Retro But Nice...

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Well, the book pictured finally turned up today - "HyperTalk 2.0: The Book". I first bought a copy of this back when it came out in 1990, and like a lot of tech text books, it got lost along the way as HyperCard became less and less used until it more or less faded away, except in the annals and stockrooms of the vintage geek fraternity, who, thank God, preserve just about anything and everything that no longer has currency in the tech world. As I've mentioned before [blog posts passim], I inherited an old 9" B&W Mac Classic after JC died five years ago, which has a version of HyperCard installed on its tiny hard drive - tiny in capacity, that is, the thing's a full-size SCSI [Google it] old-skool jobby.

I've been pondering creating a Zettelkasten [cf. blog post passim] on the thing, for some time, in HyperCard, as it would seem structurally to render itself suitable to the task. That idea bubbled back to the surface the other week, so I decided to try and find a copy of the HyperTalk language reference of yore on the net: which I did and duly ordered. And here we are, thirty-three years later, in my late sixties, and flipping through the very reference volume I used in my thirties, to write scripts for HyperCard stacks to make them perform more and more interesting stuff for real-world practical projects. I suppose I could have downloaded a PDF of the book and used that: or even a Kindle version; but it just wouldn't have been the same. Keep you posted...

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