Hey, remember HyperCard? Well guess what, it is still around,
in fact Apple just bumped the HyperCard Player up to a new version
lately. I have a bunch of old stacks, and I do mean old. When we
replaced our dumpy old Fat Mac 512 with the new, sleek and radical
Mac SE back in 1987 it came bundled with HyperCard and I got got
a cheap thrill or two by making some stacks for my nieces and nephews.
I made a few for my wife and myself too. Here for your amusement
and/or use are the stacks I created.
If you are unfamiliar with
HyperCard, the word "stack" can
be equated with the word "program". A HyperCard stack
is comprised of a group of cards, each card loosely represents
a program window. I do mean loosely too, a card can either store
data that you don't necessarily see or a card could be a grouping
of buttons, fields and graphics in any combination. It is very
versatile. So in essence, a stack is supposed to be a stack of
cards.
As I was saying, this page will eventually give you a download
link to all the stacks I have created, good, bad or stupid (trust
me some of these are pretty stupid). Some of them are unfinished,
some of them are lost, some of them are pretty good. I was going
to make them shareware at one time but now, because I don't think
anyone would buy one, they are free. The work is still protected
by copyright. |
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Not that the artwork is anything special. It is all in black and
white because that is what all the computers were like back in
those days. Get a load of the graphic at the top of the page, that
is scanned off the box my copy of HyperCard came in. It is all
discolored and yellow it is so old and the graphic depicting the
screen shot of the HyperCard folder is in black and white.
In dog
years as in computer years, HyperCard should be a pile of bones
but lives on because it really did have something to offer,
the talents of ordinary users who were given an opportunity to
develop programs for the Mac.
For ease of use, you should keep your
HyperCard stacks on the same disk and in the same folder as the
HyperCard application or
else you will have a lot of navagation to wade through. Also, for
the sounds to play right in these stacks, you will need to turn
off virtual memory. For some reason virtual memory badly distorts
the timing of the notes.
One final word, my work is not perfect,
expect some problems. You can avoid some of the errors by opening
all the stacks using
the provided buttons or by using the "Open Stack..." command
from the "File" menu in the HyperCard application rather
than by double clicking the stacks themselves. Sosume. |
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The Downloads:
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In order to use these HyperCard
stacks you must have either the full blown HyperCard application or at
least the free HyperCard Player. The Player will let you view existing
stacks but not let you create any. In order to preserve Apple's manner
of providing this program to you, this link will take you to the Apple
site. Enter "hypercard player" into text box one and click the
search button. |
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This stack was designed for
my nieces and nephews. It is supposed to be a fun way to learn about nouns,
verbs and adverbs etc. Basically you provide the words and Storybook plugs
them into the framework of 3 existing stories either in order or randomly.
This stack is unfinished, the Sci-Fi story was never completed. Feel free
to complete it and email me the script. Remember, it has to be clean and
fun. Anyway, you can make it as dirty as you want by changing the nouns,
verbs and body parts to naughty ones. This one gets pretty funny. Enjoy. |
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In the old days I used to
make borders around my snail mail stationery paper in MacPaint then I
would use MacWrite to compose the letter, copy it, then paste it into
the MacPaint file between the borders, then print it. This was a pain
in the butt to do but it was cool to look at when no other computer available
could do this. When HyperCard came around I immediately saw how this could
make my life easier when I wanted to do graphic bordered stationery. I
created a stack that has a small archive of preexisting borders that you
can choose from. Choose one, then type your letter into it in a easily
editable text field, print it off and you have stationery. I included
the ability for you to create your own borders and to store them in the
archive for later use. Try it out. |
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Here is a utility that transports
a pattern, or an entire library of patterns, from one HyperCard stack
to another. You can create your own pattern library for use in your stacks
or just use the library I have provided with over 400 unique and original
patterns. Many of them have names for goodness sake! I created this one
because when I was working with HyperCard it had a weakness where if you
created a new pattern in a stack you could not move that pattern to another
stack, you had to recreate it in each stack you wanted to use it in. To
be honest I have not kept up with HyperCard past the mid 90's so I do
not know if this was ever fixed. If it hasn't been fixed, boy do I have
the utility for you! |
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This stack used to be the
bane of my existence. I would dread opening this stack for fear
of the what I would see. It wasn't long before I changed the button icon
for this stack from a cute loving little heart shaped breakfast melon
to the animated graphic of some poor sap getting flattened on an anvil.
You married guys have probably guessed it by now, this stack is a high
tech electronic nagging device, don't download it. For you gals, this
is just what the doctor ordered for getting that worthless worm out of
the lazyboy and into the yard. Is that lamp still broken and gathering
it's body weight in dust on his workbench? Now you only have to mention
it once and it will come back to haunt him every damn time
he opens the @#$%^&* Honey Do stack! I should make you women pay me
for this one but I would go to "Guy Hell" if I accepted money
for it. |
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Here is another kids stack
I made for my nieces and nephews that groanups (sic) will enjoy too, maybe
if only for a little while. This is a spin off of the Mr. Potato Head
I used to have as a kid. In those distant days of yesteryear we used real
potatoes, no foolin', and we plugged little plastic and wooden attachments
into them. Now with the advent of Tubers, I am offering you all a kinder
and gentler way of life. Here in electronic form is that same child's
game without all the pieces getting lost or sucked up into the vacuum
cleaner. Gone are the trips to the grocery store or to the doctors office
to get a derby removed from your left nostril. The original intention
was to print off your creations and color them, but now that there is
color in HyperCard you can use that application and THEN print it off.
