Ancient Web: HyperCard’s Art Bits Found a Second Life as Tiny PNGs

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Long before every icon came from a downloadable design system, Macintosh users could pull little black-and-white pictures out of Apple's HyperCard examples and turn them into parts of their own interactive projects.

Visit the Art Bits from HyperCard gallery.

The page's creator, mariteaux, explains that Apple shipped sample stacks with HyperCard, a hypermedia environment that combined cards, buttons, graphics, scripts, and links. One of those sample stacks, called Art Bits, contained a large collection of monochrome clip art. Rather than leaving it buried in software few people can easily run now, the author painstakingly extracted more than 700 images and displayed them at their original sizes.

The gallery's categories are a little encyclopedia of old icon ideas: beasts, buildings, communications and media, HyperCard miscellany, Macintosh miscellany, people, transportation, nature and science, and assorted small treasures. There are rows upon rows of tiny pictures that range from practical interface symbols to decorations with no obvious purpose at all.

A thousand interfaces hiding in a pile of pictures

The most revealing feature is the economy of the format. The author says the entire collection, after converting and optimizing the art as PNG files, occupies less than 300 kilobytes. That is an extraordinary density of visual material by the standards of today's large graphical websites, and the simplicity is part of the old artwork's appeal.

This is a modern rescue rather than the original HyperCard distribution. The drawings were extracted from a bundled software stack and rearranged as an HTML document, so the result cannot reproduce the interactive behavior of HyperCard itself. It does preserve the individual artwork in an easily browsable form.

The original program helped ordinary Macintosh users compose interactive documents without starting from blank code. Having such a large collection of reusable drawings mattered: someone could decorate a button, tell a story, or assemble a little game with pictures that already existed.

Some Web preservation efforts focus on saving finished websites. This one saves raw visual ingredients that went into making interactive pages before the Web was widespread.

Browse the extracted HyperCard graphics.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.