HyperCard Introduction and Experiments with Eric's Edge | VCFMW 18 (2023)

I had the pleasure of presenting at the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest this year with Ron, from Ron's Computer Videos

It was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to next year's event.

Some notes from the presentation that were missing. Also, due to an unfortunate decision I made, you can't hear the questions well, I've included the questions as best as I can recall.

"I can't remember his name" References

Vannevar Bush (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush)
Introduced the concept of the Memex in the 1930s - a hypothetical adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to hypertext.

Douglas Engelbart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart)
Influenced by Bush's vision, Douglas lead the development of NLS, the oN-Line System, which demonstrated numerous technologies, including the computer mouse, the chorded keyboard, bitmapped screens, and hypertext. All of this was showcased in The Mother of All Demos in 1968.

NoteCards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoteCards)
Hypertext based knowledge system developed at Xerox PARC in 1984.

Blah Blob! (https://bribrikendall.itch.io/blah-blob)
A short platformer game made in HyperCard.

Questions you can't hear well from the video with abbreviated answers.

Q: Do you have these stacks publicly available?
A: Yes, some of them. In https://archive.org and https://macintoshgarden.org
My archive.org uploads
My macintosh garden uploads

Q: Do you have two player support on that (The Royal Game of Ur)?
A: No, not yet but it's coming. One of the things you can do is play over AppleTalk.

Q: Can you take me down memory lane and show the code?
A: Sure! Or we can have an after party. (I'll start covering aspects of the code in future videos.)

Q: I'm noticing all of your apps are monochrome. Is that for compatability or is that a limitation?
A: I try to make sure they will work on classic macs. I'm targeting that framework. There are options to add color.

Q: And if you targeted that framework, would you have more options?
A: Heck yes! In fact, I tried to do a physics game called Annoyed Trout... This .. is .. great .. as .. it .. slowly .. draws. ... I'm trying to stay in the 1988 performance framework. (Blah Blob! is a great example of a more modern game pushing the limits of performance in emulation.)

Q: Ways to run HyperCard without a Mac? (best guess at actual question)
A: You can use an emulator such as Mini vMac. Don't use Basillisk II.

Q: Will it work in OS9?
A: Yes! HyperCard works in OS9.

Q: Mostly funny question. What if there were a forth beige G3, what model would it be?
A: It would be called the YEET Machine. Because you would YEET it into the sun.

Q: I have a question about your game. Can you get ye flask?
A: I'll have to look that up. We'll have to add it. Mohini says you can't get ye flask!
(https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouCantGetYeFlask)

Q: The HyperCard stack that you are demonstrating, are these available? Do you have a site?
A: A couple of them are available online (see answer above).

Q: The stacks you are showing, how much time is invested in those so we can get an idea of how much work?
A: Adventure - a couple hundred hours, some took a few weeks or a month of spare time.

Q: I had HyperCard hooked up to a laser disk or video disk player back in the day. Were there any other peripherals?
A: There was MacRecorder. I'm not familiar with the hardware that was available. Mac84 is looking for the software for the video disk controller.