I feel like this article undersells Hypercard. From my perspective as a young teen BBS kid in the early '90s, everyone and their mother (literally) were making Hypercard stacks. A friend of mine in 9th grade made a Spanish flash card quiz game that got a ton of downloads. My dentist made a stack that tracked patient records and visits and allowed you to click on a tooth on a diagram and enter data about it. There were games, both amateur and professional (MYST is the most famous example). Hypercard really did seem like programming for the people.
By comparison, the early web was much weaker visually, interactively, and programmatically, but the interconnectivity of the web was the killer feature and eventually, the web became the programming platform of the people.
But man, it was really to get up and going with something quickly in Hypercard, and so many of the paradigms that modern web developers are familiar with today, were in place in the late '80s with hypercard. Components, components inside components, components sending and listening to events, programming individual components' behaviors. etc.
My high school had so many classrooms running everything with HyperCard. The most intriguing were decks connected to VCRs to play videos. My computer science teacher had his laserdisc connected to some of his decks. It was amazing what HyperCard was.
By comparison, the early web was much weaker visually, interactively, and programmatically, but the interconnectivity of the web was the killer feature and eventually, the web became the programming platform of the people.
But man, it was really to get up and going with something quickly in Hypercard, and so many of the paradigms that modern web developers are familiar with today, were in place in the late '80s with hypercard. Components, components inside components, components sending and listening to events, programming individual components' behaviors. etc.