HyperCard

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What Does HyperCard Mean?

HyperCard is a popular visual and programming application for Macintosh and Apple computers. HyperCard was released in 1987 and continued to be offered until 2004.

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The concept of HyperCard relies on a series of program screens or
“cards.” A programming language called HyperTalk allows users to program
these cards and the relationships between them.

Techopedia Explains HyperCard

As an object-oriented scripting language, HyperTalk is a precursor to some of the more semantically accessible programming languages used today. Some also see HyperCard as a precursor to the internet with the first kind of hypermedia functionality that later became part of the world wide web’s fundamental structure.

One of the prevailing strengths of HyperCard was its accessibility – in relation to today’s programming languages, HyperCard was abundantly intuitive, semantic and easy to learn. For instance, users could draw command buttons directly onto a HyperCard card or screen, label them and write their code inside of them. Many types of easy HyperCard programming involved simply linking cards to other cards in a particular sequence.

As a unique type of retro programming tool, HyperCard is extremely instructive in introducing new audiences to the ways that today’s technologies were built out of semantic concepts.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.