SuperCard may have gone extinct.

[richmond62]

Until a few weeks ago it was easy to apply for and download a SuperCard demo: now the SuperCard website seems to have vanished:

https://supercard.us/lander

[tperry2x]

I'd like to hope they are updating it...
However, clicking on 'Privacy policy' reveals 'Go Daddy' privacy policy:

supercard-site.png (51.35 KiB) Viewed 6103 times

To my logic, this implies that's a Go Daddy holding page for the domain, rather than Supercard's privacy policy.
If it is indeed a Go Daddy holding page, perhaps the hosting hasn't been renewed (which could just be an oversight).

expired.png (32.84 KiB) Viewed 6088 times

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I'd like to hope they are updating it...

Me too, last I heard some people associated with SuperCard were working on updating it, but it's been a long time and it still doesn't run on anything newer than macOS 10.14 Mohave.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

The site is still a domain place-holder page.

[FourthWorld]

Mark Lucas posted a tool in the forums to help those who need to install on different machines.

No word yet on when the server will be restored, but he's aware of the situation.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Sad news...
Due to the passing of

Scott Simon, owner of Solutions Etcetera, in April 2024, the SuperCard web site and that of its parent company were taken down.

So the first xTalk/xCard that wasn't HyperCard has indeed gone extinct.
I wonder who holds the source code and if they're willing to donate it to the public? It probably wouldn't do us much good, since on the one platform it did support that engine was never updated for 64bit intel (let alone Apple Silicon), but just for curiosity / history sake.

[FourthWorld]

Mark Lucas is now the sole owner of the SuperCard code base, and has been exploring options for updating it. Nothing definitive yet. As you can imagine, at the moment he has other concerns.

[richmond62]

Somewhere along the way SuperCard 'dropped the baton' (which, arguably, was picked up by Runtime Revolution): the fact that in 2002 version 4.0 was released, and that version 4.8 became available in 2023 argues fr a long period of stagnation.

From a semantic/semiotic point of view SuperCard is more like Homo Neanderthalis than Homo Habilis insofar as RR/LC is a linear descendant of HC and MC,while SC went for a different way of achieving the same result ( one could argue that 'yon stour mon' with HyperNext has produced something nearer to SuperCard than LC.

https://preserve.mactech.com/content/so ... -version-0

https://web.archive.org/web/20231231172 ... ercard.us/

if you feel that running a 'pirate' version of SuperCard on your PPC Mac is not going to send your psyche into nonstop mental backflips
you can get 'something' here:

http://www.macintoshrepository.org/11298-supercard-4-x

[If you are as daft as me and run 1+ PPC Macs then, frankly, pirating early versions of SuperCard should win you kudos rather than opprobium.]

Oh,and why, forbye, did this thing tell me that both 'opprobium' and 'forbye' were spelt in a dicky way?

Uncle Richmond pompously says: "It's technically illegal, so ONLY use it for messing around,and learning, in the privacy of your own bedroom."

[richmond62]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCard

Some oik has been 'presuming':

SuperCard was a high-level development environment

I made that 'was' big and threatening.

They have gone all mealy-mouthed just like my Granny from Dundee:

As a result of the passing of Scott Simon, co-owner of Solutions Etcetera, in April 2024

Simon Scott died, and sad as that undoubtedly is, a spade is a spade not a "decayed vegetation relocator", and no-one "passes' (where do they pass to?), they die.

I do hope that Mark Lucas will either:

1. Sort out a 64-bit Mac build.

or

2. Make the source code freely available so that people can look, learn, emulate, and 'nick' ideas.

[richmond62]

The clear turning point in SuperCard's commercial viability was Solutions Etcetera's decision not to follow Apple's development roadmap.

Just so.

The are 2 ways forward which I have listed in the previous post.

#2 could be modified to making the source code available under some sort of open source licence.

[FourthWorld]

The clear turning point in SuperCard's commercial viability was Solutions Etcetera's decision not to follow Apple's development roadmap.

Thank you for bringing the inaccurate writing on that page to my attention. I'll discuss an update to that content with Mark Lucas soon.

[richmond62]

It is a pity that we probably have no way of knowing who edited that Wikipedia page.

[FourthWorld]

It is a pity that we probably have no way of knowing who edited that Wikipedia page.

As a public resource, Wikipedia does a fair job of balancing privacy with editorial accountability.

Mods to that page are listed in the History view:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... on=history

It seems most of the recent edits were from one user, likely well-intended but sadly uninformed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:C ... ns/Cadwego

[richmond62]

Presumably ALL 'Cadwego' meant by that statement is that SC didn't produce a 64-bit version.

