HyperCard’s 25th Anniversary
Of all the things I have worked on at Apple, HyperCard changed me most. It was deeply revolutionary, deeply misunderstood, deeply controversial. I have never had to fight Apple internal organizations so much, or received so much amazing support, on any other project. The Apple of 1986 and 1987 was still reeling from the departure of Steve Jobs, yet trying to claw its way back to relevance and success through execution, and HyperCard was seen as a hangover of the Steve era. It was a skunkworks project, written entirely off-campus, out of the normal management chain. The Engineering group didn’t want to spend resources on it. Evangelism thought that bundling it with every Mac would complicate our delicate relationships with software vendors. And nobody could really explain what it did or why we needed to do it.
