7 ms·

Wow, the fact that Mac OS Classic did not even have a command line interface really baffles me. I looked it up and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18646286

by ktpsns 8y ago

Wow, the fact that Mac OS Classic did not even have a command line interface really baffles me. I looked it up and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18646286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18646286 - it seems to be true. It's ironic that in 2018, the terminal is more prominent then ever in any developer scene (thinking only of package managers for diverse programming languages), while in the 90s somehow people thought the GUI could solve all problems, not only for the novices but also for computer experts.

aequitas 8y ago
I remember vaguely having to create a bootable floppy for an old os9 installation. It had to be done by dragging a system file from the OS onto the floppy in a special way which is termed "Blessing".
- saagarjha 8y ago
  You can now do this from the command line using bless(8).
chubot 8y ago
It's indeed interesting how important the command line is now. You might like this mini-book / essay by Neal Stephenson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co... It examines the issue of GUIs vs. command line interfaces, among other things. I'm pretty sure there is an anecdote there that says that Mac OS did have a hidden command line? It was only for Apple engineers, not for end users, but it was there. I'd appreciate a pointer if anyone remembers.
- bboreham 8y ago
  The Macintosh Programmers Workbench (MPW), the first IDE for Mac, had a command-line with a simple shell. When I used it in 1986 it really needed a big machine, i.e. 512K RAM :-)
  - yourapostasy 8y ago
    MPW had an interesting way to ease GUI-centric users into its CLI-centric world. There was a mode you could trigger for commands that brought up a help-oriented GUI for the command to build the command argument list, which would then echo onto the command line. Depending upon who built the GUI, it was usually a less terse and friendlier help for new users than AIX's SMIT, for those who are familiar with that. I sometimes wish there was an open source equivalent like that for Linux , but with live, interactive building of the command as the GUI options were manipulated so new users could get a feel for commands more readily. This would act as an intermediate help system for casual users that is friendlier than manpages, and more immediate than searching around the Net. [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1360-macintosh-programmer-s-workshop-mpw-3-0-to-3-5 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1360-macintosh-programme...
    - int_19h 8y ago
      > There was a mode you could trigger for commands that brought up a help-oriented GUI for the command to build the command argument list, which would then echo onto the command line. This still lives on in a sense. For example, in VSCode, many UI commands translate to executing shell code in its internal terminal (and you can see both the commands and the output).
  - chubot 8y ago
    Thanks, I'm pretty sure that's what Stephenson mentioned in his essay / book.
chongli 8y ago
Yes, classic Mac OS truly did not have a command line interface of any kind. As a consequence, everything your application did must have had a GUI command or preference corresponding to it. Command line interfaces are powerful, yes, but they're also a crutch. It's very easy to hide certain features by exposing them only through command line flags or what have you. On classic Mac OS you could not do this; you needed to attach every feature to a GUI control of some kind. As a consequence, people came up with all kinds of GUI tools for pro/expert users. Linux, comparison, treats GUI users as second class citizens and tends to relegate them to only the most basic functionality.
- ktpsns 8y ago
  Well, I was too young to really explore classic Mac OS at that time. But from my feeling, the unixoidity of Mac OS X was really a blessing for the hacking community. So there definetly was a need.
  - chongli 8y ago
    Oh don't get me wrong, I live in the terminal these days. It's immensely satisfying to whip up a quick bash or Perl script to solve a problem. That being said, I believe the reliance Unix command line tools has made this computing power inaccessible to ordinary users. In some sense, I think it has deepened the digital divide.
    - laumars 8y ago
      You could still do scripting akin to Bash scripts on OS 7 and above via AppleScript[1]; which worked a little bit like WSH did on Windows. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript
      - chongli 8y ago
        Yes, and I'm an old fan of AppleScript as well. The difference, as far as I know, is that you couldn't hide core application functionality behind that API, could you? If you could, I think most developers didn't, since AppleScript isn't a default means of using the computer the way Unix shells are.
boomlinde 8y ago
It's worth considering what about command line interfaces makes them useful, who they are useful for and whether Mac OS offered an analogous interface somehow that fit the bill for their users. For me, the main gain of using a shell is that you can easily automate and document workflows. Apple added this to System 7 with AppleScript, to some extent. I haven't used AppleScript, so I have no idea of how successful it was to this end, but it does seem to cover some surface that would traditionally be in the domain of a command line shell. Apple released their GUI operating system to consumers before most competitors had anything like it. Rough contemporaries in the GUI consumer OS space, in the mid-80s through the 90s almost all had some kind of command line interface. The addition of AppleScript was probably a response to this, while trying to stay true to Jobs' and Raskin's idea of the Macintosh as a "computer appliance".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
