8 ms·

Andy Hertzfeld recollects how Macintosh team dissected the new IBM PC and what they thought of donkey.bas: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macinto

by Jerry2 10y ago

Andy Hertzfeld recollects how Macintosh team dissected the new IBM PC and what they thought of donkey.bas: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Donkey.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

dingo_bat 10y ago
Wow, that's a salty article!
- ebbv 10y ago
  I don't think salty is the right word. Salt implies some kind of frustration and I don't think that's accurate here. I'd call it an honest, judgmental article.
  - segmondy 10y ago
    salty is slang for "envious"
    - o0-0o 10y ago
      "Throwing salt" can also be used to mean "casting dispersions", as it were. I think the article tosses a bunch of salt towards Bill Gates, but who knows what the motivation was. I'm guess when properly confused, you might just throw some salt for luck, and end up looking salty yourself. :) Edit: I'm talking about the author throwing salt, not any of the posters here.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
        I have to do this! I believe you mean "casting aspersions."
  - HemanHeartYou 10y ago
    I always considered salty to mean the act of being bitter or resentful.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I know i'll invite shit for this, but "cult of the mac" is a term...
WayneBro 10y ago
Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.
- MawNicker 10y ago
  Meh. Sort of. He mostly sounds like someone with experience on both platforms who is surprised by the dominance of the one that he considers inferior. His prominence as a developer isn't relevant. I trust that his ability is sufficient and that his experience with the platforms is actual. He is a suitable person to comment on the contrast between them.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    Many people did dump on the PC as inferior, but it was a marvelous platform for tinkerers of every sort, and tinker they did. The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom. Programmers were utterly amazed by Doom. Nobody had thought that was possible on the PC hardware. The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom. Huh? Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system. The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's C/C++ compiler was used. (Wikipedia)
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        People were amazed at it running on the PC, and running very well.
lanevorockz 10y ago
Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z80s that costed a fraction and were as good for games.
- spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
  The IBM wasn't cheap when it came out - when comapared to a PET or Apple ][ I recall working on a Grey Import IBP Pc in the UK - Our electronics shop built an inverter to convert 240v to 110.
- kabdib 10y ago
  The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck. Decent sound on the PC finally became real and relatively well adopted in the early 1990s. On the PC there were a lot of fights about standard ways to do things that just worked on the Mac: Memory expansion (that was a whole industry right there), graphics, networking, mice. Even the CPU needed a turbo button to work correctly. Just about the only piece of the PC that universally worked and didn't beg for improvement was the keyboard. So you can argue that the "crappy PC" spawned a bunch of industries to fix things, while the Mac, which was a lot closer to perfection, only spawned small businesses to satisfy niche needs. Apple nearly died in the 1990s because the alternatives finally caught up to them, a decade later, and Apple couldn't satisfy the computing industry alone. Still can't, doesn't try. But I had a PC (256K, two floppies) and I had a Mac, and I sold the Mac because I couldn't develop software on it without going crazy (early Mac development was pretty painful; at one point I was seriously considering FORTH, and I hate FORTH).
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    The PC was much more used as a replacement for things previously done by minicomputers, at least in my field of vision. Just the differential in cost made for quite a business model.
dahart 10y ago
That's an interesting piece of history, and certainly demonstrates a little bit of the competitive atmosphere, if nothing else. Donkey was a 'hello world' of graphics with basic, it wasn't a game. Even as a kid, playing it never lasted more than a few seconds. Critiquing it as though it's a serious game gives this code too much credit and makes Hertzfeld look bad too- taking it seriously is almost as funny to me as the game is. For what it is, a code example, having a better game would have detracted significantly from it's value.

by Jerry2 10y ago

dingo_bat 10y ago

Wow, that's a salty article!

ebbv 10y ago
I don't think salty is the right word. Salt implies some kind of frustration and I don't think that's accurate here. I'd call it an honest, judgmental article.
- segmondy 10y ago
  salty is slang for "envious"
  - o0-0o 10y ago
    "Throwing salt" can also be used to mean "casting dispersions", as it were. I think the article tosses a bunch of salt towards Bill Gates, but who knows what the motivation was. I'm guess when properly confused, you might just throw some salt for luck, and end up looking salty yourself. :) Edit: I'm talking about the author throwing salt, not any of the posters here.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
      I have to do this! I believe you mean "casting aspersions."
- HemanHeartYou 10y ago
  I always considered salty to mean the act of being bitter or resentful.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
digi_owl 10y ago
I know i'll invite shit for this, but "cult of the mac" is a term...

WayneBro 10y ago

Andy Hertzfeld sounds like a sore loser. Why should anyone care what he thinks about games? Macs suck for games and they always have. Every piece of software he's written has been a second rate failure.

MawNicker 10y ago
Meh. Sort of. He mostly sounds like someone with experience on both platforms who is surprised by the dominance of the one that he considers inferior. His prominence as a developer isn't relevant. I trust that his ability is sufficient and that his experience with the platforms is actual. He is a suitable person to comment on the contrast between them.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Many people did dump on the PC as inferior, but it was a marvelous platform for tinkerers of every sort, and tinker they did. The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom. Programmers were utterly amazed by Doom. Nobody had thought that was possible on the PC hardware. The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom. Huh? Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system. The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's C/C++ compiler was used. (Wikipedia)
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      People were amazed at it running on the PC, and running very well.

lanevorockz 10y ago

Agree with the article, the code is not to be proud of. One thing about the Macintosh, it was better but the price was way higher. Most people stayed with the z80s that costed a fraction and were as good for games.

spacecowboy_lon 10y ago
The IBM wasn't cheap when it came out - when comapared to a PET or Apple ][ I recall working on a Grey Import IBP Pc in the UK - Our electronics shop built an inverter to convert 240v to 110.
kabdib 10y ago
The Mac folks understood a lot more about personal computers than the IBM folks. For instance, the graphics hardware on the Mac wasn't much to write home about, but the PC's graphics was unbelievable garbage that had no hope of performing well (it probably set back GUI development on the PC by five years). The Mac's sound wasn't great, but the PC had a speaker hooked to a TTL port, with the same engineering sophistication as the backup alarm on a garbage truck. Decent sound on the PC finally became real and relatively well adopted in the early 1990s. On the PC there were a lot of fights about standard ways to do things that just worked on the Mac: Memory expansion (that was a whole industry right there), graphics, networking, mice. Even the CPU needed a turbo button to work correctly. Just about the only piece of the PC that universally worked and didn't beg for improvement was the keyboard. So you can argue that the "crappy PC" spawned a bunch of industries to fix things, while the Mac, which was a lot closer to perfection, only spawned small businesses to satisfy niche needs. Apple nearly died in the 1990s because the alternatives finally caught up to them, a decade later, and Apple couldn't satisfy the computing industry alone. Still can't, doesn't try. But I had a PC (256K, two floppies) and I had a Mac, and I sold the Mac because I couldn't develop software on it without going crazy (early Mac development was pretty painful; at one point I was seriously considering FORTH, and I hate FORTH).
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  The PC was much more used as a replacement for things previously done by minicomputers, at least in my field of vision. Just the differential in cost made for quite a business model.

dahart 10y ago

That's an interesting piece of history, and certainly demonstrates a little bit of the competitive atmosphere, if nothing else. Donkey was a 'hello world' of graphics with basic, it wasn't a game. Even as a kid, playing it never lasted more than a few seconds. Critiquing it as though it's a serious game gives this code too much credit and makes Hertzfeld look bad too- taking it seriously is almost as funny to me as the game is. For what it is, a code example, having a better game would have detracted significantly from it's value.