A Futile Question

External Since: Oct 05, 2007 Posts: 11

This is a question to anyone who still cares or is interested in the
promise of Hypercard. Is there any chance of prying HC from the paws of
Apple and making it possible for some coders to rewrite it into an
internet application. I don't understand why Apple doesn't release the
code into public domain. They have abandoned it and show no interest in
doing anything with it. Any ideas?

External Since: Apr 15, 2008 Posts: 54

Henry Flam wrote:
> This is a question to anyone who still cares or is interested in the
> promise of Hypercard. Is there any chance of prying HC from the paws of
> Apple and making it possible for some coders to rewrite it into an
> internet application. I don't understand why Apple doesn't release the
> code into public domain. They have abandoned it and show no interest in
> doing anything with it. Any ideas?

This is NOT an offer to do it or even be involved, but the specs for
Hypercard have been public knowledge for over 20 years. Some bright person
could write a Hypercard program in Java.

As long as you did not violate any patents Apple would not be able to stop
you, and if anything is patented, it may be close to expiring. If not,
Apple might let you use them as long as you did not sell the program.

IMHO the main reason Apple abandoned Hypercard was not that they wanted
to bury it, but that it was too expensive to maintain in relation to
what they expected to get from it.

You could of course run your old stacks under BasiliskII if you used
a 680x0 version of Hypercard, and Sheepshaver if it was a PPC version.

You can still download Hypercard Player 2.4 from Apple, but not the full
version.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm DeleteThis @mendelson.com N3OWJ/4X1GM