4 ms·

What's sad was that the Apple line of computers was exactly this. Completely programmable. Completely usable. But was despised by Steve Jobs. https://www.yo

by bb88 3y ago

What's sad was that the Apple line of computers was exactly this. Completely programmable. Completely usable. But was despised by Steve Jobs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_jug02JATc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_jug02JATc I'm not saying that Steve Jobs wasn't successful, or wasn't a visionary, or didn't save Apple. I'm just saying, the Apple II shipped with AppleSoft Basic. The Mac had no such language or built in compiler. I remember my friend back in college had an Apple IIc, and someone actually wrote a C compiler for it. He used it AFAIK all the way through college until the mid nineties, 12 years after it's original release date roughly in 1984. What I miss about computers from this time is that the Apple IIc had a joystick port. When I was like 12 (1985ish) I discovered I could get a DB9 connector and got a CDs cell which acted like a light sensitive resistor. This allowed me to play games that needed only a X or Y axis movement just by hovering my hand over the sensor. Edited to add: To this day, I don't own an Apple computer. The mac's were just waaay too expensive. Around 1996/1997 after college, I enjoyed Unix style operating systems more than windows or mac, and promptly got a PC and ran linux on it when I got a full time job out of college. And linux back then installed a C compiler typically too!! Windows and mac did not.

agumonkey 3y ago
A lot of small computers during the early days were seen as programmable things. Then it became a user interactive interface more than something to hack on. Maybe the shift of influence between Wozniak and Jobs explains that.
- bb88 3y ago
  That's weird. I see all computers as programmable, even those from the 1980s. Maybe it's just me!
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    early 80s machines were what I had in mind, I remember my aunt having bought a tiny tiny amstrad niche typewriter and the manual was 50% BASIC programming which surprised me a lot. Only later, when GUIs started to pop, the spirit changed into a user friendly app platform and not something to hack.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Apple made a BASIC for the Mac. Microsoft killed it: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
sbuk 3y ago
Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode, and the associated tooling, without forgetting that until recently, every Mac came pre-installed with Perl, Python and Ruby. I will concede that Objective-C is not AppleSoft Basic, but how useful is that now? And aren’t the previously listed languages a more powerful version in many ways? Also didn’t all Macs after 1986 come with HyperCard? I know NeXT machines all shipped with Project Builder. My point, your link is, like your theory, fiction.
- bogantech 3y ago
  > Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode, Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment, in a time where every other personal computer had one built-in. As a matter of fact the only way to develop software for the Macintosh was to drop $10,000 on a Lisa
  - sbuk 3y ago
    Fact: the link the OP provided was from a Hollywood movie, a know reliable source of historical accuracy. /s That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing, certainly not the fact that programmable personal computers were so vehemently "despised by Steve Jobs." Edit: Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...
    - bb88 3y ago
      > Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it... Right. No python. No C. No Perl. No Pascal. No Ruby. No C++. No Basic. Even the Apple IIc with it's puny 64k of ram had a decent Basic in it for the time. Talk about a feat of engineering from Microsoft! One thing I was able to do with my AppleIIc was control the serial port through Basic (1984 ish). Hypertalk released support for doing that in 1992 -- a full 8 years (!) after the original mac was released.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
> But was despised by Steve Jobs. And then he went on to establish Next. Jobs is the reason OS X Is UNIX and is as open as it is.
virtualritz 3y ago
That's scary. This post illustrates where we're headed with 'facts' and 'fact checking'. A false statement (Jobs despising programmability) being backed up by a media clip that shows a made up account of events (according to Woz) based on aforementioned false statement. I grew
coldtea 3y ago
>I'm just saying, the Apple II shipped with AppleSoft Basic. The Mac had no such language or built in compiler. So? Apple II shipped in a date when you did a lot of stuff on your own. All home computers had some BASIC or similar built in. In any case, OS X shipped with C/C++/XCode IDE and several scripting languages and shells, more powerful than Apple's II BASIC. And XCode and all kinds of computers is an officially supported install away now too.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  OS X had almost absolutely nothing in common with the original Macintosh. It’s an entire distinct OS Apple adopted in the laste 90s after buying Next. Classic Mac OS wasn’t a very nice system to develop for. To be fair it was pretty awful OS in general (ignoring the UI/UX stuff)
PaulHoule 3y ago
Up until the 1984 Macintosh every "home computer" came with a BASIC interpreter and could be programmed out of the box. It was quite a while before dev tools were out for the Mac (I think you were expected to use a Lisa to do development for the Mac) and people found it very hard to write GUI applications at first because it was different from anything anyone had ever seen before.

