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The QuickDraw code (LISA_OS/LIBS/LIBQD) is just glorious. While reading it, I am overcome by the creative genius of Bill Atkinson. [1]. Bill went on to become

The QuickDraw code (LISA_OS/LIBS/LIBQD) is just glorious. While reading it, I am overcome by the creative genius of Bill Atkinson. [1]. Bill went on to become quite accomplished at cooking lunch for the team at General Magic. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Atkinson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Atkinson [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
The QuickDraw source code has been available for some time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285569> Submitted several times to HN since then. Most recently: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519132>
TradingPlaces 4y ago
Oh, yes. >{ RoundRect Routines }
bluedino 4y ago
One of the great stories: In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=Bill+Atkinson https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
manv1 4y ago
The story was that Atkinson saw the Parc and it's GUI and said to himself "holy shit they're doing their graphics this way" and write QuickDraw based on that. The Parc didn't do its graphics that way at all, and Atkinson (and Apple) got a lot of patents on his region code. That code is also why the Mac's graphics performance was so much better than everyone else's (until discrete GPUs came out). It's that fast. Apple's software guys were really good back in the day. Their software-based floating point stuff (SANE) was faster and more accurate than Intel's hardware FP stuff for a long time.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

The QuickDraw source code has been available for some time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2285569> Submitted several times to HN since then. Most recently: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16519132>

TradingPlaces 4y ago

Oh, yes. >{ RoundRect Routines }

bluedino 4y ago

One of the great stories: In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=Bill+Atkinson https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

manv1 4y ago

The story was that Atkinson saw the Parc and it's GUI and said to himself "holy shit they're doing their graphics this way" and write QuickDraw based on that. The Parc didn't do its graphics that way at all, and Atkinson (and Apple) got a lot of patents on his region code. That code is also why the Mac's graphics performance was so much better than everyone else's (until discrete GPUs came out). It's that fast. Apple's software guys were really good back in the day. Their software-based floating point stuff (SANE) was faster and more accurate than Intel's hardware FP stuff for a long time.