4 ms·

Whoa, whoa, and whoa. The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was considerably higher and more im

Whoa, whoa, and whoa. The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was considerably higher and more impressive because none of the scaffolding was there to support the work, and the system resources were also far, far less. You're significantly discounting that effort. It's also worth reminding you that — even among the engineers who left or felt too much pressure — nearly all of them say the emotional investment was both necessary and worthwhile in retrospect. There are very few ex-Macintosh-team detractors in the world. Taking nothing away from this open source project, but let's not rewrite history.

wk_end 4y ago
I don't think I'm discounting that effort at all! To be honest, given that I mentioned both that they were exceptionally talented ("elite" and "hand-picked") and worked incredibly hard, I'm not sure where that interpretation came from. And retro game programming is a hobby of mine, I know all too well what it's like to write bare metal 68000 assembler and squeeze every last gasp of performance you can get out of an 8MHz CPU and handful of RAM. A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a single person or at most a small team could make the equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their basement. But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less competent, either. My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it these days, and they have virtually all the resources in the world.
- LeFantome 4y ago
  Really solid example
- xixixao 4y ago
  I’m not sure the analogy stands. Getting consistent margins is not as hard as building an AAA game imho. It’s more about building the right abstractions and having consistent attention to detail.
  - grishka 4y ago
    Yes, that's the point I was trying to make. Building GUIs now is even somewhat easier than it was decades ago because modern hardware is so capable and forgiving, yet the interactions themselves are all the same.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > Getting consistent margins is not as hard as building an AAA game imho Tell that to Microsoft. Resizing windows in Win 10 is a masochistic act.
- OnlyMortal 4y ago
  Quite a bit of Macintosh was written in Pascal. Quite a bit is assembler too (BlockMove been a good example). I assume MPW Pascal was used once the OS could be booted.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game The problem today is that everything is possible yet the quality of SW has gone down. We have UIs (GUIs are deprecated) using GB of RAM without help (how could they have a help menu with so little memory), where you have to guess what an UI element does, when you have to click on the only one text field on the screen to write something. It is like Will Smith came and erased the memory of everything that was done before. Using Win 95 was an exercise in pain because programs crashed. Using win 10 is an exercise in pain because it is user hostile. Yes i need to resize a window and yes i need a titlebar and a big enough scrollbar.

wk_end 4y ago

I don't think I'm discounting that effort at all! To be honest, given that I mentioned both that they were exceptionally talented ("elite" and "hand-picked") and worked incredibly hard, I'm not sure where that interpretation came from. And retro game programming is a hobby of mine, I know all too well what it's like to write bare metal 68000 assembler and squeeze every last gasp of performance you can get out of an 8MHz CPU and handful of RAM. A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a single person or at most a small team could make the equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their basement. But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less competent, either. My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it these days, and they have virtually all the resources in the world.

LeFantome 4y ago
Really solid example
xixixao 4y ago
I’m not sure the analogy stands. Getting consistent margins is not as hard as building an AAA game imho. It’s more about building the right abstractions and having consistent attention to detail.
- grishka 4y ago
  Yes, that's the point I was trying to make. Building GUIs now is even somewhat easier than it was decades ago because modern hardware is so capable and forgiving, yet the interactions themselves are all the same.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > Getting consistent margins is not as hard as building an AAA game imho Tell that to Microsoft. Resizing windows in Win 10 is a masochistic act.
OnlyMortal 4y ago
Quite a bit of Macintosh was written in Pascal. Quite a bit is assembler too (BlockMove been a good example). I assume MPW Pascal was used once the OS could be booted.
hulitu 4y ago
> But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game The problem today is that everything is possible yet the quality of SW has gone down. We have UIs (GUIs are deprecated) using GB of RAM without help (how could they have a help menu with so little memory), where you have to guess what an UI element does, when you have to click on the only one text field on the screen to write something. It is like Will Smith came and erased the memory of everything that was done before. Using Win 95 was an exercise in pain because programs crashed. Using win 10 is an exercise in pain because it is user hostile. Yes i need to resize a window and yes i need a titlebar and a big enough scrollbar.