Dr. Dobb's Journal December, 2005
I'm sure some of you remember Randy Sutherland. Randy stopped by our place in September for a couple of days. On the first evening, we went out to eat; but on the second night, our restaurant was open, so Randy ordered the Epicurean Adventure. Very appropriate.
Randy was my right-hand guy when I was editor-in-chief of DDJ back in the early 1980s. He was first managing editor, then editor. He went on to other jobs, including a long stint at Cisco, where he made a ton of money before getting out with—or for—his sanity.
Randy's always seemed eminently sane to me, but he's a different kind of sane these days. I was getting e-mail diaries from him last year from remote locations that were always exotic and often downright dangerous-sounding, in North Africa and the Middle East, some of it reading like passages from The Sheltering Sky. So you can see why the Epicurean Adventure, or any adventure, would sound like his dish.
Randy's visit, coupled with the impending 30th anniversary of this magazine and other events of this year, put me in a nostalgic mood.
Just the mood to mark the passage of a software company that was not just admired, but loved by many. Cyan has faded to black, gone white on white, been blue-penciled. It has fallen down the manhole, faded in the mist, seen the world beyond the mackerel, and has been riven from reality and exiled to the end of ages. It has been given an earth suit and sent to Headstone Park to curl up its toes and dance the horizontal tango.
It was in 1987, my last year of working in an office, when brothers Rand and Robyn Miller wrote Manhole, the first CD-ROM-based game and a new kind of electronic entertainment. Manhole and every subsequent game from their company, Cyan, was a hit, and every one pushed the limits in the creation of virtual worlds. The titles include Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, Spelunx, Myst, Riven, and various Myst sequels.
The talented Miller brothers will continue to do creative work, probably in a variety of media, but their company ran out of money and came to an end in September of this year. With it disappears a gentle spirit that is lacking in most popular computer games today. Cyan will be missed.
The Miller brothers wrote Manhole in HyperCard, and used HyperCard to prototype later games. Some would say that HyperCard has also Gone to the Place where Grampa Lives, but that case is more complicated. It's true that Apple no longer sells or supports or acknowledges HyperCard, but software doesn't really die until all the hardware it can run on dies. Apple's working on that.
HyperCard, also released in 1987, was a wonderful product, a development environment for ordinary users, almost a virtual computer on top of the Mac environment. It didn't take a lot of time to learn the rudiments of HyperTalk, HyperCard's scripting language, and start creating the miniapplications called "stacks." Naive users could use stacks written by others, and a huge number of these quickly became available. HyperCard was a godsend to educators in particular.
HyperCard had its limitations: It was object based, not object oriented, and it was originally black and white only. But it could have been brought up to date, made to work under OS X, and if that had happened it would still be popular today. In fact, a small but significant number of people still use it, on old Macs or under the Classic environment.
Classic, however, will not run on the new Macintel machines. That would seem to spell the doom of HyperCard, but its fans are not giving up.
The most obvious thing to do would be to create a HyperCard clone. It's been done before: SuperCard, Plus, ToolBook, MetaCard. And Edinburgh-based Revolution (Mike Markkula is an investor) has built on the MetaCard engine to create a powerful multiplatform HyperCard-like product. But it's different enough from HyperCard that some stackheads are still hoping somehow to get HyperCard running on Macintel. A recent baroque proposal involved using Basilisk, a 68K Mac emulator. It makes my head hurt.
DDJ