PurpleRamen 8y ago
Well, to be fair, GUIS can be powerful commandlines, to the point that they even satisfy most experts. But it needs more work, and you either end up using textinput anyway, or have a slightly worst performing interface. So at the end most invest into the simple solution. With the raise of HTML5 & Electron and their simplicity for creating powerful GUIs and AI-Speech-Driven interfaces we might be again reach somewhere in the next decades the point where Keyboard-interfaces are in decline. And if the AI overlords take over whe don't have any need for complicated interfaces anyway.
flohofwoe 8y ago
IFIR, Win3.1 didn't have a command line either, you had to exit Windows completely back to DOS. IMHO the Amiga offered the best of both worlds at that time (except for expensive UNIX workstations). On one hand you had a modern windowing UI, and a real multitasking OS. On the other hand you had terminal windows with a command line interface that was slightly different to UNIX, but close enough to be enjoyable. Later in the life of the Amiga it became standard that UI applications provided standardized scripting interfaces (via AREXX), so you could write complex automation tasks that glued together all sorts of UI- and command-line-programs. In a way this was a lot more advanced than anything that's available on Windows or Linux today, since it wasn't limited to a few applications that all live in their own isolated world.
- np_tedious 8y ago
  I think Windows 3.1 did have one. Accessible at command.com Here's the best source I could dig up https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/windows-command-prompt-introduction/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/windows-command-p...
  - chungy 8y ago
    Windows 1.x-3.x didn't really have a command line, the window you use to run command.com was for DOS programs only. Windows programs didn't have a text mode to utilize it. Windows NT's console window was properly accessible to Windows programs, as well as DOS compatibility. Windows 95/98/Me inherited limited forms of text-mode compatibility from NT.
    - einr 8y ago
      the window you use to run command.com was for DOS programs only. This is not strictly true. You could launch Windows programs from the DOS box. If you tried to run something like PBRUSH.EXE from true DOS you would get "This program requires Windows" but in a DOS box it would detect that Windows was running and launch the program. I think it is true that there were no Windows-only command line apps though.
pjmlp 8y ago
I use my package managers from within Eclipse and Visual Studio. The builtin IDE REPLs are pretty good and more powerful than plain old style UNIX CLI. Usually I use the cli when I have to, not by choice.
mjlee 8y ago
AppleScript existed on System 7 - I used to use it like a very limited command line (scripting common activities and complex workflows.) The fun thing about it was that you were essentially interfacing with the GUI. Everything was incredibly discoverable - if you knew something was possible then it was almost always obvious how to do it in AppleScript.
rconti 8y ago
Wow, the fact that this is baffling to someone is, in turn, baffling to me! I don't mean this to be insulting, it's just one of those generational things. It hadn't occurred to me that someone (someone who cares about CLIs, at least) wouldn't know this. It might be informative to step back and point out that this is why so many of "us" originally disliked Macs; before the "walled garden" of iOS, before even the walled garden of needing iTunes to load music onto your iPod, there was the GUI-only MacOS. Now, those in the know could dramatically alter Mac OS with Resedit, but I wasn't a "Mac guy", so I never really knew anything about it; I hated a locked down OS that only let you do things you could click on. It was such a step forward to many of us hobbyists that OS X was based on Unix, and suddenly we had the best of both worlds -- a good GUI and a good CLI. Suddenly Windows was no longer the commercial OS that let you "do whatever you wanted" with it (relatively speaking). In fact, (to personalize this for a paragraph), as a Linux desktop person buying his first laptop in 2002, I decided "well, I guess I might as well buy a Windows laptop instead of trying to hassle with running Linux on it." It felt like "giving in" to buy the commercial OS just to have easy access to Office and DVD players and the like. It slowly dawned on me "wait, if I'm going to buy a commercial OS, maybe I could buy a Mac?" I had never considered a Mac in my life, but I realized, wait, I can have Office on it (which not everyone realized, even then), AND easily play DVDs, AND this new OS X thing (which had come out a year before). It was a huge leap of faith, though. The reputation of Apple building things that are just "pretty and shiny", I think, still stems from this sense that it's a consumer device that only does what Apple lets you do with it. And yes, some of these criticisms are still valid, but for those who weren't aware of the no-CLI Mac OS, I think it's very useful context that many of us take for granted.
ken 8y ago
It didn't have a Unix shell, but you likely had some way to type commands and get the computer to run them. Depending on context, you might have had HyperTalk, or AppleScript, or the MPW Shell. In some ways these could be even more powerful than a Unix shell. What's the Unix way to say "Select a menu item", if the developer of your favorite app didn't think to also include a command-line interface to it? (Yeah, I know: accessibility APIs. Do all your apps include a complete set of those, too?)

