HyperCard - Legacy

Legacy

HyperCard is one of the first products that made use of and popularized the hypertext concept to a large popular base of users. However, it was preceded by Paul Heckel's Zoomracks.

Jakob Nielsen has pointed out that HyperCard was really only a hypermedia program since its links started from regions on a card, not text objects; actual HTML-style text hyperlinks were possible in later versions, but were awkward to implement and seldom used. Deena Larsen programmed links into HyperCard for Marble Springs. Bill Atkinson later lamented that if he had only realized the power of network-oriented stacks, instead of focusing on local stacks on a single machine, HyperCard could have become the first Web browser.

HyperCard saw a loss in popularity with the growth of the World Wide Web, since the Web could handle and deliver data in much the same way as HyperCard without being limited to files on one's own hard disk. HyperCard had a significant impact on the web as it inspired the creation of both HTTP itself (through its influence on Tim Berners-Lee's colleague Robert Cailliau), and JavaScript (whose creator, Brendan Eich, was inspired by HyperTalk). It was also a key inspiration for ViolaWWW, an early web browser.

The pointing-finger cursor used for navigating stacks later found its way into the first web browsers, as the hyperlink cursor.

The Myst computer game franchise, initially released as a HyperCard stack and included bundled with some Macs (for example the Performa 5300), still lives on, making HyperCard a facilitating technology for starting one of the best-selling computer games of all time.

According to Ward Cunningham, the inventor of Wikis, the wiki concept can be traced back to a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s, making HyperCard one of the grandparents of the Wiki idea.