10 ms·

Your First THINK C Program

193 points by vermilingua 7y ago

ur-whale 7y ago
cfg/CNFGRAPI.h:10:9: fatal error: Cocoa/Cocoa.h: No such file or directory also: ./setup_t -t xl64 >setup.sh Unknown value for -t attention to details indeed. [edit]: I assume this'll only work on a Mac. Too bad, looked fun.
- jchw 7y ago
  I haven’t tried it but the bottom portion of the article seems to suggest you need some slight tweaks depending on your host OS, Linux apparently should work fine.
  - skocznymroczny 7y ago
    Unfortunately this is something I see with many articles or open source projects. The building instructions are only for Linux (usually apt-get some packages and run configure/make). For Windows? Good luck, at most you'll get some nasty MSYS setup to follow.
    - qayxc 7y ago
      WSL should solve that handily. I use it daily and test and compile my programs on both Windows and Linux. On the other hand I also stay away from projects that don't use cross-platform build-systems like Ninja, or CMake. Shell scripts are sometimes incompatible even between different distributions and shells. The worst offender (that I know of) by far is GNU Octave. On Windows they basically ship a snapshot of a Linux dev box (complete with the whole directory tree, compiler suite and everything) with userland binaries compiled for Windows. So much for being "cross-platform"...
      - skocznymroczny 7y ago
        WSL solving the issue on Windows is like telling a Linux user to "just use Wine".
    - cxr 7y ago
      And you really shouldn't expect otherwise. One of these is gratis and libre, and the other isn't. If you want to stand on that side with Windows and expect other people to help you out, then what you're asking for is for them to shell out money and a lot of effort for you. Whereas the reverse is not true; in comparison, the picture of a Windows user having to get access to a FOSS toolchain for themselves looks trivial—and with the abundance of ready-made system images that you can spin up without even having to reboot your computer, it is. "Windows user" is not an ADA-protected class.
      - skocznymroczny 7y ago
        I don't expect Windows support for all projects, but I consider having to install the whole Unix toolchain on Windows equivalent to telling a Linux user that Linux is supported, just run it through Wine and it works.
        cxr 7y ago
        In that case, then boy, your criticism is really out of place. The entire article here is about running a classic Mac OS image so you can run a discontinued compiler.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  "lx64", not "xl64". (Article has this wrong, but documentation sets it right.)
  - RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
    An unfortunate typo. Sorry about that; fixed.
- gryphel 7y ago
  The Mini vMac download page (https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/dnld_std.html https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/dnld_std.html) includes binaries for Macintosh, Windows, Linux, and other platforms. As recently noted in the build documentation, compiling it yourself is not recommended for most people. (First, the result will be much less efficient than the official binary unless you tweak things for your particular compiler. Second, there is the chance of running into compiler bugs and bugs in Mini vMac that show up only on some compilers - the official binaries are much better tested.)
  - RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
    Quite reasonable. I've edited the footer section with a callout to these recommendations and appropriate links.
kick 7y ago
This is an amazing post for a bunch of reasons (as soon as I finished reading it a few days ago, I immediately sent it to half a dozen people), but one that should immediately jump out for you is that the picture of the Mac Plus is dithered using Bill Atkinson's dithering algorithm. Atkinson's done a bunch of really awesome things, but most notably, he played probably the biggest role in the genesis of the Macintosh. Very few posts on the WWW have the same attention to detail and wonderful playfulness as this one. It's an incredibly rare thing, and insanely pleasant to read.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  >the picture of the Mac Plus is dithered using Bill Atkinson's dithering algorithm. That explains how that it had that classic Macintosh feel. Thanks!
  - kick 7y ago
    Glad to share what I know!
    - homarp 7y ago
      http://gazs.github.io/canvas-atkinson-dither/ http://gazs.github.io/canvas-atkinson-dither/ lets you dither any picture
      - sigzero 7y ago
        That's awesome.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Speaking of Bill Atkinson and the Macintosh, here is a great story about him: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
