[OT}] Hypercard and an uneasy read.

[Ronald Zellner]

Don't know which message in the thread to replicate here.

I was an early adopter of Hypercard and had developed an interesting set of resources utilizing our local Corvus network in the early 90s (the university wasn't yet networked back then.)
Students received copies of a "Workbook" stack and completed a series of 15 exercises throughout the semester.  As each exercise was due they would need to be in one of the Labs and utilize an HC submit function that copied their input to a master stack on the server.  The Graduate assistants could then scan through the various sections stored on the server HC stacks  (there were 10 sections with 20 students in each) and grade the assignments.  All grades were based on distinct rubrics and automatically copied to a master grade stack for server storage and final course grading (much like a multi-worksheet spreadsheet).  Students could also query the system for their individual grade records and feedback.
It worked well, but ran into the problem that students needed to come to the lab to enter their work; as the dorms became networked and students acquired their own computers the problem was that HC only ran on Macs so I discontinued the system when the PC user discontent was not worth the convenience of electronic delivery/management.  

I was reluctant to give up on HC, but since I needed to work with the full range of users it was quite difficult to continue.

When the Internet matured and Javascript evolved I recognized that I could resurrect the system in a fully cross-platform format, at first with a FileMaker server & Javascript/HTML.
However, I was very excited when I found Revolution in 1999, and subsequently developed a stand-alone Revolution version of the workbook that used the Filemaker server for storage.  Students could work anywhere, submit assignment content, and access grading feedback quite conveniently. The final version used SQL for data storage and access.
There was a wide range of factors influencing what approaches to take and what to develop in educational settings.

By the way, I have an extra copy of Danny Goodman's "The Complete HyperCard 2.2 Handbook"  if there is a collector among you who will pay the postage.

Ron