5 ms·

I was doing Macintosh programming back then. Programming was much harder because there was no stack overflow. If you got stuck, you had to figure it out yours

I was doing Macintosh programming back then. Programming was much harder because there was no stack overflow. If you got stuck, you had to figure it out yourself or ask someone who knew something at a user group meeting or call a BBS and pay long distance. There was one book : Mac Programming Primer that was the only beginner book that existed. The Inside Mac books were large and heavy and the only official guides for programming macs. There was no online help or search, so you had to open these heavy books and flip through them every time you needed anything. Think C had a pretty fast compiler, but there was no protected memory, so every time you null pointer dereferenced, or otherwise corrupted memory, the machine would crash and you would have to reboot. Version control and other programmer tools were very primitive. Working with other programmers was extremely clumsy. My favorite memories of the era were the BBSs. These were dial up services with one or two lines that a hobbyist would run on his home machine. They were very local, because calling long distance was expensive. It was a tech nerd only local hangout club for the local area. Also, at this point in time, nerds were very split off from the rest of society. We were really our own strange order of weirdos and very very uncool, while nowadays a much larger percentage of people would say they're in tech and everyone uses tech and is a tech nerd now.

qubex 6y ago
> Programming was much harder because there was no stack overflow Oh, stack overflow definitely existed, but only the kind that makes programming harder. EDIT: Corrected a typo.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  a decentralized world where everybody had their own private stack overflow for their own malefit.
- lisper 6y ago
  Well, stack overflow existed, but Stack Overflow didn't. (This is probably the one time in my writing career when the initial "Well," actually makes a difference in communicating the idea I intended to convey.)
- bawana 6y ago
  mac tutor was a great magazine - got into the real nuts and bolts under the mac hood
klodolph 6y ago
I was lucky to have access to THINK Pascal and later Metrowerks CodeWarrior, and adults who would answer programming questions or tell me how pointers work. I don't remember the Inside Macintosh books being especially large and heavy; they were broken into volumes which were a half-inch or inch thick, except for volume VI. It wasn't terribly long before these books ended up online on Apple's developer website but I don't remember when that happened.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  The original Inside Macintosh books were three-ring binders three or four inches thick. Apple would update them by mailing you new sections on paper. Definitely large and heavy.
david422 6y ago
> the machine would crash and you would have to reboot I self taught myself on macs. And not knowing how to correctly validate my inputs, I would crash, reboot, try again until I got it right. So many reboots.
- bombcar 6y ago
  I remember optimizing my MS-DOS 5.0 config.sys and autoexec.bat to get me back and running as fast as I could, shaved boot down to a few seconds if I remember correctly. Crashing and rebooting wasn't that bad before multi-process became the norm, as the crashing app was taking your data down with it anyway, who cares if you needed to wait 5 seconds for the computer to boot again.
  - cout 6y ago
    I did the same. My 25MHz 386SX boots to a usable screen faster than any Windows or Linux machine I own, despite promises from certain prominent programmers. I could park my hard drive and shut my computer down every night and think twice about it. Now I don't bother, because my coffee will be done before the computer will let my login.
Jeema101 6y ago
BBSes were awesome. It was this whole other level of subculture within the already nerdy computing subculture. And the people you were connecting with were all in your own community! I remember I would grab the local computer user newsletter every time I'd go to the computer store with my father just to pore over the BBS listings to see if there were any new ones that had popped up recently. It was really a fun time to be part of that whole early (and very local) era of 'online computing'.

qubex 6y ago

> Programming was much harder because there was no stack overflow Oh, stack overflow definitely existed, but only the kind that makes programming harder. EDIT: Corrected a typo.

agumonkey 6y ago
a decentralized world where everybody had their own private stack overflow for their own malefit.
lisper 6y ago
Well, stack overflow existed, but Stack Overflow didn't. (This is probably the one time in my writing career when the initial "Well," actually makes a difference in communicating the idea I intended to convey.)
bawana 6y ago
mac tutor was a great magazine - got into the real nuts and bolts under the mac hood

klodolph 6y ago

I was lucky to have access to THINK Pascal and later Metrowerks CodeWarrior, and adults who would answer programming questions or tell me how pointers work. I don't remember the Inside Macintosh books being especially large and heavy; they were broken into volumes which were a half-inch or inch thick, except for volume VI. It wasn't terribly long before these books ended up online on Apple's developer website but I don't remember when that happened.

dreamcompiler 6y ago
The original Inside Macintosh books were three-ring binders three or four inches thick. Apple would update them by mailing you new sections on paper. Definitely large and heavy.

david422 6y ago

> the machine would crash and you would have to reboot I self taught myself on macs. And not knowing how to correctly validate my inputs, I would crash, reboot, try again until I got it right. So many reboots.

bombcar 6y ago
I remember optimizing my MS-DOS 5.0 config.sys and autoexec.bat to get me back and running as fast as I could, shaved boot down to a few seconds if I remember correctly. Crashing and rebooting wasn't that bad before multi-process became the norm, as the crashing app was taking your data down with it anyway, who cares if you needed to wait 5 seconds for the computer to boot again.
- cout 6y ago
  I did the same. My 25MHz 386SX boots to a usable screen faster than any Windows or Linux machine I own, despite promises from certain prominent programmers. I could park my hard drive and shut my computer down every night and think twice about it. Now I don't bother, because my coffee will be done before the computer will let my login.

Jeema101 6y ago

BBSes were awesome. It was this whole other level of subculture within the already nerdy computing subculture. And the people you were connecting with were all in your own community! I remember I would grab the local computer user newsletter every time I'd go to the computer store with my father just to pore over the BBS listings to see if there were any new ones that had popped up recently. It was really a fun time to be part of that whole early (and very local) era of 'online computing'.