  - kick 7y ago
Koshkin 7y ago
See also http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/ http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/.
- greendave 7y ago
  Wow. Even persists data across reboots (like the full emulator).
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> If you’re specifically using an OLPC, the target should be either lx86 for the XO-1 or larm for any subsequent ARM-based models. That's oddly specific. Mind, I approve; it's nice to see people trying things on less-common platforms and documenting the way:)
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  I have an XO-4 (the unobtanium model) and I love using it for distraction-free tinkering. A mac emulator looks especially nice in the display's black-and-white mode when I have the chance to use it in sunlight.
  - avhon1 7y ago
    How did you get your XO-4? Were you involved in a project developing software for it?
    - RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
      Nothing so exciting I'm afraid; I cruised ebay for a few months and had the good fortune of stumbling upon what appeared to be a decommissioned classroom set from a pilot program in Canada. Nabbed a pair, so I have some spare parts if I need them.
pjmlp 7y ago
Ah, a trip down memory lane.
buserror 7y ago
THINK C was the straight successor of Lightspeed C, and I came from there, and before that from Turbo/TML Pascal on the IIgs. Whatever people will say, I still miss these "one pass" compilers, they were amazing and peaked with CodeWarrior, the best development suite, ever, in my nearly 40 years experience. Nowadays we see autoshit "configure" stuff and compilers like gcc (some) or clang (oh my frigging GOD!!) trawl their way slowly and painfully thru the most simple projects without even support for plain basic stuff like automatic precompiled headers. Wow look, we've NEARLY got Link Time Optimization working (took decades), in 2020 whoohoo, I'm so delighted. I could compile hundred of thousands of lines of light C++ or (better) plain C 25 years ago on a much, MUCH slower machine, with an simple editor that used the compiler lexer output so you had highlighting, real indexing it was 'just there' and always right, and always blinding fast. I'm pretty sure we are way worse than we were 20 years ago for tooling. I'm sure some people will disagree, these people haven't seen CodeWarrior chew thru hundreds and hundreds of files in seconds.
- setpatchaddress 7y ago
  I'll do you one better and say that CodeWarrior 1.x was the high water mark. 2.0 and later were slower. Xcode is not bad now, though, and I think I'd miss the extremely robust autocomplete.
  - mevdev 7y ago
    Which 1.0 though?! They hit 1.0 a few times.
- destitude 7y ago
  My CodeWarrior T-shirt looks pretty ratty now.. Think Pascal was just as amazing.
- bluedino 7y ago
  We had Think C about ten years past it's time on the Mac LC in school. I would have taken Visual C++ that I had at home over that, any day. Heck, Turbo C for DOS would have been more productive.
- 7y ago
slobiwan 7y ago
Not being an original Macintosh guy I'm having a hard time getting the minivmac to boot directly into System7. I follow the steps but can't figure out what "Copy the donor system folder into our new boot volume, using the familiar drag-and-drop." means. Any clues?
- mjcohen 7y ago
  I dragged the System7 file from the finder into the running app.
  - slobiwan 7y ago
    yeah, that works. I'm trying to figure out how to make disk1.dsk be the default disk that the app starts up with. Is that possible?
fmajid 7y ago
My first Think C program reformatted my entire drive, requiring a full reinstall... There are benefits to modern operating systems with memory protection.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Sometimes it's good to learn the hard way.
catketch 7y ago
I used to work on this product (and think Pascal, Think Reference and other cool stuff). Fun times and a lot of great developers. When compiling, there was a modal dialog that would show the name of each file being compiled...they went by fast even on early macs. Michael Kahl sped it up even more by figuring out that QuickDraw’s DrawText routine was still slow enough to be impacting compile time. So a custom blitter was made to replace it and a fast compiler got even faster.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  It really does feel delightfully modern to use. I've been having a great deal of fun playing with it lately. Excellent work!
- macjohnmcc 7y ago
  I ran into that with a backup product showing the current file being backed up. I wound up just posting the current file to a buffer that was protected by a mutex and whatever file name happened to be in the buffer at render time was what was drawn.
