A time to link and a time to die

Our favourite old Hyperlinking object based data management rapid developent system has been formally discontinued.

That's right, Hypercard is now officially a finished product line of Apple Computer according to this story by one of the original Hypercard team members.

Hypercard, like most things from Apple and especially those designed and built by Bill Atkinson, was ahead of it's time. Attesting to this is it's 16 year life cycle. Not many commercial computer programs last that long.

There was a good article on Hypercard from 2002 in Wired (here) telling us how great it is and how it's still useful. Unfortunately when you can make good money from Filemaker, you don't really want to be pushing Hypercard. Which is a pity since the OSX framework could lead to a really nice Hypercard, where embeddeble NSObjects replace xcmds...

It's a sad day. Somewhat akin to the day some 4 or so years ago when Apple discontinued support for it's first Mac. Yes, Apple sold spare parts for the original Macintosh for roughly 15 years after it was released. Stick that in your HP/Compaq pipe and try to smoke it...