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Fact: Project Builder X for Mac Os was released 2001ish a full 17 years after the original Mac was introduced in 1984. (2001-1984 = 17) Also Fact: The origi

by bb88 3y ago

Fact: Project Builder X for Mac Os was released 2001ish a full 17 years after the original Mac was introduced in 1984. (2001-1984 = 17) Also Fact: The original 1984 Mac did come not pre-installed with Perl, Python, nor Ruby.

sbuk 3y ago
You're absolutely right, how could I miss it! Steve Jobs hated the thought of programmable computers so much that he stopped these languages being included a full 3 years before any of them existed! /s What you think you've "proved", you haven't. I'll repeat myself; 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."
- bb88 3y ago
  Maybe you're angry or maybe you're pissed at being called out on this. I don't know. But there were two issues with the Mac release in 1984. 1. The price. 2. It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user. In fact it was such a complete flop, it forced out Jobs by 1985. The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user. That depends on what you mean by "out of the box." It's true that no development tools were included, but they were available from third parties. I wrote the code for my masters thesis in 1986 using Coral Common Lisp on a Mac Plus, so if you wanted to program a Mac you certainly could.
  - sbuk 3y ago
    Not angry about anything my friend, just incredulous that you seemingly cannot separate Hollywood from what is front of you. Your definitions, as demonstrated by lisper, are at best debatable. > The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic. Interesting. Where are they now? It's as if in 1984 a paradigm shift happened. /s Also, DOS didn't ship with basic. Some vendors may have bundled it, but DOS never had it built in.
    - ragingrobot 3y ago
      Actually, starting with MS-DOS 5, QBasic - a feature reduced version of the commercial QuickBasic - was included.
      - sbuk 3y ago
        I stand corrected. Though that was in 1991, which is 7 years after the timeframe the OP is arguing about.
      - makapuf 3y ago
        There was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC before that, which allowed me to start programming. Edit: fixed link
        sbuk 3y ago
        I may very well be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was a Compaq thing. I certainly don't remember BASIC coming with any version of DOS or Windows out of the box in 1984. May be later on in the decade. Best I watch 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' to check a reliable source... /s
        ragingrobot 3y ago
        I wasn't sure about GW-BASIC. I remember running it on a PC that came with MS-DOS 4.0, but that came with the PC (a Laser 286) as well. MS-DOS 5.0 was a shrink-wrapped box purchase, so I was sure it was "pure".
    - rerx 3y ago
      What? The original IBM PC came with BASICA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Advanced_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Advanced_BASIC From 1983, MS DOS came with GW-BASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC From 1991, GW-BASIC was replaced by QBasic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic I would say, DOS always shipped with Basic. QBasic remained included up to Windows ME (the last Windows that came with DOS).
  - ddingus 3y ago
    Yeah, I was there. At the time, Apple was making a ton of money selling the bit, 6502 based computers. These machines were a completely open book, featured slots to plug anything you could imagine into (and people did, using those computers as quite capable 8 bit workstations: test and measure, cross dev, business, publishing, and so many more...) I will stop there as the story of the 8 bit Apple computers is well known. I will say Jobs hobbled the 16 bit machine so it would not spank the Mac silly. Delivering serious use value to users is what funded the Mac and then some. The only people I knew who wanted a Mac back then were ones that would never write a program. Funny enough, many of those went on to use the crap out of HyperCard.
kergonath 3y ago
> Also Fact: The original 1984 Mac did come not pre-installed with Perl, Python, nor Ruby. It would have been quite extraordinary, considering that none of these languages existed. Also fact: it did not come with Go or Rust built in, and did not have a CUDA-compatible GPU.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  It also didn't come with BASIC built-in or included unlike its contemporaries at the time.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    That’s a really strange hill to die on. I know I learnt Pascal as a teenager on a Mac Plus. It had several third party development environments and there was a thriving shareware/freeware scene, developer tools were there. In the end what harmed the Mac was that it was much more expensive than PC clones. Even when a BASIC implementation was built in, getting a better one from third parties was very common on all platforms. You can look at magazines from the time if you don’t believe it. The Mac was by design more of an appliance than the Apple ][, but it was not the black box some people here seem to think it was. This whole thread is full of assertions that are demonstrably false in about 10s worth of Google search.

