A friend published a love letter to Hypercard in BBC online: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190722-the-apple-software-that-inspired-the-internet

(Reminds me that I need to grab my Mac SE from storage.) One of my favourite things about HC, looking back on it, is that you could edit the tutorial stacks, and they'd stay edited. We didn't have the install disks (bought the Mac used with a 20MB HD which just randomly happened to have HC on it), so after a while, my sister and I had totally vandalized the hell out of those stacks and there was no going back. I count myself among the people for whom HC was the gateway into programming.. though I was also playing with Logo at the same time, so /shrug/

What an amazing mission statement:

>> However, computing has changed since HyperCard’s heyday in the 1990s (it stopped being updated in 1998 and stopped being sold by Apple in 2004). There is a gaping hole in the space of computing, and each of us should feel it deeply. As we go about our daily use of technology, each of us might recognise the need for not-yet-created small tools and applications. But because these are not the kind of things that would be showered with venture funding or become the next Facebook, no one will create them for us. They could help us do our jobs better or make our lives easier or more delightful – imagine being able to build the simple note-taking app you’ve always wanted – but because they are hard for non-programmers to create, we find ourselves forced to dismiss these desires as not available to us. But it needn’t be this way.

As we go about our daily use of technology, each of us might recognise the need for not-yet-created small tools and applications

This is how I always try and sell the superpower of programming to non-tech people. "Did you ever spend 2 hours menially copying text between files in a particular way" etc. My feeling is in the modern ecosystem the "hypercard gap" is between Excel and Python.