by ktpsns 8y ago

aequitas 8y ago

I remember vaguely having to create a bootable floppy for an old os9 installation. It had to be done by dragging a system file from the OS onto the floppy in a special way which is termed "Blessing".

saagarjha 8y ago
You can now do this from the command line using bless(8).

chubot 8y ago

It's indeed interesting how important the command line is now. You might like this mini-book / essay by Neal Stephenson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co... It examines the issue of GUIs vs. command line interfaces, among other things. I'm pretty sure there is an anecdote there that says that Mac OS did have a hidden command line? It was only for Apple engineers, not for end users, but it was there. I'd appreciate a pointer if anyone remembers.

bboreham 8y ago
The Macintosh Programmers Workbench (MPW), the first IDE for Mac, had a command-line with a simple shell. When I used it in 1986 it really needed a big machine, i.e. 512K RAM :-)
- yourapostasy 8y ago
  MPW had an interesting way to ease GUI-centric users into its CLI-centric world. There was a mode you could trigger for commands that brought up a help-oriented GUI for the command to build the command argument list, which would then echo onto the command line. Depending upon who built the GUI, it was usually a less terse and friendlier help for new users than AIX's SMIT, for those who are familiar with that. I sometimes wish there was an open source equivalent like that for Linux , but with live, interactive building of the command as the GUI options were manipulated so new users could get a feel for commands more readily. This would act as an intermediate help system for casual users that is friendlier than manpages, and more immediate than searching around the Net. [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1360-macintosh-programmer-s-workshop-mpw-3-0-to-3-5 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1360-macintosh-programme...
  - int_19h 8y ago
    > There was a mode you could trigger for commands that brought up a help-oriented GUI for the command to build the command argument list, which would then echo onto the command line. This still lives on in a sense. For example, in VSCode, many UI commands translate to executing shell code in its internal terminal (and you can see both the commands and the output).
- chubot 8y ago
  Thanks, I'm pretty sure that's what Stephenson mentioned in his essay / book.

chongli 8y ago

Yes, classic Mac OS truly did not have a command line interface of any kind. As a consequence, everything your application did must have had a GUI command or preference corresponding to it. Command line interfaces are powerful, yes, but they're also a crutch. It's very easy to hide certain features by exposing them only through command line flags or what have you. On classic Mac OS you could not do this; you needed to attach every feature to a GUI control of some kind. As a consequence, people came up with all kinds of GUI tools for pro/expert users. Linux, comparison, treats GUI users as second class citizens and tends to relegate them to only the most basic functionality.

ktpsns 8y ago
Well, I was too young to really explore classic Mac OS at that time. But from my feeling, the unixoidity of Mac OS X was really a blessing for the hacking community. So there definetly was a need.
- chongli 8y ago
  Oh don't get me wrong, I live in the terminal these days. It's immensely satisfying to whip up a quick bash or Perl script to solve a problem. That being said, I believe the reliance Unix command line tools has made this computing power inaccessible to ordinary users. In some sense, I think it has deepened the digital divide.
  - laumars 8y ago
    You could still do scripting akin to Bash scripts on OS 7 and above via AppleScript[1]; which worked a little bit like WSH did on Windows. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript
    - chongli 8y ago
      Yes, and I'm an old fan of AppleScript as well. The difference, as far as I know, is that you couldn't hide core application functionality behind that API, could you? If you could, I think most developers didn't, since AppleScript isn't a default means of using the computer the way Unix shells are.

boomlinde 8y ago

It's worth considering what about command line interfaces makes them useful, who they are useful for and whether Mac OS offered an analogous interface somehow that fit the bill for their users. For me, the main gain of using a shell is that you can easily automate and document workflows. Apple added this to System 7 with AppleScript, to some extent. I haven't used AppleScript, so I have no idea of how successful it was to this end, but it does seem to cover some surface that would traditionally be in the domain of a command line shell. Apple released their GUI operating system to consumers before most competitors had anything like it. Rough contemporaries in the GUI consumer OS space, in the mid-80s through the 90s almost all had some kind of command line interface. The addition of AppleScript was probably a response to this, while trying to stay true to Jobs' and Raskin's idea of the Macintosh as a "computer appliance".

