[OT] Michigan Repository

[Martin Baxter]

On 23/02/14 23:03, Bob Sneidar wrote:
> What really made me give up on Hypercard and Supercard was the fact
> that stacks with more that 2000 cards kept corrupting themselves, and
> the xcmd’s capable of accessing dBase databases were sketchy at best.
> 
> 
> What got me BACK into using a Hypercard-like environment was Runtime
> Revolution which had support for databases. I think if Hypercard had
> done that way back then, and Jobs hadn’t killed it, we might still
> have Hypercard today.
> 
> Bob
> 

I have been using hyprecard this morning. Even after all these years I
haven't got around to migrating my invoicing stack to livecode, though I
do plan to, REAL SOON NOW ;) . Its interface was quirky, even back in
1990, and relied on xcmds a lot. Today I just make sure nobody else sees
it in case they laugh at me. Using it is... ...err, different. So I
would suggest that it is more than just the lack of db access that
hampered Hypercard. Its quirkiness was perhaps the main culprit there,
at least from a mainstream perspective because it was something you
either got it totally or you didn't get it at all and the difference may
have been the ability to see it conceptually rather than superficially.

However, way back when, Oracle did produce an xcmd connector for
hypercard and sold it in a bundle with an interface stack and an Oracle
runtime, which was great. I think that was actually my intro to SEQUEL
as it was then called. So I can attest that there is something to what
you say, in that, as an ad hoc interface to a serious db, Hypercard was
in fact potentially useful.

Martin Baxter