Show HN: Gemini 3 imagines Hacker News as a HyperCard stack in 1994

boring

Mostly, I gave it some feedback and steered it a little but it's 99% percent Gemini 3. It would be interesting to make something like this "live" in that it could simulate each day of 1995 (say) anew, updating each morning.

If you like that, check out Decker https://beyondloom.com/decker/ Super fun to use.

An easy-to-use end-user programming and hypertext system for the 68K Mac, with MacPaint-like visual layout and an English-like (AppleScript-like) scripting language (HyperTalk). [1]

Also a cult favorite on HN, as it was an end-user programming system that actually resulted in a million (or so) end users creating their own apps (perhaps foreshadowing the era of people creating their own web sites with html and javascript, or games using Flash and actionscript.) And famously used to create the game Myst.

HyperCard came out of a leave of absence that Bill Atkinson took from Apple after Microsoft had forced Apple to kill MacBASIC. Unfortunately the deal he made with Apple to distribute it for free with every Mac was only for two years, and Apple replaced it with a playback-only "HyperCard Player" while the authoring capability was sold as a separate product by Claris - effectively killing in-the-box end-user programming on the Mac. [2] (AppleScript resembled HyperTalk, but didn't include an easy-to-use authoring environment, perhaps to avoid competing with HyperCard). Development stagnated as well; no native PowerPC version was created, and HyperCard never evolved to run over a network, much less the internet (even though HyperCard influenced NCSA Mosaic and Apple was certainly aware of early networked hypertext systems like Intermedia, which ran on the Mac).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FquNpWdf9vg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejdgTVj7ZG8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

It was pretty cool, lonnnng time ago!

I prefer home cooked meals, but sometimes a candy bar is nice.