4 ms·

Good memory, there was a Megamax C, but I never used it. When Lightspeed C (renamed to Think C) came out most of the Mac developers I knew that used C switched

Good memory, there was a Megamax C, but I never used it. When Lightspeed C (renamed to Think C) came out most of the Mac developers I knew that used C switched to it. I was still writing in MPW Pascal, and would continue to use it for professional Mac development until '91. The C compiler that I remember working with was Aztec C, but for early Mac side projects. Later I switched to Think C for my side projects. An aside: My first C compiler was for CPM and was named BDS C. https://www.bdsoft.com/resources/bdsc.html https://www.bdsoft.com/resources/bdsc.html

optimuspaul 6y ago
MPW was my favorite environment to work it. It was like as editor and a CLI all in one. I wasn't going C or Pascal with it, just using it to manipulate files and the like. I have long wanted to write a terminal that emulated some of it's intuitive behaviors.
- kabdib 6y ago
  MPW was pretty neat, and I've not seen its equal since I left Apple. It's a simple concept, a shell-plus-screen-editor that lets you have both source code and commands in the same window, and the combination let you do things like put context-sensitive commands in project directories. A little like Jupyter, I suppose. The NIH attitude of the team didn't help the toolset make inroads anywhere. MPW had its own take on Make and a bunch of other Unix-y tools. Basically it was a license to revisit a bunch of hoary, old (even then) utilities, sometimes improving them, sometimes striking out. My lord, it was slow. It didn't help that the fastest I/O on a Mac back then was a 5Mhz SCSI bus hooked to spinning rust. Builds could take hours. The symbolic debugger was . . . interesting (okay, it was awful). [I worked on a bunch of its tools, including the linker and some runtime stuff.]
- wrs 6y ago
  You’d have to write not only a terminal, but a FUSE layer or something, because when an MPW tool opens a file, it’s actually opening the live editor buffer for the file (if there is one). You can even give a filename to a tool that represents the editor selection in the file. Which was all awesome, and I have also thought of trying to figure out how to do it in newer MacOS or Linux. I always figured this was inspired by Smalltalk, with its “DoIt” command, but never asked the MPW folks.

optimuspaul 6y ago

MPW was my favorite environment to work it. It was like as editor and a CLI all in one. I wasn't going C or Pascal with it, just using it to manipulate files and the like. I have long wanted to write a terminal that emulated some of it's intuitive behaviors.

kabdib 6y ago
MPW was pretty neat, and I've not seen its equal since I left Apple. It's a simple concept, a shell-plus-screen-editor that lets you have both source code and commands in the same window, and the combination let you do things like put context-sensitive commands in project directories. A little like Jupyter, I suppose. The NIH attitude of the team didn't help the toolset make inroads anywhere. MPW had its own take on Make and a bunch of other Unix-y tools. Basically it was a license to revisit a bunch of hoary, old (even then) utilities, sometimes improving them, sometimes striking out. My lord, it was slow. It didn't help that the fastest I/O on a Mac back then was a 5Mhz SCSI bus hooked to spinning rust. Builds could take hours. The symbolic debugger was . . . interesting (okay, it was awful). [I worked on a bunch of its tools, including the linker and some runtime stuff.]
wrs 6y ago
You’d have to write not only a terminal, but a FUSE layer or something, because when an MPW tool opens a file, it’s actually opening the live editor buffer for the file (if there is one). You can even give a filename to a tool that represents the editor selection in the file. Which was all awesome, and I have also thought of trying to figure out how to do it in newer MacOS or Linux. I always figured this was inspired by Smalltalk, with its “DoIt” command, but never asked the MPW folks.