Over the Memorial Day weekend, I’ve been squaring away some of the backup procedures that keep our personal documents, photos, music, and websites all backed up to large external hard disks in the basement. I wanted to confirm I had copy/pasted old diary entries into our family blog from a HyperCard stack I built in 1991 to record events. In doing that, I discovered a second diary called “Diary PB.” The PB stood for “PowerBook.” When I got my first Mac laptop, I started recording diary entries in a second copy.

I found much of 1992 and 1993 recorded in there which included our move from Hancock to Rae, living with Mom and Dad for a month, and the preparation and arrival of Kelly! The two girls each came down to check on me late at night in the basement because I was laughing so hard and some of these entries… especially “The Bucket Man” and the famous story of the little old man.

Click on the thumbnail to see how big a 9″ b&w Mac screen was. It was in that small square that I did a lot of writing and sometimes small sketches drawn with a mouse. I built the stack from scratch using HyperScript for programming. The buttons include: 1: Lock/unlock so text would not be accidentally deleted. 2: Search 3: Create new entry 4: Home for other stacks 5: Quit to the Finder 6: Sort stack by date 7: Print. At the bottom was a font size toggle for easier reading, an author toggle (Kathy and Nicole sometimes wrote entries.) In this example I have a button that links to a related entry… the hyperlink of the day. I also drew a small illustration using the built-in painting capability.

I want to get all of the text, images, and even sounds out of the HyperCard stacks into the blog, because there will come a day when I will not be able to user HyperCard. This very innovative software was long ago abandoned by Apple. It will only run under OS9. Only our oldest Mac can still run OS9 (under OSX Tiger in emulation.)