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>But Jobs never lost his vision that Apple should sell appliances, and people who wanted to "wrench their own devices" should buy PCs. You present an excellent

>But Jobs never lost his vision that Apple should sell appliances, and people who wanted to "wrench their own devices" should buy PCs. You present an excellent historical case of how Apple got here, but here's where I see a dichotomy: Back in the day, tools like RezEdit, Hypercard, AppleScript came included. There were countless "apps" to reconfigure how the Mac looked and felt to create a personalized experience. Average users had developer-like tools that enabled them to become producers. Even today, things like Swift Playground send a message that Apple wants a technically-enabled user base. Perhaps this is really an issue like centralized vs decentralized computing, states vs. federal, IE: there will always be a fundamental fight where some people within Apple want a black box appliance, and others want a fully customizable hackable device.

a4isms 4y ago
Speaking of HyperCard: Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media. HyperCard used a metaphor of stacks of cards containing graphics, text, buttons, and links that could take you to another card. The HyperTalk scripting language implemented by Dan Winkler was a gentle introduction to event-based programming. Steve Jobs wanted me to leave Apple and join him at Next, but I chose to stay with Apple to finish HyperCard. Apple published HyperCard in 1987, six years before Mosaic, the first web browser. —Bill Atkinson https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Joining_Apple_Computer https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... My recollection of HyperCard is that it was a grassroots success, Apple did not invest in it, Apple never made a compiler to turn stacks into Mac apps, &c. I personally did two professional HyperCard stacks. One was an internal tool used by a consulting client. The other was a configuration tool for a very successful (at the time) Java development suite. I wrote it in a weekend to meet a deadline, which is why it was written in HyperCard and compiled to run on all our supported operating systems using a third-party compiler. My employer was aghast at this, our mantra was that if we’re selling Java tools, wherever possible we would write them in Java. I thought I was a decent programmer at the time, but no way I could bang out a robust customer-facing tool in a weekend using Swing or AWT or whatever. It was eventually rewritten in Java by a co-op student, it took their entire work term. So eventually, everyone was happy. But HyperCard got the job done when shipping fast mattered.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  speed is important to you. I can tell because you abbreviated an abbreviation. > &c for those not in the know, "etc" is an abbreviation for "et cetera" which is Latin for "and so on." the Ampersand character itself evolved from the shape of the word "et" which alone is "and" in Latin. what do you do with all the time you save? :D
  - a4isms 4y ago
    Others may not know the origin of &c., so it's great that you explained. But here's a thought: Abbreviations are not about saving time typing for me. Other reasons for abbreviations: 1. Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms are a kind of jargon that compress long words into single tokens that communicate something in a single chunk. That is more efficient for _readers_ to parse... If they are in the know. 2. Speaking of being in the know, abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms communicate which tribe you belong to, and this strengthens social bonds between writer and readers. 3. Some mediums have limited space available. Newspaper headlines, SMS messages, and the original Twitter tweets are examples of mediums with limited space. Abbreviations help compress longer messages to fit the medium. I happen to be a very slow author compared to just about every professional I know. Since it takes me a while to think about what I write, I find that trying to find shortcuts is not helpful with code or the written word. Cheers...
danaris 4y ago
And these days, every Mac comes with a full Unix terminal built-in. Xcode is a free download (remember, if you wanted to develop Macintosh applications back in the day, you had to buy something like CodeWarrior!), and, as you say, they've developed Swift Playgrounds specifically to make a nicer onramp for people interested in developing their own stuff. It's never been trivial to configure the Mac in terms of things like skinning, but third-party tools to do so have always existed for those who cared enough to look, and today, if you want to install Linux on your Mac, you can. If you want to install Windows on your Intel Mac, you can even do that. Those options were, at best, incredibly niche back in the pre-Intel days (though I remember toying with SuSE Linux for PowerPC in the early 2000s), and nearly nonexistent in the pre-MacOS X days. So it's definitely not a simple case of "Apple in the '90s was in favor of customization; when Jobs came back, he locked them all down and made them toasters."
- ta3564664 4y ago
  Even though its now probably 20+ years old, the CodeWarrior experience was vastly superior to XCode. For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.
  - a4isms 4y ago
    Oh maaaaaahn, do I remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior[1] fondly! Thank you for bringing it up. I also remember using Lightspeed C, which later became Think C.[2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C
    - dtgriscom 4y ago
      Still got my Code Warrior tee shirt, showing a chunky dude holding a floppy disc...
  - josephg 4y ago
    Oh my god, I’ve been using Xcode to make something recently and holy moly it’s where energy and ambition goes to die. The sheer number of bugs in both Xcode and in apple’s APIs is astounding. Constant crashes, unreliable and underdocumented apis. Urgh. I’ve been doing web programming for the last decade or so. When I started web programming, it was a mess of browser incompatibilities and jquery. But now I’d take modern web development over apple’s hellscape any day. MDN, caniuse, flexbox & grid CSS, modern bundlers, svelte and solidjs - this stuff is a delight in comparison.
rhaway84773 4y ago
AppleScript was a far more effective way of scripting your computer’s GUI apps than anything on a competing platform (even if AppleScript the language was terrible, Cocoa and Carbon made it incredibly easy for GUI apps to add AppleScript support) further strengthening the idea thst Apple was in favor of making macs programmable by the average user, even under Jobs. Heck, the AppleScript language was terrible precisely because it attempted to be approachable to regular users and resemble English.
spc476 4y ago
The Apple Macintosh was released in 1984. Jobs was pushed completely out of the company in 1985. When did RezEdit, Hypercard and AppleScript come out? Without looking it up, I would say after Jobs left Apple.
- tessierashpool 4y ago
  ResEdit: May 85 Jobs resigns: September 85 HyperCard: August 87 AppleScript: October 93
  - WWLink 4y ago
    Counterpoint: NeXTStep: September 1989. And then there's Automator: April 2005 https://support.apple.com/guide/automator/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/automator/welcome/mac Apple between 1999 and 2012 seemed to put out one banger after another. But I could smell the garbage coming with the original iPhone. It's funny because the iPhone is lovely ... until you get down to the many many desperate attempts at vendor lock-in, the "meh" quality software (NOT compared to Android software, just compared to well-written computer software), and the way everything's locked down. Mehhhhhhhh.
- WillAdams 4y ago
  Yes, but MacBASIC was worked on under Jobs' leadership -- until it was taken at gunpoint by Bill Gates: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt

a4isms 4y ago

Speaking of HyperCard: Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media. HyperCard used a metaphor of stacks of cards containing graphics, text, buttons, and links that could take you to another card. The HyperTalk scripting language implemented by Dan Winkler was a gentle introduction to event-based programming. Steve Jobs wanted me to leave Apple and join him at Next, but I chose to stay with Apple to finish HyperCard. Apple published HyperCard in 1987, six years before Mosaic, the first web browser. —Bill Atkinson https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Joining_Apple_Computer https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... My recollection of HyperCard is that it was a grassroots success, Apple did not invest in it, Apple never made a compiler to turn stacks into Mac apps, &c. I personally did two professional HyperCard stacks. One was an internal tool used by a consulting client. The other was a configuration tool for a very successful (at the time) Java development suite. I wrote it in a weekend to meet a deadline, which is why it was written in HyperCard and compiled to run on all our supported operating systems using a third-party compiler. My employer was aghast at this, our mantra was that if we’re selling Java tools, wherever possible we would write them in Java. I thought I was a decent programmer at the time, but no way I could bang out a robust customer-facing tool in a weekend using Swing or AWT or whatever. It was eventually rewritten in Java by a co-op student, it took their entire work term. So eventually, everyone was happy. But HyperCard got the job done when shipping fast mattered.

