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> This is Unix revisionism (...) they certainly didn't rebuild Unix to fit on a Mac I think you're reading too much into this. MPW, which was made and used by
by arexxbifs 6y ago
> This is Unix revisionism (...) they certainly didn't rebuild Unix to fit on a Mac
I think you're reading too much into this.
MPW, which was made and used by Apple developers and sold by Apple, featured a command line interface, which the Mac otherwise didn't have. They implemented this because a command line interface is a powerful tool when working with software development and most developers know this and will eventually want one. That's what Stephenson is saying here.
The Lisa Workshop, which was used for software development on the Lisa, was also a text-based interface.
> Unix was far too large and unwieldy for microcomputer hardware of the time
No it wasn't. Xenix was released for the Lisa in 1984.
- okareaman 6y agoI loved MPW back in the day but I was an outlier compared to my other Mac developer friends
- mistrial9 6y agoI wrote the CodeWarrior tooling integration for MPW and presented the finished work to the CEO of MetroWerks :-) Given the engineering quality on both sides of that wide divide, I felt some honor at the time -- I was paid but not that much.
- homarp 6y agohttps://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macintosh-programmers-workshop https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macintosh-programmers-works... describes Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (MPW) as "a Unix-like integrated development environment for the Mac OS." http://www.math.columbia.edu/~om/mpw-88.pdf http://www.math.columbia.edu/~om/mpw-88.pdf is a presentation by 2 of the authors of MPW. (Richard Meyers, Jeff Parrish)
- jhbadger 6y agoAnd Cromemco had CROMIX (a UNIX-Clone) for their 8-bit Z80 machines in 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco