HyperCard

Macintosh, 1987. The authoring tools were already installed.

⎈FileEditGoTools

User Preferences

User Level:

When the user level is set at Authoring or Scripting, a new menu title, Objects, appears in the menu bar.

Apple, HyperTalk Beginner's Guide, 1989

Button Info

Button Name: Next

Card button number: 2 Card button ID: 2

Style: Round Rect Show name: yes

Script of card button id 2 = "Next"

Click the buttons. They work.

Field marks: how to spot 1-bit Macintosh

There are no greys. Every shade is a checkerboard of black and white pixels at the pixel level. If you see a flat grey, it is not System 6.
Buttons invert, they do not depress. Pressing fills the whole button solid black and flips the label to white. Three CSS declarations, and it is the entire feel of the machine.
The title bar is horizontal pinstripes, with the title sitting on an opaque white block that knocks a hole in them.
The card is 512 by 342, the full screen of a compact Mac, so the document had no chrome around it at all.
Chicago is a bitmap face. It only looks right at its native size and whole multiples of it.

You just rewrote a control on the page you were reading.

Not in a plugin. Not in a developer account. In a text box that was in the software the whole time, on a machine you already owned, in about four seconds.

The dial did not unlock a purchase. It was already set to whatever you set it to.

What it cost

HyperCard was free on every Mac because Bill Atkinson would only give it to Apple on that condition. Then it was sold, then it was Claris's, then it was nobody's. The last version shipped in 1998 and Apple stopped selling it in March 2004. Ward Cunningham has said the wiki began as a HyperCard stack he wrote in the late 1980s. The idea got out. The dial did not.

Now try it where you are. Look at the buttons in any app you use daily and find the one that opens its script. There isn't one. The Objects menu is on their side of the glass, and you rent access to it.

The problem it solved: becoming an author was a setting, not a product tier.

Back to the directory

Source. The user level wording and the script are Apple's own, from the HyperTalk Beginner's Guide (1989). Chrome measurements are taken from system.css and system7css (both MIT); the card size of 512 by 342 is corroborated by Decker. Type is ChiKareGo2 by Giles Booth (CC BY) with ChicagoFLF by Robin Casady as fallback. This is a recreation, not an emulator.