news_to_me 7y ago
I love this. I’ve been using Think C on an old Mac 512k I got a couple years ago, and it’s a completely different world. I’m currently working on writing a gif animation app! One interesting thing is that the ANSI library is relatively large, so I try not to use it, instead relying on ROM routines or reimplementing bits of stdlib that I need.
ken 7y ago
I don't know if it's the fonts, the icons, the controls, the monochromaticity, the blocky resolution, the tinkerability, or even just stupid nostalgia, but there's just something so darned cute about classic Mac OS. macOS today is attractive and useful and colorful, but it feels so serious.
smacktoward 7y ago
Why do we still need to trawl obscure Google Sites to download a valid classic Mac ROM? Why isn’t Apple just making them available? It’s not like it would cut into their “modern” MacOS sales at this point, and it would make preserving classic Mac software like this so much easier...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
firefoxd 7y ago
I am the newbie who only recently found some interest in machines from the 80s. I'm a web programmer and I cannot wrap my head around how those machines rendered the graphics. I draw a 512 x 342 canvas on a webpage, if I loop pixel by pixel to draw an image using an array, the fans of my powerful computer start to scream. I'm not a graphics programmer maybe I am doing it wrong, but how the hell does an 8 Mhz computer with 128kb do it.?
- Athas 7y ago
  These machines had extremely low overhead for everything you did. If the framebuffer is just a piece of memory, and the screen is monochromatic, then a 512x342 display consists of 175104 one-bit pixels, which is just about 21KiB of memory (which is probably even distinct from main memory). A single pixel update could presumably be done with a single instruction. If we assume maybe 4x looping overhead, then updating the entire screen by individually poking each pixel could be done in about 700k instructions. In practice, there will likely be special hardware and instructions for copying entire blocks of pixels onto the screen in a much faster way ("bit blitting", although I don't know exactly how the Mac did it). Modern machines have huge overheads because of the indirection, virtualisation, and protection mechanisms we desire. On a webpage, you obviously don't have direct access to the framebuffer, but are drawing into some in-memory canvas. Drawing a single pixel in Javascript is going to go through many function calls, with probably orders of magnitude more instructions than you would have on an old Mac. There are still ways of getting (near) direct graphics access that is screaming fast, since people do write games and play videos and such, but there is much more ceremony to it now.
  - rvense 7y ago
    There's no really separate video memory on the original Mac, just the 21kb buffer that's updated by software. When it needs to, the video circuitry grabs the bus and reads the pixels it needs and outputs them. (There's probably some caching in the controller, but not a lot - a single screen line tops, I'd wager)
  - ngcc_hk 7y ago
    Well JS simulate 6502 with canvas ...
mrpippy 7y ago
Similar: I wrote a walkthrough using Basilisk to run THINK C 6, and build john calhoun’s classic game Pararena 2 from source. http://bslabs.net/2016/11/13/building-pararena/ http://bslabs.net/2016/11/13/building-pararena/
i_don_t_know 7y ago
I loved Think C 5 and devoured Dave Mark’s books on programming with the Mac toolbox in the early 90s. Good times.
NCG_Mike 7y ago
Wow. Going back a long time. I was in the MPW Shell camp but did use ThinkC With Objects and it was so much faster than the C compiler in MPW.
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Done it under macOS and it is easy. Just in case: - download the minivmac said linked web site. - you need to download also the vmac.rom and the system7.dsk. - you can run the "mini Vmac.app" by clicking and drag and drop first the vmac.rom then the system7.dsk. - your own disk needed to be created and drag-and-drop to the mini Vmac.app. - follow the instruction. - press control (and hold it) press H and other commands under H (you need to press control). - it is a Mac the original one and hence you have to press the menu all the time :-). Forget that. - and within a couple of minutes you have your first think C program in Mac 7. Not sure I will go through the whole volume of Think C. One day may be one day.
- ngcc_hk 7y ago
  Very nice except the magnification (control-H-M) only to one level. If it is one more level (i.e. 4 times instead of just double) that my 27 inches may be good for some development. Full screen is just grey others in mine. And the alarm sound (for bug etc.) is a bit harsh as alarm sound go. Not sure how to change this.

