Things were different 25 years ago. There was a cold war going on, and above all Apple was nothing like today, both in size and technology. Perhaps the latter is best illustrated by Hypercard, which first shipped in 1987 and celebrated its 25th anniversary yesterday, as TUAW notes.
For those of you who weren’t into Apple back then or those bandwagoners who only just joined six months ago, Hypercard was sort of like Automator that you find in today’s Macs, but in addition you could also develop apps, like Xcode.
It required 1MB of memory and two floppy disks, which was quite a lot for the time, even though you might laugh at it now. It was only discontinued in 2004, so it remained part of Apple’s range for quite a while, but it was too complex for many and that was probably one of the reasons why they stopped it.
But 25 years deserves at least some recognition, especially as those who knew how it worked all found it incredibly useful. So Happy Birthday Hypercard!
