superior to web browsers!

Please people, have some joy and stop taking people down a peg for vibe coding apps. Let people have fun again for once.