Births and Deaths
Commentary by Rob Stevenson
Obituary
Dateline Nov. 10, 2002, Silly Con Valley - DisApple today announced that HyperCard, once the darling of Macintosh developers, would no longer be produced or supported. This came as no surprise to those developers since HyperCard has languished in Apple limbo since October of 1998 when its entire development team was transferred to work on QuickTime. (Quicktime was once the market leader in multimedia playback, but got cought up in the backlash a couple of years ago against computers as toys. It is now used only in DisApple's line of animated cartoons.)
In making the announcement, Steve Jobs, DisApple Interim-CEO-for-life, said that he had entirely forgotten about HyperCard until just recently when he bumped into HyperCard creator Bill Atkinson's car in the parking lot of a local mall. When he recovered conciousness Steve asked Bill what he'd been doing lately. Bill said he'd been mourning the death of HyperCard and wasn't getting much photography done because of that. Steve said, "Doh!" and ran off to get DisApple VP of Everything Ross Perot to write up the news release.
News of the death of HyperCard hit the HyperCard community hard. All eleven developers still using old versions of the product have been burning up the net with cross posted wailing and gnashing of teeth, and have agreed to band together to create a memorial to HyperCard at the old HyperCard Heaven web site, appropriately enough. Said long-suffering HyperCard Heaven creator James Step, "It's the least we could do." Jacqueline Landman Gay of HyperActive Software is to write the eulogy. Other messages of condolence are expected from Danny Goodman, who literally wrote the book on HyperCard, Chris Espinosa, Scott Kamins and Jeanne DeVoto. Dan Winkler, creator of HyperTalk, and Scott Knaster are expected to contribute recipes.
Birth Notice
Dateline Nov. 10, 2002, Silly Con Valley - DisApple today announced the release of version X.5 of HyperOS, the number two operating system for personal computers. Based on the original HyperCard/HyperTalk code, so highly optimized you could create anything you wanted on even a 4Mb Mac Plus, HyperOS X.5 seems destined to continue DisApple's rise to the top of the computer world. Its sole competitor, MicroOS, is still struggling to release its flagship Win2000 operating system in a more or less bug free form. Saddled with mounting debts because of a recall of more than 100 million copies of the last release because of Y2K bugs, they admit they don't know if there will ever be a successful Win2000 release. Consequently, worried PC users are moving in droves to the stable and powerful HyperOS platform, which now runs on almost any hardware, but runs best on DisApple's own semi-transparent work'n'play stations.
Recently billionaires Bill Atkinson and Dan Winkler, creators of respectively HyperCard and HyperTalk as well as owners of the rights to most of the HyperOS code, met with Danny Goodman, seemingly author of all the books on HyperCard, to map out a new tome. Expected to be large enough to fill a small car, it will be the everything book about HyperOS. As usual, you can pay for it and download it online. However, entire forests are expected to be depleted as users print it out, despite the best efforts of conservationists to get people to use flat screen readers.
Retired trillionaire Bill Gates, co-founder of MicroOS's precursor Microsoft, said from his palatial rooms on the Space Station II, "I've always admired and respected the folks at DisApple, and I always knew they'd figure out a way to beat us eventually. Back in that critical 1998/99 period, when Apple decided to keep HyperCard alive, I knew something was up. I just didn't know it'd be the beginning of such a powerful change."