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

PurpleRamen 8y ago

Well, to be fair, GUIS can be powerful commandlines, to the point that they even satisfy most experts. But it needs more work, and you either end up using textinput anyway, or have a slightly worst performing interface. So at the end most invest into the simple solution. With the raise of HTML5 & Electron and their simplicity for creating powerful GUIs and AI-Speech-Driven interfaces we might be again reach somewhere in the next decades the point where Keyboard-interfaces are in decline. And if the AI overlords take over whe don't have any need for complicated interfaces anyway.

flohofwoe 8y ago

IFIR, Win3.1 didn't have a command line either, you had to exit Windows completely back to DOS. IMHO the Amiga offered the best of both worlds at that time (except for expensive UNIX workstations). On one hand you had a modern windowing UI, and a real multitasking OS. On the other hand you had terminal windows with a command line interface that was slightly different to UNIX, but close enough to be enjoyable. Later in the life of the Amiga it became standard that UI applications provided standardized scripting interfaces (via AREXX), so you could write complex automation tasks that glued together all sorts of UI- and command-line-programs. In a way this was a lot more advanced than anything that's available on Windows or Linux today, since it wasn't limited to a few applications that all live in their own isolated world.

np_tedious 8y ago
I think Windows 3.1 did have one. Accessible at command.com Here's the best source I could dig up https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/windows-command-prompt-introduction/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/windows-command-p...
- chungy 8y ago
  Windows 1.x-3.x didn't really have a command line, the window you use to run command.com was for DOS programs only. Windows programs didn't have a text mode to utilize it. Windows NT's console window was properly accessible to Windows programs, as well as DOS compatibility. Windows 95/98/Me inherited limited forms of text-mode compatibility from NT.
  - einr 8y ago
    the window you use to run command.com was for DOS programs only. This is not strictly true. You could launch Windows programs from the DOS box. If you tried to run something like PBRUSH.EXE from true DOS you would get "This program requires Windows" but in a DOS box it would detect that Windows was running and launch the program. I think it is true that there were no Windows-only command line apps though.

pjmlp 8y ago

I use my package managers from within Eclipse and Visual Studio. The builtin IDE REPLs are pretty good and more powerful than plain old style UNIX CLI. Usually I use the cli when I have to, not by choice.

mjlee 8y ago

AppleScript existed on System 7 - I used to use it like a very limited command line (scripting common activities and complex workflows.) The fun thing about it was that you were essentially interfacing with the GUI. Everything was incredibly discoverable - if you knew something was possible then it was almost always obvious how to do it in AppleScript.

rconti 8y ago

Wow, the fact that this is baffling to someone is, in turn, baffling to me! I don't mean this to be insulting, it's just one of those generational things. It hadn't occurred to me that someone (someone who cares about CLIs, at least) wouldn't know this. It might be informative to step back and point out that this is why so many of "us" originally disliked Macs; before the "walled garden" of iOS, before even the walled garden of needing iTunes to load music onto your iPod, there was the GUI-only MacOS. Now, those in the know could dramatically alter Mac OS with Resedit, but I wasn't a "Mac guy", so I never really knew anything about it; I hated a locked down OS that only let you do things you could click on. It was such a step forward to many of us hobbyists that OS X was based on Unix, and suddenly we had the best of both worlds -- a good GUI and a good CLI. Suddenly Windows was no longer the commercial OS that let you "do whatever you wanted" with it (relatively speaking). In fact, (to personalize this for a paragraph), as a Linux desktop person buying his first laptop in 2002, I decided "well, I guess I might as well buy a Windows laptop instead of trying to hassle with running Linux on it." It felt like "giving in" to buy the commercial OS just to have easy access to Office and DVD players and the like. It slowly dawned on me "wait, if I'm going to buy a commercial OS, maybe I could buy a Mac?" I had never considered a Mac in my life, but I realized, wait, I can have Office on it (which not everyone realized, even then), AND easily play DVDs, AND this new OS X thing (which had come out a year before). It was a huge leap of faith, though. The reputation of Apple building things that are just "pretty and shiny", I think, still stems from this sense that it's a consumer device that only does what Apple lets you do with it. And yes, some of these criticisms are still valid, but for those who weren't aware of the no-CLI Mac OS, I think it's very useful context that many of us take for granted.

ken 8y ago

It didn't have a Unix shell, but you likely had some way to type commands and get the computer to run them. Depending on context, you might have had HyperTalk, or AppleScript, or the MPW Shell. In some ways these could be even more powerful than a Unix shell. What's the Unix way to say "Select a menu item", if the developer of your favorite app didn't think to also include a command-line interface to it? (Yeah, I know: accessibility APIs. Do all your apps include a complete set of those, too?)