You can use HyperCard to export the files for other apps to color if you
like. These are great for hanging on the fridge to cover all the crusted-on
accumulations that have accrued over the years of neglected sanitation. |
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Imagine a very drunk and
depressed Harlan Ellison who just woke up from a horrific nightmare. Well
that was all very redundant wasn't it? OK, just imagine Harlan Ellison
sat down to write a HyperCard stack. The end result would be something
like "The Cruel Fairy". As promised, here is one of those really
stupid stacks I was wasting all that bad breath on in the intro. This
stack has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It probably won't even run
right on your machine due to timing discrepancies between the Mac SE it
was developed on and the G4/450 it was re-tuned on. My old stone age copy
of HyperCard that was bundled with my SE slaughtered the playback, but
the recent version of the HyperCard player played the animations much
smoother. Good luck, remember this is freeware. |
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Car
Care |
Now this stack has some real
usage. We use this one a whole lot more than The Cruel Fairy! In fact
after about 10 years of service, it is still in use today in my family.
This is the Car Care stack. This stack is designed to log your gasoline
purchases. With the gallons, cost, mileage and dates, it calculates your
miles per gallon, price per gallon, whether your mileage is up or down
from the last entry and so on. It gives you the average or totals as appropriate
under each column. You can use this information to produce a statistical
year end report (handy at tax time as well as in planning a budget) and
it handily tracks your car maintenance needs. Push the button and see
if your Ethiopian oil puker, er... I mean your beloved automobile, needs
a tune up, transmission service, brake service etc. If you are 1000 miles
late on an oil change for instance, no problem, just enter in the last
mileage you got one and it will track it from there. |
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Here is a mind blower that
will make you think and wonder and wander back to what you were thinking
first before I interrupted your thinking but then you will think again
about this and think, "Criminy" and start thinking about this
thinking thingy again and think it is pretty cool. Hey you know what?
When you say "think" a lot it really sounds pretty weird "think
think think... think, thinked, have thunken..." now hell, what was
I thinking about? OH! Triangles. There is no way I am going to expend
1000 words here trying to describe the picture this stack draws, but here
is how it draws it. There are 3 main dots. The program starts at one of
the dots, selects one of the other dots at random, measures the distance
halfway to that dot and puts a dot in that spot. From that new dot it
starts the process all over again. The graphic that process produces is
amazing to say the least. You have to see this. |
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Stupid part deux. Frappie
the Frog is a throwaway stack I did to amuse my youngest niece who now
is too old to chew her own food. Did you know that in China they tie a
cord around the family dog's neck so it can't swallow then they feed it
the grandparents portion of meat? Fortunately soup doesn't need much chewing
cause that will zoom down a dog's gullet even if you tie the cord tight
enough to make it's head pop off. In Guatamala they pound meat with river
stones, then leave it in the sun to rot and soften before feeding it to
the toothless. There is no soup in Guatamala because social taboos say
it looks too much like unflushed runny doodie. The Zambians have a fascinating
technique for softening elderly foods. They take the elderly, pound them
with river stones, mix them with a little dog, wrap this in green banana
leaves and roast it buried in coals. Goes great with soup. |
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This is the companion piece to the HyperStationery
stack up on the top of this list. I forgot all about it. This works the
same way HyperStationery works, mainly because it is a paste of it's fathers
copy. A chip off the ol block, a nudge-nudge from a know-what-I-mean,
a knock off, a rip off, a blatantly pirated and hacked version of HyperStationery.
It is not as bad as I make it sound, I guess you know that by now I tend
to go on a bit. HyperEnvelope lets you address and print business or personal
sized envelopes. Using the same format as HyperStationery, HyperEnvelope
will allow you to either use a preexisting archive of envelopes or you
can create your own set of envelopes. The envelopes in the archive were
meant for my nieces and nephews but you can easily customize this archive
to suit your own purposes. |
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This is a quick and dirty
utility to add up a list of times. I found it handy when I was adding
the minutes and seconds of the tracks of long playing records so that
I would know if 2 digitized LP albums would fit on a single CD. Whatever
your needs, this will add up minutes and seconds accurately and easily.
The new version 1.1 that adds error checking, improved addition of seconds,
some amenities, and more closely adheres to our beloved HyperCard standards.
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Well this one is pretty specialized
but like "Add LP Time" it is utilitarian and it serves a useful
function. My wife and I have a hobby, we are participating in a SETI@home,
a distributed computing project that crunches radio telescope data. We
are Team SETI. One of the statistics
that is returned to the user is the total CPU time spent crunching data.
At first it is in hours but after a year it is given to you as decimal
fractions of a year! How the heck can you figure out how long it takes
to crunch a unit of data using fractions of a year? SETI Hours is how.
You enter in the starting and ending years for the period of time you
want to check and the number of units crunched and click a button. I normally
check this figure once a week or after making a change in the way I process
the data to see if I am getting better results. You can find your decimal
starting and ending year in the Personal Stats section of the User
Account portion of SETI@home. Save any two results then find the hours
per unit with this HyperCard stack. |
