The past we carry

One finds a great deal in doing a reorganization of one’s cluttered study.

These two manuals have survived multiple shelf-cleansings over the years. I just can’t throw them away; HyperCard was an amazing program, and I learned to do amazing things with it. Whatever prowess I have with the scripting in Filemaker Pro derives directly from my expertise with HyperCard. (This isn’t surprising, since Filemaker Pro was originally an Apple product and has recently acknowledged that origin by renaming its company Claris Filemaker.)

Like many people of a certain age, my introduction to programming came when my principal bought two Apple ][e’s and plunked them down in my media center without consulting me. “You’ll figure out what to do with them,” he said.

And I did. I bought some educational software for the kids to explore (as well as Zork), and I began to learn AppleSoft BASIC, the extremely basic programming language. Then I started teaching students how to program with it.

The brilliant math teacher Mike Mayhall taught actual programming on a mainframe computer in his classroom, and he and his students — with their stacks of punch cards — sneered at the silly little computers in the media center. Well, he sneered until he actually saw what they were able to do.

I enjoyed that low level of programming. I wrote a couple of Zork-like games, but I also wrote a word processor that could word-wrap; an overdue book fine calculator that also printed out notices; and a card catalog program that allowed you to put in a book’s basic info and it would print the entire set of cards for the catalog. The entire school system used that program until the state automated all the media centers. (Before that, O young ones, we had to type the damn things ourselves. On a typewriter. I had a whole course in it.)

Then the Macintosh computer arrived, and I jumped on HyperCard. I grieved when Apple abandoned it in 1998, and it finally died with the introduction of OS X. I still regret not having a way to retrieve my most popular HyperCard stack, “The Adventure,” which was a choose-your-own-adventure that most often ended with your decision to punch the ogre, resulting with the classic “The ogre tears off your head and eats it. The End.” Good times.

sidebar: I may have found a way. The Internet Archive has a library of HyperCard stacks with an emulator. I have uploaded The Adventure. I’ll report back. If this works, I will be a happy man.

So, no, I will not be tossing these two thick paper manuals that have not been useful for 24 years. I will keep them on my shelf, and my heirs and assigns will have to deal with them.

Now, in a bit of synchronicity, I am heading up to a mountain cabin tomorrow with a fellow Lichtenbergian for a Retreat, and I have chosen as my Effort to work on a checkout system for the Filemaker database of Backstreet Arts’s library.

Thank you, HyperCard.