The thing that I wonder about is that when MetaCard demonstrated that (at the time) there was an appetite for xTalk outwith the Macintosh universe, SC did not produce a Windows version (at the least).

[FourthWorld]

The thing that I wonder about is that when MetaCard demonstrated that (at the time) there was an appetite for xTalk outwith the Macintosh universe, SC did not produce a Windows version (at the least).

To want something is much easier than to have it.

With Mac market share at the time as low as 2.2% globally, the need for a Windows version was self-evident. You could hardly read anything about Apple in the press at the time without the company name preceded with "beleaguered".

MetaCard didn't even figure into it; back then it was Unix only, few in the Mac or Windows worlds even knew about it. But everyone knew about Director, and how well Adobe was doing after their Windows port.

After Silicon Beach Software assets were acquired by Aldus to form what became Aldus Consumer Division, Aldus CEO Paul Brainerd (can't make these names up ) couldn't figure out what to do with SuperCard, being not quite a consumer tool of the sort that SuperPaint and Personal Press were. So Aldus did nothing, no major updates for years.

After repeated outcry from the community, a new company was formed and acquired SC from Aldus to become Allegiant Technologies.

How that acquisition was announced is another worthy story in itself, but the outcome seemed at the time the best of all possibilities: the new company was staffed with most of the original SC team, and financed solidly with one goal: make it the best it can be, and that includes a Windows version.

But then reality happened. Exactly why that mission never got farther than a preview build includes too many factors to list here, all meaningfully relevant, a sort of perfect storm for mission failure, where any single element might have been overcome had it not been for the others.

I could write a book about that, and now and then I think about doing so, if the number of readers who care numbered more than a few hundred.

After years of reflection and recovery (the closure of Allegiant and the end of the Windows port nearly cost me my business, the closure settlement cost all of us contractors 90% of monies owed, and I lost all of the value of the stock I'd had), if there was a single element that stands out as a transferrable lesson learned, it is this:

Hire the people most passionate about your mission.

While the Mac team was comprised of xTalk veteranos (to use a fitting phrase from mi barrio), the Windows engineers were merely competent, and their team leader knowledgeable about software production in general but knew little about SC before he was hired.

Passion is a human performance multiplier.

And given the other factors making the task difficult (chiefly that SC was designed from its core to be a glove carefully tailored to fit the hand of the Mac Toolbox), a human performance multiplier was needed to pull off the Windows port.

Having only competency instead, the port dragged on until investors were eventually forced to reconsider continually pouring money into it without shipping.

I was there in the final days, my last train trip to their offices spent helping them pack boxes.

So the lesson for company owners has held me in good stead all the years since: hire for passion first, as everything else can be taught.

And there's a lesson for consumers and third party devs that has also proven its worth as time rolls by:

Like SuperCard for Windows, the only software that materially exists is a final shipping product.

Everything before that is just an idea, and every bit as ephemeral.

With any vendor in any industry, I barely notice product announcements, and generally ignore demoes.

The HyperCard 3.0 demo from WWDC '98 was very exciting. Oh boy, merging HC with QuickTime for cross-platform GUI richness. Apple was investing in beyond our wildest dreams. Oh the thrill of that demo!

HC was killed months later.

I live a simple life: until a software is in my hands as a shipping product, it's just an idea. The world is full of ideas, and I need to get work done today with tools that exist.

If it shows up later, I'll look at it then, when it's in my hands.

The Osborne II was a very exciting product announcement, so exciting people stopped buying the Osborne I. Starved for resources as a result of overinvestment in the future at the cost of the living present, the company folded before the new model ever shipped.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

How that acquisition was announced is another worthy story in itself, but the outcome seemed at the time the best of all possibilities: the new company was staffed with most of the original SC team, and financed solidly with one goal: make it the best it can be, and that includes a Windows version.

I read a post on the SC group recently from one of the SC Devs ( Mark Lucas probably) that said they didn't have all of the source code for SuperEdit and they were relying on executing code in binary blobs.

[tperry2x]

Does that essentially mean they have 'lost' access to the source the binaries were created from?
That sounds a bit familiar.

[richmond62]

Very queer indeed as I understood that the source code for SC was co-owned by 2 people, one who died.

Under those circumstances I would have expected BOTH owners to have had backup copies of the source code.

[FourthWorld]

I read a post on the SC group recently from one of the SC Devs ( Mark Lucas probably) that said they didn't have all of the source code for SuperEdit and they were relying on executing code in binary blobs.

If you were a Silicon Beach Software fan you might recognize chunks of SuperPaint in SuperEdit. My understanding is that when Allegiant was formed they got all of SC's code, but not the portions that came from SuperPaint.