If you've been using a Mac since the glory days of System 7, you probably remember Hypercard. It was the workhorse app of choice for old-school Mac users to put together databases, presentations, and all kinds of other important information. Unfortunately, since Apple discontinued Classic, there's no way to run HyperCard on a new Mac. There's a workaround, though, in the form of Danny Goodman's HyperPort. HyperPort extracts data from Hypercard files into text formats you can read on that brand-new MacBook Air. Goodman, who has been publishing books on software since the early 80's, has now released the utility as unsupported freeware.
HyperPort is actually a Hypercard stack itself, so if you've already gotten rid of your Classic OS installation, it might not be much help to you. We found it was worth downloading just for the nostalgia, though. The PDF user's manual is a fascinating faded scan of the 1990 original. So, while you're grabbing all those old names and addresses out of your Hypercard stacks, you can enjoy author Goodman's timeless sense of style. Is that a sweater vest, Danny?
[via Daring Fireball]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-19-2008 @ 2:57AM
Atanas Boev said...
Ha! http://www.apple.com/hypercard/ redirects to wikipedia! Interesting thing to do on a corporate website...
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2-21-2008 @ 11:34PM
Chipp said...
You can also convert your stacks using Runtime Revolution, a very powerful RAD tool, which has many similarities to HC.
www.runrev.com
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3-13-2008 @ 6:47PM
Mark said...
First of all, I've got to say that Revolution is a great tool. One of the products made with it is DIFfersifier, which basically does the same as HyperPort, on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows --since Revolution is a cross-platform development tool. You can download DIFfersifier at http://differsifier.economy-x-talk.com .
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