JawnCon put its conference schedule inside an emulated Macintosh Plus

JawnCon, Philadelphia’s hacker conference, built this year’s schedule as a HyperCard stack and ran it “in a Macintosh Plus, in a 68k emulator in your browser,” according to the event’s schedule page, with a plain web version beside it for anyone in a hurry. The schedule site is offline now that the con is over; the Internet Archive kept a copy of the page.

HyperCard is an odd pick for 2026, and the page said what makes it special. It said HyperCard “was released in 1987 and predates the World Wide Web and JavaScript,” and that its scripting language, HyperTalk, later influenced the design of AppleScript.

The conference behind it is growing. JawnCon 0x3 ran October 16 to 18 at Arcadia University, according to its own site, a day longer than last year’s two-day 0x2. Its schedule listed 29 talks across two stages, on everything from board games to paging in 2026. Tickets were $100, free for students with a .edu email address, and the streams from both stages are on JawnCon’s YouTube channel for anyone who couldn’t get to Arcadia University.

The badge followed the same retro idea. Its user manual calls it “a 4-digit calculator with a built-in touch-tone (DTMF) generator, a handful of hidden games, a serial menu for customizing it, and a wired link for connecting to other badges.” It runs on an ATmega328P-P, the manual walks you through soldering it, and JawnCon posted STL and 3MF files to print your own case.

If you missed it, the talks are the part that keeps. Start with the YouTube streams, then read the badge manual even if you never held one.

A 1987 app ran a 2026 conference’s schedule, and it did it in a browser tab.