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Can someone who did professional development on the Apple II at the time comment on what it was like? I was doing x86 DOS/Win/Unix development in the mid 90s fo

Can someone who did professional development on the Apple II at the time comment on what it was like? I was doing x86 DOS/Win/Unix development in the mid 90s for a Fortune 500 company, and even there we used some janky home-grown version control system that, if I recall correctly, required us to ftp our changes to some server somewhere. I know Apple had Projector[0] for Mac development with MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop[1]). Was there any sort of source control for the Apple II? I have to admit it’s somewhat ironic that a company that made disk copying software didn’t have a backup copy of their source code. [0] http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.06/VersionControlAndTheDeveloper/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.06/Ve... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Workshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Worksho...

didgetmaster 4y ago
I wrote my very first program using BASIC on an Apple II. My high school in Oregon bought two of them in 1979 (one for the math dept. and one for the business dept.) and I was one of the few students who had a class in both classrooms during the day. The teachers would let us play on them after finishing our regular class assignments. Neither one had a hard drive so we had to store all our code on a 5 1/4" floppy. The teachers didn't know much of anything about programming, so us students basically self-taught ourselves how to do simple programming on them using the manual and stuff we read about in magazines.
palad1n 4y ago
So it wasn't at a professional level, but I had an Apple ][+ when I was 13, taught myself BASIC and 6502 assembler. Yeah, no one had a hard drive at the time, if I recall. I got good enough at assembler to be able to hack Sensible Speller to bypass the copy-protection call and be able to copy with a normal disk copy. I also won a couple two-liner "contests", which was to write something interesting within 2 lines of input, which maxed out at 256 characters. One for Beagle Bros. (who were the coolest software company around back then) and one for Nibble magazine. As for source control, I would not be acquainted with that term till a decade later. There was one time that I was writing a program in Apple Pascal (also self-taught) for 17 hours straight--and then the frickin machine FROZE! Hard lesson learned, that I've generally never allowed to happen again. Yeah, that was mid-late 80s and basically knew more that the teachers how things worked on those computers.
acomjean 4y ago
Apple Time Warp has John Romero interviewing some professional Apple 2 developers. Its seemed like mostly very small teams (1-4 people) writing code. Chuck Somerville's I though was pretty fun. Stewart Smith was a more "professional" going into the game making process. https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/ https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/ also on youtube (audio only). https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0o94loqgK3CMz7VEkDiIgA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0o94loqgK3CMz7VEkDiIgA

didgetmaster 4y ago

I wrote my very first program using BASIC on an Apple II. My high school in Oregon bought two of them in 1979 (one for the math dept. and one for the business dept.) and I was one of the few students who had a class in both classrooms during the day. The teachers would let us play on them after finishing our regular class assignments. Neither one had a hard drive so we had to store all our code on a 5 1/4" floppy. The teachers didn't know much of anything about programming, so us students basically self-taught ourselves how to do simple programming on them using the manual and stuff we read about in magazines.

palad1n 4y ago

So it wasn't at a professional level, but I had an Apple ][+ when I was 13, taught myself BASIC and 6502 assembler. Yeah, no one had a hard drive at the time, if I recall. I got good enough at assembler to be able to hack Sensible Speller to bypass the copy-protection call and be able to copy with a normal disk copy. I also won a couple two-liner "contests", which was to write something interesting within 2 lines of input, which maxed out at 256 characters. One for Beagle Bros. (who were the coolest software company around back then) and one for Nibble magazine. As for source control, I would not be acquainted with that term till a decade later. There was one time that I was writing a program in Apple Pascal (also self-taught) for 17 hours straight--and then the frickin machine FROZE! Hard lesson learned, that I've generally never allowed to happen again. Yeah, that was mid-late 80s and basically knew more that the teachers how things worked on those computers.

acomjean 4y ago

Apple Time Warp has John Romero interviewing some professional Apple 2 developers. Its seemed like mostly very small teams (1-4 people) writing code. Chuck Somerville's I though was pretty fun. Stewart Smith was a more "professional" going into the game making process. https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/ https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/ also on youtube (audio only). https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0o94loqgK3CMz7VEkDiIgA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0o94loqgK3CMz7VEkDiIgA