[OT}] Hypercard and an uneasy read.

[J. Landman Gay]

On 12/1/11 4:54 PM, Bob Sneidar wrote:

> What made Hypercard obsolete was time and the lack of certain things
> that became essential to modern apps or dev environments, like say
> real color support or database access, not to mention a robust
> graphics engine like Livecode has.

Steve Jobs killed it. The HC team was in the middle of writing version 
3.0 which would have brought it up to date with modern apps of the day. 
It was QuickTime based, which gave it color and the graphics engine you 
mention. Other additions were planned. When the community heard it was 
to be discontinued, we mounted a protest. Steve Jobs had no idea what HC 
was or why we were concerned (Phil Schiller thought it was only good for 
making rolodexes,) and after receiving a bombardment of emails and 
faxes, Steve asked Kevin Calhoun for a demo so he could see what HC was. 
He was completely unfamiliar with it. KC called me afterward to talk 
about it. Steve didn't understand what HC was good for and went ahead 
with his plan. He disbanded the HC team and most of its engineers left 
the company.

I've heard there were other reasons as well, but none of them had to do 
with the program itself.

LiveCode has grown to be much more capable, as it turns out. I'm glad we 
ended up here.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com