Apple’s Hypercard Software, the Innovative 1980s Precursor to Hypertext, Now Made Available by Archive.org

Archive.org is on a bit of a roll late­ly. After recent­ly mak­ing avail­able 25,000+ dig­i­tized 78rpm records from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, they’ve turned around and put online Apple Hyper­card soft­ware. When Hyper­card was released in 1987, The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Apple to Intro­duce Unusu­al Soft­ware,” which began:

Apple Com­put­er Inc. will intro­duce an unusu­al data­base and man­age­ment infor­ma­tion pro­gram Tues­day that the com­pa­ny hopes will help it main­tain its lead in tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing com­put­ers easy to use.

The new soft­ware, known as Hyper­card, will enable users of Apple’s Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers to orga­nize infor­ma­tion on com­put­er­ized file cards that can be linked to oth­er file cards in intri­cate ways. The pro­gram will be includ­ed for no charge with each Mac­in­tosh sold, start­ing this month.

Hyper­card made its appear­ance pre­cise­ly when Apple also released “a com­mu­ni­ca­tions device, known as a modem, that will enable the Mac­in­tosh to send doc­u­ments to and from fac­sim­i­le machines.” Some of us still use modems today. Hyper­card, not so much. At least not direct­ly.

As Hyper­card’s cre­ator Bill Atkin­son indi­cates above, Hyper­card start­ed work­ing with the hyper­text con­cept that’s now preva­lent on the web today. Think those links you find in HTML. On Archive.org, you can find and play with Hyper­card soft­ware, or what they call emu­lat­ed Hyper­card stacks. (They also host a library of emu­lat­ed soft­ware for the ear­ly Mac­in­tosh com­put­er). Read more about Archive.org’s Hyper­card project on their blog here.

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