193 points by vermilingua 7y ago

cfg/CNFGRAPI.h:10:9: fatal error: Cocoa/Cocoa.h: No such file or directory also: ./setup_t -t xl64 >setup.sh Unknown value for -t attention to details indeed. [edit]: I assume this'll only work on a Mac. Too bad, looked fun.

jchw 7y ago
I haven’t tried it but the bottom portion of the article seems to suggest you need some slight tweaks depending on your host OS, Linux apparently should work fine.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  Unfortunately this is something I see with many articles or open source projects. The building instructions are only for Linux (usually apt-get some packages and run configure/make). For Windows? Good luck, at most you'll get some nasty MSYS setup to follow.
  - qayxc 7y ago
    WSL should solve that handily. I use it daily and test and compile my programs on both Windows and Linux. On the other hand I also stay away from projects that don't use cross-platform build-systems like Ninja, or CMake. Shell scripts are sometimes incompatible even between different distributions and shells. The worst offender (that I know of) by far is GNU Octave. On Windows they basically ship a snapshot of a Linux dev box (complete with the whole directory tree, compiler suite and everything) with userland binaries compiled for Windows. So much for being "cross-platform"...
    - skocznymroczny 7y ago
      WSL solving the issue on Windows is like telling a Linux user to "just use Wine".
  - cxr 7y ago
    And you really shouldn't expect otherwise. One of these is gratis and libre, and the other isn't. If you want to stand on that side with Windows and expect other people to help you out, then what you're asking for is for them to shell out money and a lot of effort for you. Whereas the reverse is not true; in comparison, the picture of a Windows user having to get access to a FOSS toolchain for themselves looks trivial—and with the abundance of ready-made system images that you can spin up without even having to reboot your computer, it is. "Windows user" is not an ADA-protected class.
    - skocznymroczny 7y ago
      I don't expect Windows support for all projects, but I consider having to install the whole Unix toolchain on Windows equivalent to telling a Linux user that Linux is supported, just run it through Wine and it works.
      - cxr 7y ago
        In that case, then boy, your criticism is really out of place. The entire article here is about running a classic Mac OS image so you can run a discontinued compiler.
duskwuff 7y ago
"lx64", not "xl64". (Article has this wrong, but documentation sets it right.)
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  An unfortunate typo. Sorry about that; fixed.
gryphel 7y ago
The Mini vMac download page (https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/dnld_std.html https://www.gryphel.com/c/minivmac/dnld_std.html) includes binaries for Macintosh, Windows, Linux, and other platforms. As recently noted in the build documentation, compiling it yourself is not recommended for most people. (First, the result will be much less efficient than the official binary unless you tweak things for your particular compiler. Second, there is the chance of running into compiler bugs and bugs in Mini vMac that show up only on some compilers - the official binaries are much better tested.)
- RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
  Quite reasonable. I've edited the footer section with a callout to these recommendations and appropriate links.

kick 7y ago

This is an amazing post for a bunch of reasons (as soon as I finished reading it a few days ago, I immediately sent it to half a dozen people), but one that should immediately jump out for you is that the picture of the Mac Plus is dithered using Bill Atkinson's dithering algorithm. Atkinson's done a bunch of really awesome things, but most notably, he played probably the biggest role in the genesis of the Macintosh. Very few posts on the WWW have the same attention to detail and wonderful playfulness as this one. It's an incredibly rare thing, and insanely pleasant to read.

EdwardDiego 7y ago
>the picture of the Mac Plus is dithered using Bill Atkinson's dithering algorithm. That explains how that it had that classic Macintosh feel. Thanks!
- kick 7y ago
  Glad to share what I know!
  - homarp 7y ago
    http://gazs.github.io/canvas-atkinson-dither/ http://gazs.github.io/canvas-atkinson-dither/ lets you dither any picture
    - sigzero 7y ago
      That's awesome.
pmiller2 7y ago
Speaking of Bill Atkinson and the Macintosh, here is a great story about him: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
- kick 7y ago

Koshkin 7y ago

See also http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/ http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/pce-js-apps/.

greendave 7y ago
Wow. Even persists data across reboots (like the full emulator).

