HC, a free Mac app, opens original 1987 HyperCard stacks and adds color

I never got over HyperCard. You made a card, put a button on it, and typed a few lines of English-ish script that made the button do something. Most people who touched it in 1987 learned their first scripting language without noticing. Then Apple let it go, and the stacks stayed in old backups and on dead hard drives.

HC, from Patricia Benedetto at Association Labynet, is a native Mac app that opens those original stacks, from 1987 to 1998, without converting them. It runs their HyperTalk scripts. It is free, MIT-licensed, universal for Intel and Apple Silicon, needs macOS 10.13 or later, and runs inside the App Sandbox. The site puts the permissions bluntly: “HC asks for no other right: no network, no microphone, no camera.” For an app that opens files from the 1990s, that is the sentence I wanted to read.

It also adds things the original lacked. There is color, through the backColor, foreColor and textColor properties, plus polygon buttons and a the keysDown function for reading keys. The Tetris demo shows why that matters. The falling piece is “a single polygon button that changes shape at every rotation,” and the board is “a plain text of twenty lines.” Arrow keys or Q and D move the piece, Z rotates, X drops it and the space bar releases it. A game made of one button and twenty lines of text is exactly the sort of silly, clever hack HyperCard was for.

The headline number needs care. The site says: “On a corpus of real stacks, 99.7% of the scripts are accepted.” It doesn’t say which stacks, how many or what “accepted” covers. Accepting a script means the parser doesn’t reject it. It does not mean the stack plays right. I’d use that figure to get excited and the Tetris demo to get evidence.

Credit to the page for the limits. A stack renamed in the Finder keeps its internal name. Some error messages are still in French. A search written as find x in card field "f", with a variable, answers “unknown property.” And several demo stacks need HC 0.8.8 rather than the current version. That list is the part that makes me trust the rest, because someone who hid problems would not have written it down.

The site’s closing line is the one for the poster: “The scripts of 1987 wake up on the Mac of 2026, intact, as if they had only been asleep.” (Hold the applause. I haven’t run a stack yet, so this is the maker’s claim, and I’ve got a floppy in a drawer that deserves a real test.) A trademark note on the page says HyperCard is a trademark of Apple Inc., so HC is a new app that reads the old files rather than a revival of the original.

There’s a practical use beyond nostalgia. Stacks were small databases, quizzes and teaching tools, and some of them exist nowhere else. If a stack from a school project or a long-dead hobby has been sitting in a backup, this is the first free, current way I’ve seen to open it as it was and read what the scripts did. The GitHub repository holds the source and the HC-1.0 release dated Nov. 10, so you can read it before you run it.

A renamed stack keeps its old name.