HyperCard is a popular hypertext system first released free of charge to all Apple Macintosh system owners in 1987. It evolved from Xerox PARC's Notecards system, and uses metaphors of cards and stacks. Cards have backgrounds, fields, button, and can accomodate multimedia objects. The HyperTalk scripting language provides English-like control through an object-oriented mechanism. X-commands allow use of C and other programs for more special operations, including controlling multimedia peripherals or computation-intensive activities like sorting, indexing, searching, or database processing.