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

> If you’re specifically using an OLPC, the target should be either lx86 for the XO-1 or larm for any subsequent ARM-based models. That's oddly specific. Mind, I approve; it's nice to see people trying things on less-common platforms and documenting the way:)

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
I have an XO-4 (the unobtanium model) and I love using it for distraction-free tinkering. A mac emulator looks especially nice in the display's black-and-white mode when I have the chance to use it in sunlight.
- avhon1 7y ago
  How did you get your XO-4? Were you involved in a project developing software for it?
  - RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
    Nothing so exciting I'm afraid; I cruised ebay for a few months and had the good fortune of stumbling upon what appeared to be a decommissioned classroom set from a pilot program in Canada. Nabbed a pair, so I have some spare parts if I need them.

pjmlp 7y ago

Ah, a trip down memory lane.

buserror 7y ago

THINK C was the straight successor of Lightspeed C, and I came from there, and before that from Turbo/TML Pascal on the IIgs. Whatever people will say, I still miss these "one pass" compilers, they were amazing and peaked with CodeWarrior, the best development suite, ever, in my nearly 40 years experience. Nowadays we see autoshit "configure" stuff and compilers like gcc (some) or clang (oh my frigging GOD!!) trawl their way slowly and painfully thru the most simple projects without even support for plain basic stuff like automatic precompiled headers. Wow look, we've NEARLY got Link Time Optimization working (took decades), in 2020 whoohoo, I'm so delighted. I could compile hundred of thousands of lines of light C++ or (better) plain C 25 years ago on a much, MUCH slower machine, with an simple editor that used the compiler lexer output so you had highlighting, real indexing it was 'just there' and always right, and always blinding fast. I'm pretty sure we are way worse than we were 20 years ago for tooling. I'm sure some people will disagree, these people haven't seen CodeWarrior chew thru hundreds and hundreds of files in seconds.

setpatchaddress 7y ago
I'll do you one better and say that CodeWarrior 1.x was the high water mark. 2.0 and later were slower. Xcode is not bad now, though, and I think I'd miss the extremely robust autocomplete.
- mevdev 7y ago
  Which 1.0 though?! They hit 1.0 a few times.
destitude 7y ago
My CodeWarrior T-shirt looks pretty ratty now.. Think Pascal was just as amazing.
bluedino 7y ago
We had Think C about ten years past it's time on the Mac LC in school. I would have taken Visual C++ that I had at home over that, any day. Heck, Turbo C for DOS would have been more productive.
7y ago

slobiwan 7y ago

Not being an original Macintosh guy I'm having a hard time getting the minivmac to boot directly into System7. I follow the steps but can't figure out what "Copy the donor system folder into our new boot volume, using the familiar drag-and-drop." means. Any clues?

mjcohen 7y ago
I dragged the System7 file from the finder into the running app.
- slobiwan 7y ago
  yeah, that works. I'm trying to figure out how to make disk1.dsk be the default disk that the app starts up with. Is that possible?

fmajid 7y ago

My first Think C program reformatted my entire drive, requiring a full reinstall... There are benefits to modern operating systems with memory protection.

Koshkin 7y ago
Sometimes it's good to learn the hard way.

catketch 7y ago

I used to work on this product (and think Pascal, Think Reference and other cool stuff). Fun times and a lot of great developers. When compiling, there was a modal dialog that would show the name of each file being compiled...they went by fast even on early macs. Michael Kahl sped it up even more by figuring out that QuickDraw’s DrawText routine was still slow enough to be impacting compile time. So a custom blitter was made to replace it and a fast compiler got even faster.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
It really does feel delightfully modern to use. I've been having a great deal of fun playing with it lately. Excellent work!
macjohnmcc 7y ago
I ran into that with a backup product showing the current file being backed up. I wound up just posting the current file to a buffer that was protected by a mutex and whatever file name happened to be in the buffer at render time was what was drawn.