by bb88 3y ago

agumonkey 3y ago

A lot of small computers during the early days were seen as programmable things. Then it became a user interactive interface more than something to hack on. Maybe the shift of influence between Wozniak and Jobs explains that.

bb88 3y ago
That's weird. I see all computers as programmable, even those from the 1980s. Maybe it's just me!
- agumonkey 3y ago
  early 80s machines were what I had in mind, I remember my aunt having bought a tiny tiny amstrad niche typewriter and the manual was 50% BASIC programming which surprised me a lot. Only later, when GUIs started to pop, the spirit changed into a user friendly app platform and not something to hack.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Apple made a BASIC for the Mac. Microsoft killed it: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

sbuk 3y ago

Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode, and the associated tooling, without forgetting that until recently, every Mac came pre-installed with Perl, Python and Ruby. I will concede that Objective-C is not AppleSoft Basic, but how useful is that now? And aren’t the previously listed languages a more powerful version in many ways? Also didn’t all Macs after 1986 come with HyperCard? I know NeXT machines all shipped with Project Builder. My point, your link is, like your theory, fiction.

bogantech 3y ago
> Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode, Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment, in a time where every other personal computer had one built-in. As a matter of fact the only way to develop software for the Macintosh was to drop $10,000 on a Lisa
- sbuk 3y ago
  Fact: the link the OP provided was from a Hollywood movie, a know reliable source of historical accuracy. /s That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing, certainly not the fact that programmable personal computers were so vehemently "despised by Steve Jobs." Edit: Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...
  - bb88 3y ago
    > Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it... Right. No python. No C. No Perl. No Pascal. No Ruby. No C++. No Basic. Even the Apple IIc with it's puny 64k of ram had a decent Basic in it for the time. Talk about a feat of engineering from Microsoft! One thing I was able to do with my AppleIIc was control the serial port through Basic (1984 ish). Hypertalk released support for doing that in 1992 -- a full 8 years (!) after the original mac was released.

ffgjgf1 3y ago

> But was despised by Steve Jobs. And then he went on to establish Next. Jobs is the reason OS X Is UNIX and is as open as it is.

virtualritz 3y ago

That's scary. This post illustrates where we're headed with 'facts' and 'fact checking'. A false statement (Jobs despising programmability) being backed up by a media clip that shows a made up account of events (according to Woz) based on aforementioned false statement. I grew

coldtea 3y ago

>I'm just saying, the Apple II shipped with AppleSoft Basic. The Mac had no such language or built in compiler. So? Apple II shipped in a date when you did a lot of stuff on your own. All home computers had some BASIC or similar built in. In any case, OS X shipped with C/C++/XCode IDE and several scripting languages and shells, more powerful than Apple's II BASIC. And XCode and all kinds of computers is an officially supported install away now too.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
OS X had almost absolutely nothing in common with the original Macintosh. It’s an entire distinct OS Apple adopted in the laste 90s after buying Next. Classic Mac OS wasn’t a very nice system to develop for. To be fair it was pretty awful OS in general (ignoring the UI/UX stuff)

PaulHoule 3y ago

Up until the 1984 Macintosh every "home computer" came with a BASIC interpreter and could be programmed out of the box. It was quite a while before dev tools were out for the Mac (I think you were expected to use a Lisa to do development for the Mac) and people found it very hard to write GUI applications at first because it was different from anything anyone had ever seen before.