HyperCard: RIP

Hic jacet HyperCard. Apple has finally removed the HyperCard directory from its servers, and delisted the HyperCard from the Apple Store. It’s really the end for HyperCard.

You can read Tim Oren’s eulogy, but I suppose I really wrote mine back in 2002. I can’t help but be a little sad. I’m still using HyperCard fairly regularly, in Classic. Voyager’s Macbeth, which my colleague Michael E. Cohen produced, still works fine, and I used the Hypertext Handlist of Rhetorical Terms in teaching this quarter. My bibliography database is still in HyperCard, in a stack that’s now about 300 MB of text, a stack that generates HTML formatted MLA bibliographies, as well as .RTF formatted bibliographies with a few clicks of a button, and which fully exploits HyperCardÆs search functions, still one of the best “search” feautures I’ve ever seen.

Requiescat in pace.