Matthew Lasar for Ars Technica:

This month, I glanced at my historical watch. HyperCard will soon be 25, I noticed. What ever happened to it? I searched around and found venture entrepreneur and coder Tim Oren’s 2004 eulogy for the program, written the week that Apple withdrew the software from the market. HyperCard’s problem, he argued, was that Apple never quite figured out what the software was for.

HyperCard, for the uninitiated, was an early software app for the Mac created by Apple programmer Bill Atkinson that enabled users to create stacks which could contain everything from fields of data to pictures, buttons which could execute scripts and more. Part database software, part multimedia system, the software predicted hyperlinking on Web pages and many techniques that we take for granted today.