naikrovek 4y ago
speed is important to you. I can tell because you abbreviated an abbreviation. > &c for those not in the know, "etc" is an abbreviation for "et cetera" which is Latin for "and so on." the Ampersand character itself evolved from the shape of the word "et" which alone is "and" in Latin. what do you do with all the time you save? :D
- a4isms 4y ago
  Others may not know the origin of &c., so it's great that you explained. But here's a thought: Abbreviations are not about saving time typing for me. Other reasons for abbreviations: 1. Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms are a kind of jargon that compress long words into single tokens that communicate something in a single chunk. That is more efficient for _readers_ to parse... If they are in the know. 2. Speaking of being in the know, abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms communicate which tribe you belong to, and this strengthens social bonds between writer and readers. 3. Some mediums have limited space available. Newspaper headlines, SMS messages, and the original Twitter tweets are examples of mediums with limited space. Abbreviations help compress longer messages to fit the medium. I happen to be a very slow author compared to just about every professional I know. Since it takes me a while to think about what I write, I find that trying to find shortcuts is not helpful with code or the written word. Cheers...

danaris 4y ago

And these days, every Mac comes with a full Unix terminal built-in. Xcode is a free download (remember, if you wanted to develop Macintosh applications back in the day, you had to buy something like CodeWarrior!), and, as you say, they've developed Swift Playgrounds specifically to make a nicer onramp for people interested in developing their own stuff. It's never been trivial to configure the Mac in terms of things like skinning, but third-party tools to do so have always existed for those who cared enough to look, and today, if you want to install Linux on your Mac, you can. If you want to install Windows on your Intel Mac, you can even do that. Those options were, at best, incredibly niche back in the pre-Intel days (though I remember toying with SuSE Linux for PowerPC in the early 2000s), and nearly nonexistent in the pre-MacOS X days. So it's definitely not a simple case of "Apple in the '90s was in favor of customization; when Jobs came back, he locked them all down and made them toasters."

ta3564664 4y ago
Even though its now probably 20+ years old, the CodeWarrior experience was vastly superior to XCode. For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.
- a4isms 4y ago
  Oh maaaaaahn, do I remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior[1] fondly! Thank you for bringing it up. I also remember using Lightspeed C, which later became Think C.[2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C
  - dtgriscom 4y ago
    Still got my Code Warrior tee shirt, showing a chunky dude holding a floppy disc...
- josephg 4y ago
  Oh my god, I’ve been using Xcode to make something recently and holy moly it’s where energy and ambition goes to die. The sheer number of bugs in both Xcode and in apple’s APIs is astounding. Constant crashes, unreliable and underdocumented apis. Urgh. I’ve been doing web programming for the last decade or so. When I started web programming, it was a mess of browser incompatibilities and jquery. But now I’d take modern web development over apple’s hellscape any day. MDN, caniuse, flexbox & grid CSS, modern bundlers, svelte and solidjs - this stuff is a delight in comparison.

rhaway84773 4y ago

AppleScript was a far more effective way of scripting your computer’s GUI apps than anything on a competing platform (even if AppleScript the language was terrible, Cocoa and Carbon made it incredibly easy for GUI apps to add AppleScript support) further strengthening the idea thst Apple was in favor of making macs programmable by the average user, even under Jobs. Heck, the AppleScript language was terrible precisely because it attempted to be approachable to regular users and resemble English.

spc476 4y ago

The Apple Macintosh was released in 1984. Jobs was pushed completely out of the company in 1985. When did RezEdit, Hypercard and AppleScript come out? Without looking it up, I would say after Jobs left Apple.

tessierashpool 4y ago
ResEdit: May 85 Jobs resigns: September 85 HyperCard: August 87 AppleScript: October 93
- WWLink 4y ago
  Counterpoint: NeXTStep: September 1989. And then there's Automator: April 2005 https://support.apple.com/guide/automator/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/automator/welcome/mac Apple between 1999 and 2012 seemed to put out one banger after another. But I could smell the garbage coming with the original iPhone. It's funny because the iPhone is lovely ... until you get down to the many many desperate attempts at vendor lock-in, the "meh" quality software (NOT compared to Android software, just compared to well-written computer software), and the way everything's locked down. Mehhhhhhhh.
WillAdams 4y ago
Yes, but MacBASIC was worked on under Jobs' leadership -- until it was taken at gunpoint by Bill Gates: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt