One of my first jobs as a teenager and at Uni was at a place called IC Technologies – at that time (early 90s) the largest Apple reseller in Australia. I used the money from that gig to buy myself a PowerBook 180c – a magnificent gun metal grey Macintosh laptop with a beautiful LCD colour screen. I still have it to this day – and it still works. I turned it on over the weekend, opened the Application folder, and there I saw an old application called HyperCard. Finding HyperCard on my Mac again was like opening a time capsule from the golden era of computing.
A Personal Journey to HyperCard
HyperCard, released by Apple in 1987, was among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. Think of it as the web before the web – a completely graphical, interactive system for linking information, at a time when the “Internet” for most of us meant bulletin boards services (BBSs), newsgroups, FTP and email.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I didn’t fully grasp what HyperCard was. It came free with my Mac, so I casually toyed with it, making simple “stacks” to organise contacts, notes, ideas, funny little games and just mucking around. Only now do I realise that I had in my hands a platform radically ahead of its time.
HyperCard’s brilliance lay in its simplicity. It was built on the metaphor of “stacks” and “cards.” A stack was like a digital card stack (imagine a stack of index cards) and each card could contain text, images, buttons, fields, sounds, interactive elements – pieces of information or interface that you could mix and match. Users would navigate from card to card by clicking on buttons or links, browsing information in a non-linear, clickable way. …basically exactly like the web.
HyperCard essentially let you create a personal hyperlinked multimedia database – before the Web made hypertext (the “HT” in HTTP) mainstream.
Crucially, HyperCard was designed for everyone. My technical skills are self taught, and I taught myself how to use it very quickly. You didn’t have to be a programmer to use it. As Apple’s Bill Atkinson (HyperCard’s creator) put it, it was “programming for the rest of us”, a way to let people program without having to learn how to write code.
It had a built-in scripting language called HyperTalk, which was quite a simple, easy language. HyperTalk scripts could be attached to any object (buttons, fields, cards) and would run when you clicked a button or navigated a card. This meant anyone could build interactive programs: forms that calculate things, quizzes that give feedback, even simple games. I looked it up – HyperCard is even now celebrated as the first true no-code application builder.
When HyperMedia Was a Radical Idea
To appreciate how futuristic HyperCard felt, remember that in 1989 the Internet had no graphical browsers. There was no Chrome or Netscape yet – no webpages with images and clickable links. If you went online, it was via a squealing modem into a text-only bulletin board service, navigating with typed commands. Most PCs ran on MS-DOS, using green text on a black screen. Into that world, Apple’s HyperCard introduced hypermedia: you could click on a word or a picture on your Mac and jump to another card of information. You could embed images and sounds, link cards in nonlinear ways, and create an experience that was part book, part application. HyperCard was essentially an offline Web on your computer, letting you hop between “pages” (cards) with a mouse click.
Even more astonishing, these interactive creations weren’t confined to one machine. Users began sharing HyperCard stacks with each other, swapping floppy disks at user groups and uploading stacks to bulletin board services. I remember hundreds of stacks were available on various BBSs for download (if you had the time and stable enough modem connection)! I remember dialling into local BBSs (Melbourne favourites such as Cyburbia, AUSOM, Cafe, The Kingdom, Nemesis) and finding entire libraries of homemade stacks. Thousands of unique stacks circulated through the late ’80s and early ’90s, covering everything from educational quizzes to recipe collections.
Some of these stacks were remarkably sophisticated. Some companies pushed HyperCard to its limits. The revolutionary game Myst, for example, initially appeared as a HyperCard stack – a point-and-click adventure with atmospheric graphics and sound, all built within HyperCard’s framework. (It later became one of the best-selling PC games of all time, but it started on HyperCard.) Even the Beatles got in on the action, releasing an official HyperCard stack to accompany A Hard Day’s Night. For a Mac user in that era, HyperCard felt like a glimpse into the future – an early peek at how computers could empower anyone to create rich, interactive content.
Foreshadowing the Modern Digital World
Looking back now, it’s clear that HyperCard didn’t just foreshadow the Web – it foreshadowed virtually everything about our modern digital world. Consider these prescient features and their modern counterparts:
- Hyperlinks and Hypermedia: HyperCard’s core idea was linking cards and information graphically. This was true hypertext before HTML. It’s no surprise that the first web pioneers drew direct inspiration from HyperCard – in fact, HyperCard influenced the creation of HTTP and the Web itself. The idea of clicking a link to jump to another document? HyperCard had that in 1987 (albeit linking cards, not networked documents). The pointing finger cursor you see when hovering over a web link today? That was borrowed from HyperCard’s navigation cursor.
- Built-in Scripting -> Modern Web Scripting: HyperCard had HyperTalk, a scripting language to add logic to cards. This spirit lives on in JavaScript, which gives life to web pages – and indeed JavaScript’s creator, Brendan Eich, was inspired by HyperTalk when designing the language. In a way, every interactive web form or app today carries a bit of HyperCard’s DNA.
- User-Created Apps -> No-Code/Low-Code Movement: The whole low-code/no-code wave we see now – from visual web design tools to app builders like Bubble or Microsoft Power Apps – echoes what HyperCard did on a Macintosh in the late 80s. It empowered ordinary people to build mini-applications. One could argue HyperCard was the template for today’s no-code platforms. Even now, tech communities ask “what is the modern equivalent to HyperCard?” because that ease of authoring has never been fully duplicated. It’s a question I myself Googled just now.
- Distributed Content and Decentralisation: In the pre-internet era, HyperCard stacks spreading via BBS nodes were a decentralised phenomenon – there was no central authority controlling distribution, just users sharing with other users. It’s reminiscent of how modern Web3 and decentralised platforms envision content sharing: user-driven and serverless. HyperCard stacks weren’t on a blockchain, of course, but the ethos of users publishing their own interactive content and sharing it freely anticipated today’s decentralised content networks. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, even traced the wiki concept back to a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late ’80s – proof that those early experiments seeded ideas about collaborative, decentralised information that Web2 and Web3 are still exploring.
In short, HyperCard was a pioneer. It gave us clickable hyperlinks, multimedia, scripting, user-generated “apps,” and sharing – all before the World Wide Web existed. Before the World Wide Web did anything, HyperCard did it.
The One That Got Away: Why HyperCard Didn’t Conquer the World
If HyperCard was so great, why isn’t it everywhere today?
Apple had all the ingredients for the Web – and perhaps something even better – but it missed something. HyperCard remained largely confined to Macintosh computers. It was a product a bit too ahead of its time, and Apple, despite its creativity, treated HyperCard as an offline tool rather than the start of a networked platform. Maybe the often-repeated error most companies make which is to see something as it is and has been, rather than unencumbered – where it might be.
The creator of HyperCard, Bill Atkinson, later lamented that if he had thought to connect HyperCard stacks over networks, it could have become the first Web browser. Imagine if Apple had built an internet service around HyperCard in the late 80s – a global network of stacks shared and linked remotely. This could have been the start of the Web or an alternative to it. We might have had two web standards: HTTP and HYPER.
But in the late 80s, Apple’s focus wasn’t on networking every computer to a global network (few saw how big the Internet would become). HyperCard was conceived in a world where sharing meant passing disks around. The mental model needed – an open, worldwide hypermedia network – was brewing elsewhere, in places like CERN where Tim Berners-Lee was working on the Web.
Moreover, as the 90s progressed, Apple’s business priorities shifted. Remember, Steve Jobs wasn’t at Apple at this time – he had been sacked in 1985 and was running NeXT and Pixar. Atkinson left Apple in 1990, and HyperCard stagnated without a champion. By the mid-90s, the Web and browsers like Netscape took off, providing similar hyperlinked multimedia experiences, but across millions of computers via the Internet – something HyperCard (as a local app) couldn’t compete with. Apple did make a few updates, but HyperCard never made the jump to Mac OS X and was quietly discontinued by 2004.
There’s a broader lesson here about innovation. Having a great idea or a great piece of technology isn’t enough; execution and timing are everything. HyperCard arrived when the world wasn’t quite ready to network everything together. And when the world was ready, HyperCard hadn’t evolved to seize the moment. It’s a bit of bittersweet what-if history: Apple had a UI for a hyperlinked world, arguably a decade ahead of the Web, but it didn’t have the technology Overton Window (modems were extremely rare), ecosystem or strategic focus to make it the foundation of the next era of computing.
Remember The Time
Sitting here in 2025, reflecting on that old Macintosh and the HyperCard stacks I’ve rediscovered, I feel both nostalgic and appreciative. Nostalgic, because that era of computing felt like a Wild West of possibility – a time when a small team at Apple could create something as revolutionary as HyperCard and ship it with every Mac, empowering novice users like me to tinker and create. Appreciative, because even though HyperCard didn’t “win” in the history books, it provided a whole range of amateur technologists like me an ability to build stuff easily. It inspired generations of ideas. Its influence is alive in the Web, in modern app design, in the no-code movement, and even in concepts so popular today like in the rise of AI “vibe coding”.
Sometimes the future arrives early, long before the world knows what to do with it. I’ll always be grateful for having experienced a small slice of the Web, years before the Web, on my little Mac so many years ago.
