The history of computers is filled with great transformative ideas that never took off, or sometimes, were even actively sabotaged.

One of those ideas was Hypercard, a “multimedia authoring system” for Mac OS Classic. One way to describe it is like an individual website, contained within a file on your computer, that you could click around and explore. Unlike websites, instead of learning a special language to create documents in it, it has its own creation system that allowed users to wield the Macintosh’s powerful UI to make things.

Hypercard was an early version of several different things. Of course its concept of linking between different “cards” of information was influential to the design of the World Wide Web. Its method of placing controls onto cards and attaching code to them is reminiscent of RAD development environments like Delphi and Visual Basic. And its multimedia capabilities allowed for the creation of full games, the most prominent example of which, of course, is Cyan’s Myst. Hypercard also could be seen as the inspiration, with varying degrees of directness, of a swath of creations ranging from TWINE to alienmelon’s Electric Zine Maker.

But wait! Don’t we live in something rich people call the “free market?” Aren’t superior products supposed to make their creators (and, of course, investors) billions of dollars? Why aren’t we all making Hypercard stacks now, on our Macintosh System 29 computers? Of course: it’s because good things are not necessarily profitable, that corporate politics matter much more than the intrinsic worth of a technology, marketing is grotesquely powerful yet also somehow overvalued, and finally, the World Wide Web came out and essentially did it one better.

Yet Hypercard still has its fans even today. Decker (not Docker), the subject of this post, is a kind of homage to Hypercard made for current OSes. It looks, on purpose, like it’s a program for early versions of Classic Mac OS, with 1-bit graphics and copious use of dithering. Yet despite that it’s still reasonably powerful. So, rediscover the promise of computing circa the late 80s, with Decker.

Decker (itch.io, $0, for Windows, Mac and Linux)

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One piece of the puzzle for getting this insane project working was Linux on Wii; another piece was the fact that the Wii and late versions of Mac OS Classic both use PowerPC processors. It doesn’t work perfectly, but as they say, it’s amazing that the Nintendog talks at all.

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Features a good variety of software including games and productivity, a full-screen mode, built-in networking with friends on the internet by specifying the same subdomain allowing such tricks as online sessions of Marathon, and a fairly easy way of adding your own software.

If you use this and want to keep files between sessions, make sure that you move or copy them to the Saved folder, under The Outside World. Read the purple Sticky for more information on getting files into and out of the emulation.

I find that Classic Mac OS has a power to inspire nostalgia that OS X doesn’t. It might have to do with how so many of its conventions dated back to the original Macintosh release from 1984. Multitasking came to Macintosh after the fact, so when it arrived Mac OS used a cooperative multitasking paradigm, that meant one misbehaving program could bring down the whole machine. Yet the system felt smaller, like there wasn’t as much unfathomable technology between the computer and the user. And I still dig that crisp pixel art used for the icons. It is possible to have too much anti-aliasing.

Infinite Mac’s emulatons of System 6, System 7, Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9 and Japanese System 7.

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