news_to_me 7y ago

I love this. I’ve been using Think C on an old Mac 512k I got a couple years ago, and it’s a completely different world. I’m currently working on writing a gif animation app! One interesting thing is that the ANSI library is relatively large, so I try not to use it, instead relying on ROM routines or reimplementing bits of stdlib that I need.

ken 7y ago

I don't know if it's the fonts, the icons, the controls, the monochromaticity, the blocky resolution, the tinkerability, or even just stupid nostalgia, but there's just something so darned cute about classic Mac OS. macOS today is attractive and useful and colorful, but it feels so serious.

smacktoward 7y ago

Why do we still need to trawl obscure Google Sites to download a valid classic Mac ROM? Why isn’t Apple just making them available? It’s not like it would cut into their “modern” MacOS sales at this point, and it would make preserving classic Mac software like this so much easier...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

firefoxd 7y ago

I am the newbie who only recently found some interest in machines from the 80s. I'm a web programmer and I cannot wrap my head around how those machines rendered the graphics. I draw a 512 x 342 canvas on a webpage, if I loop pixel by pixel to draw an image using an array, the fans of my powerful computer start to scream. I'm not a graphics programmer maybe I am doing it wrong, but how the hell does an 8 Mhz computer with 128kb do it.?

Athas 7y ago
These machines had extremely low overhead for everything you did. If the framebuffer is just a piece of memory, and the screen is monochromatic, then a 512x342 display consists of 175104 one-bit pixels, which is just about 21KiB of memory (which is probably even distinct from main memory). A single pixel update could presumably be done with a single instruction. If we assume maybe 4x looping overhead, then updating the entire screen by individually poking each pixel could be done in about 700k instructions. In practice, there will likely be special hardware and instructions for copying entire blocks of pixels onto the screen in a much faster way ("bit blitting", although I don't know exactly how the Mac did it). Modern machines have huge overheads because of the indirection, virtualisation, and protection mechanisms we desire. On a webpage, you obviously don't have direct access to the framebuffer, but are drawing into some in-memory canvas. Drawing a single pixel in Javascript is going to go through many function calls, with probably orders of magnitude more instructions than you would have on an old Mac. There are still ways of getting (near) direct graphics access that is screaming fast, since people do write games and play videos and such, but there is much more ceremony to it now.
- rvense 7y ago
  There's no really separate video memory on the original Mac, just the 21kb buffer that's updated by software. When it needs to, the video circuitry grabs the bus and reads the pixels it needs and outputs them. (There's probably some caching in the controller, but not a lot - a single screen line tops, I'd wager)
- ngcc_hk 7y ago
  Well JS simulate 6502 with canvas ...

mrpippy 7y ago

Similar: I wrote a walkthrough using Basilisk to run THINK C 6, and build john calhoun’s classic game Pararena 2 from source. http://bslabs.net/2016/11/13/building-pararena/ http://bslabs.net/2016/11/13/building-pararena/

i_don_t_know 7y ago

I loved Think C 5 and devoured Dave Mark’s books on programming with the Mac toolbox in the early 90s. Good times.

NCG_Mike 7y ago

Wow. Going back a long time. I was in the MPW Shell camp but did use ThinkC With Objects and it was so much faster than the C compiler in MPW.

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Done it under macOS and it is easy. Just in case: - download the minivmac said linked web site. - you need to download also the vmac.rom and the system7.dsk. - you can run the "mini Vmac.app" by clicking and drag and drop first the vmac.rom then the system7.dsk. - your own disk needed to be created and drag-and-drop to the mini Vmac.app. - follow the instruction. - press control (and hold it) press H and other commands under H (you need to press control). - it is a Mac the original one and hence you have to press the menu all the time :-). Forget that. - and within a couple of minutes you have your first think C program in Mac 7. Not sure I will go through the whole volume of Think C. One day may be one day.

ngcc_hk 7y ago
Very nice except the magnification (control-H-M) only to one level. If it is one more level (i.e. 4 times instead of just double) that my 27 inches may be good for some development. Full screen is just grey others in mine. And the alarm sound (for bug etc.) is a bit harsh as alarm sound go. Not sure how to change this.