Thus begins the story of how I paid my bills for a few months by writing a pseudorelational database in HyperCard for a company that puts ads in public restrooms, and may have become the first person to write a dedicated bathroom ad tracking system.
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Forty years ago, more or less, about the time HyperCard was really starting to become known, I was working on Music Row in Nashville, TN, for a shady guy who ran a used equipment store and had a studio for rent upstairs. Graffiti came round for an unrelated reason, I don’t remember why they were there, it was a long time ago, but the conversation came round to their struggles to do the weekly update report. They’d gotten a quote from someone who wanted to use 4D, a full on relational DB, but it was going to cost them a lot and they’d have to pay license fees for 4D as it was not purchasable software. I offered to write the same basic system in HyperCard for a bit less than the up front cost, and pointed out that they would own the software outright, and never have to pay license fees on it. I ended up leaving shady guy’s shop and going independent as a HyperCard dev, right before he punched out a lawyer at a bar and the shop was closed because the owner was in jail for assault.
More as I have time. I’ll get into the details of the stack construction and so on.
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I’m really excited to hear more. It sounds like you had a lot of fun.