HyperCard on the OLPC

One of the most amazing things that came on the early Macs was a nifty (and free) program called HyperCard. HyperCard, under the covers, was an amalgam of a relational database and a high-level fairly-object-oriented programming language. On the surface, it appeared to be a rolodex-like stack of 3x5 index cards. Right away, without needing to learn any programming concepts, you could put images, sounds, and text on the cards, link the cards to each other, and even link them to programs outside of HyperCard. It was both very powerful and very intuitive, and a lot of people--especially teachers--went nuts over HyperCard and used it for everything. Thousands and thosands of stacks, some of which were quite sophisticated applications in their own right, were created.

My impression is that Apple management never really understood what HyperCard was or why some of their users were so fanatical about it, and saw it more as an expensive burden that didn't generate revenue rather than a key part of what made a Mac so special. I, like many many others, was quite sad when Apple officially dropped support for HyperCard a few years ago.

To me, HyperCard seems like the ultimate Activity for the OLPC XO. When I first started playing with the eToys Activity, I immediately thought, "Aha! This is a grandchild of HyperCard!". It would be really nifty if all of those old HyperCard stacks could be somehow run on the XO, either directly via some sort of HyperCard clone or stack "player", or by some form of conversion / translation to Squeak or Python or HTML. My guess is that a lot of those educators who were HyperCard fans would get very excited about the XO if they know they can run their old HyperCard stacks on the XO and even create new stacks.

Given the popularity of HyperCard, quite a few clones have popped up over the years. I fully expected to find a Free/Open-Source clone that runs on Linux, and halfway expected to find that said clone is already installed on the OLPC XO. No such luck. It seems as if most of the FOSS clones have either morphed into something else (these descendants can arguably include Wikis, the Web itself, and even Squeak), died, or stalled out. (From what I can tell, the FreeCard /XulCard folks are either still redesigning their project or have stopped work on it.)

There is one FOSS clone that is still chugging along, PythonCard. It is Python-based, runs on Linux, and looks pretty sophisticated. It also looks like a natural fit for the OLPC project. (Note that PythonCard is inspired by HyperCard, it is not a direct clone, so it cannot run HyperCard stacks.) I decided to see how hard it is to get it running on the XO. It ends up that installation is a little rough, but not too bad. Here are the steps I took to get it working to the point that I could play the tic-tac-toe sample "stack":

1. Get networking running on the XO so that 'yum' can download software packages.
2. Start up the Terminal activity.
   
3. Use 'yum' to install wxPython, which is needed by PythonCard; this will install a few packages, totalling about 20 MB.

   sudo yum install wxPython

4. Download the latest version of the (Mandrake) PythonCard RPM from here.
5. PythonCard isn't quite set up to run on Fedora 7 or XO Linux; it really is set up to run on Mandrake (which is a close sibling to Fedora). So PythonCard thinks it needs a software package called "python-base", which, from what I can tell, is mostly the Python stuff that Mandrake needs. So it doesn't exist on Fedora, and I think that PythonCard doesn't really need it; PythonCard just needs Python 2, which is already installed on XO Linux. So when installing the PythonCard RPM, tell it not to worry about dependencies and just go ahead and install.

   sudo rpm -Uvh --nodeps PythonCard*rpm

6. PythonCard currently uses Python 2.4 (there is a recent note on their developer format indicating that they are updating to 2.5). The XO has Python 2.5. So the PythonCard installer puts the PythonCard library in the slightly wrong place. This is easily worked around by created a symbolic link from where the library should go to where it actually is (all on one single line):
   

   sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/PythonCard /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PythonCard
   

7. PythonCard should be ready to run. Go to where the sample "stacks" have been installed and try to run the tic-tac-toe example:
   

   cd /usr/share/PythonCard/samples/tictactoepython
   python ./tictactoe.py
   

The next step is probably to "Activity-ize" PythonCard, so that it can be used without running the Terminal activity. It might be worthwhile to create something equivalent to the HyperCard "home stack" so that XO users can start playing in PythonCard without immediately having to jump into the programming aspects.