The Mac development environment (MPW) wasn't free, either. I was in the MPW group before joining Newton, and made an obnoxious ass of myself saying that MPW sho

The Mac development environment (MPW) wasn't free, either. I was in the MPW group before joining Newton, and made an obnoxious ass of myself saying that MPW should be free. One of the common objections was "how do we support hordes of random developers piling onto the platform?" My response: That's a good problem to have, have you seen the stock recently? Apple was going through some tough times and there was pressure to make money on every front, or at least look like you were going to make money. We just weren't set up to do a C++ SDK; too much of the system wasn't documented, or designed with third parties in mind, and frankly a bunch of it probably would have had to be cleaned-up in order to be usable by outsiders. Native debugging was done on expensive, hand-built and very specialized hardware ("bunwarmers") which were NuBus-attached boards with a bunch of static RAM and some other things unavailable on the real hardware, and we would have had to do some tools work to make that usable outside as well. There was a serial debugger (substantially ARM's) but it wasn't a great experience. There never was a coherent installable driver story. That's probably my fault, we were writing code really, really fast without a lot of time for platformy conveniences (that "platformy" stuff was mostly at the NewtonScript level, with Walter, Capps, Martin Gannholm and some many other folks I've unfairly left out). So things like third party PCMCIA support would probably have needed an overhaul.