There's the complexity difference, for sure. But the thing that's standing out to me right at the moment is the fact that the mac I got in 1991 just assumed I was going to use HyperCard. The same way the one I got in 2015 assumed I was going to want to use Keynote or Numbers.
HyperCard was a weird beast. While it was a programming tool, it wasn't the kind of programming tool people who programmed for a living were, by and large, using to build the applications they were selling.
(Make no mistake. Some did build the applications they sold with HyperCard. I built and sold one that way. See also Myst.) The tools that currently come free with any OS X license (or Windows, in the case of VS community editions, the sdk, and VS Code) are the tools that real working programmers use to build the things they sell. And it's real working programmers that pick those tools up.
The spirit I remember for HyperCard was: you have this computer now. You're going to want to program it. Here's a thing that does that. The business end was absent. People bought computers to create things, and one of the things you'd create is a program.
And, just to be clear, I'm not waxing nostalgic for 90s programming. Programming and the tooling that enables it are clearly better in pretty much every way now for people who know they want to do that.
I'm nostalgic for this bit of programming tooling that was intended for non-programmers and is now quite obscure. (See: livecode) That is unfortunate because much of its virtue used to lie in the fact that it was just __there__ by default when you fired up a new computer.
HyperCard was a weird beast. While it was a programming tool, it wasn't the kind of programming tool people who programmed for a living were, by and large, using to build the applications they were selling.
(Make no mistake. Some did build the applications they sold with HyperCard. I built and sold one that way. See also Myst.) The tools that currently come free with any OS X license (or Windows, in the case of VS community editions, the sdk, and VS Code) are the tools that real working programmers use to build the things they sell. And it's real working programmers that pick those tools up.
The spirit I remember for HyperCard was: you have this computer now. You're going to want to program it. Here's a thing that does that. The business end was absent. People bought computers to create things, and one of the things you'd create is a program.
And, just to be clear, I'm not waxing nostalgic for 90s programming. Programming and the tooling that enables it are clearly better in pretty much every way now for people who know they want to do that.
I'm nostalgic for this bit of programming tooling that was intended for non-programmers and is now quite obscure. (See: livecode) That is unfortunate because much of its virtue used to lie in the fact that it was just __there__ by default when you fired up a new computer.