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Tricks of the HyperTalk Masters

By Nick Hodge | April 18, 2002

[1115] Tricks of the HyperTalk Masters

Front Cover, Tricks of the Hyper­Talk Mas­ters. The Waite Group 1989.

In 1987 Apple released an applic­a­tion called Hyper­card. Once I saw Hyper­card, my life changed. The inbuilt pro­gram­ming lan­guage, Hyper­Talk, com­bined with the UI/database made it extremely easy to write small applic­a­tions. Many of the fea­tures of Hyper­Card pred­ate the web, but I believe heav­ily influ­enced Tim Berners-Lee in the HTTP/HTML design he was per­fect­ing at the same time.

At about the same time, there was no world-wide web as we know it today. Bul­letin Board Sys­tems (BBS) and large online ser­vices such as Com­puServe ruled the roost. To work with these sys­tems, you used a ter­minal emu­lator, XModem/ZModem down­loads and com­mand line sys­tems. Com­puServe cre­ated a MacOS UI over this com­plex interface.

In 1988 Brian Mus­ker, IT Man­ager of the Aus­tralian Sub­mar­ine Cor­por­a­tion, was also a Hyper­Card fan — and wanted to know if you could write an inter­face over com­plex terminal-based sys­tems. Born from this was a great rela­tion­ship between both com­pan­ies and the build­ing of a career (in my case)

Another side bene­fit were some post­ings into the Hyper­Card forum in Com­puServe. Mitchell Waite, of the Waite Group asked me if I was inter­ested in writ­ing a chapter for a book they were plan­ning “Tricks of the Hyper­Talk Mas­ters”. Mitch asked me to write a front end to Com­puServe using HyperCard.

I have never writ­ten any­thing of note in my life. My eng­lish sucks. Blame a poor coun­try school edu­ca­tion! By 1989 I had com­pleted the Hyper­Card “stack” with script­ing — and had writ­ten the text that described what the stack was doing. Nam­ing the applic­a­tion Chauf­feur, it was meant to assist you through the com­plex pro­cess of CompuServe.

My fee was all of US$500 for this pro­ject, and per­son­ally paid about AU$1200 in Com­puServe fees! The con­tract I signed was longer than the chapter I submitted.

[1116] Page 420, Tricks of the HyperTalk Masters

Page 420 of the Chauf­feur chapter

[1117] From Pacific Computer Weekly, May 1989

[1118] TOTHM: Adelaide Advertiser

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