by bb88 3y ago

sbuk 3y ago

You're absolutely right, how could I miss it! Steve Jobs hated the thought of programmable computers so much that he stopped these languages being included a full 3 years before any of them existed! /s What you think you've "proved", you haven't. I'll repeat myself; 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."

bb88 3y ago
Maybe you're angry or maybe you're pissed at being called out on this. I don't know. But there were two issues with the Mac release in 1984. 1. The price. 2. It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user. In fact it was such a complete flop, it forced out Jobs by 1985. The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic.
- lisper 3y ago
  > It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user. That depends on what you mean by "out of the box." It's true that no development tools were included, but they were available from third parties. I wrote the code for my masters thesis in 1986 using Coral Common Lisp on a Mac Plus, so if you wanted to program a Mac you certainly could.
- sbuk 3y ago
  Not angry about anything my friend, just incredulous that you seemingly cannot separate Hollywood from what is front of you. Your definitions, as demonstrated by lisper, are at best debatable. > The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic. Interesting. Where are they now? It's as if in 1984 a paradigm shift happened. /s Also, DOS didn't ship with basic. Some vendors may have bundled it, but DOS never had it built in.
  - ragingrobot 3y ago
    Actually, starting with MS-DOS 5, QBasic - a feature reduced version of the commercial QuickBasic - was included.
    - sbuk 3y ago
      I stand corrected. Though that was in 1991, which is 7 years after the timeframe the OP is arguing about.
    - makapuf 3y ago
      There was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC before that, which allowed me to start programming. Edit: fixed link
      - sbuk 3y ago
        I may very well be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was a Compaq thing. I certainly don't remember BASIC coming with any version of DOS or Windows out of the box in 1984. May be later on in the decade. Best I watch 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' to check a reliable source... /s
      - ragingrobot 3y ago
        I wasn't sure about GW-BASIC. I remember running it on a PC that came with MS-DOS 4.0, but that came with the PC (a Laser 286) as well. MS-DOS 5.0 was a shrink-wrapped box purchase, so I was sure it was "pure".
  - rerx 3y ago
    What? The original IBM PC came with BASICA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Advanced_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Advanced_BASIC From 1983, MS DOS came with GW-BASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC From 1991, GW-BASIC was replaced by QBasic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic I would say, DOS always shipped with Basic. QBasic remained included up to Windows ME (the last Windows that came with DOS).
- ddingus 3y ago
  Yeah, I was there. At the time, Apple was making a ton of money selling the bit, 6502 based computers. These machines were a completely open book, featured slots to plug anything you could imagine into (and people did, using those computers as quite capable 8 bit workstations: test and measure, cross dev, business, publishing, and so many more...) I will stop there as the story of the 8 bit Apple computers is well known. I will say Jobs hobbled the 16 bit machine so it would not spank the Mac silly. Delivering serious use value to users is what funded the Mac and then some. The only people I knew who wanted a Mac back then were ones that would never write a program. Funny enough, many of those went on to use the crap out of HyperCard.

kergonath 3y ago

> Also Fact: The original 1984 Mac did come not pre-installed with Perl, Python, nor Ruby. It would have been quite extraordinary, considering that none of these languages existed. Also fact: it did not come with Go or Rust built in, and did not have a CUDA-compatible GPU.

goosedragons 3y ago
It also didn't come with BASIC built-in or included unlike its contemporaries at the time.
- kergonath 3y ago
  That’s a really strange hill to die on. I know I learnt Pascal as a teenager on a Mac Plus. It had several third party development environments and there was a thriving shareware/freeware scene, developer tools were there. In the end what harmed the Mac was that it was much more expensive than PC clones. Even when a BASIC implementation was built in, getting a better one from third parties was very common on all platforms. You can look at magazines from the time if you don’t believe it. The Mac was by design more of an appliance than the Apple ][, but it was not the black box some people here seem to think it was. This whole thread is full of assertions that are demonstrably false in about 10s worth of Google search.