4 ms·

Long ago, as the silicon on the planet was still cooling, a friend of mine did exactly this. And single handedly. What he essentially did was he cracked open “

Long ago, as the silicon on the planet was still cooling, a friend of mine did exactly this. And single handedly. What he essentially did was he cracked open “Inside Mac” and ported it to a C library that ran on the PC. He did the bulk of it too. Memory manager, Resource manager, QuickDraw, Window manager, Event manager, Font manager. They changed it up, they didn’t copy the window gadgets and such, scrollbars worked (and looked) different. But the task was to port a native Macintosh application to the PC, pre-Windows, and keep it portable. It was not a one way trip. The company maintained both versions. Got the bulk of it done in less than a year. Obviously this was early Macintosh. B&W, bitmap fonts (though the application generated PostScript for printing). Yup, they don’t call them The Old Days for nothing.

winrid 3y ago
What was the application? So interesting.
OnlyMortal 3y ago
Heh. I did a partial port of Resource Manager so I could load up Macintosh Fonts on an Amiga. Aspect ratio was fun as the Mac had square pixels.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Everything that was simple 20 years ago is now 100x more complicated. Part of the reasons made programming interesting for me long time ago was that fact that one person could tackle a rather complex job all by himself. You could write a GUI, a game, a text processor, a compiler and even an OS as a one person team.
- elevation 3y ago
  You could still do all these things before the summer is out. Compiler design is no harder today than 20 years ago. Any text processor you would have created single-handedly 20 years ago is similarly doable. Simple, performant GUIs are easy if you restrict yourself to a single platform. Windows 11 still runs win32 apps, Ubuntu/GTK is also straightforward. For an OS, consider targeting a well-documented microcontroller. Some variants are approaching a similar amount of compute and RAM as 25-year-old PC hardware but have Ethernet ports and/or LCD displays. And if you just want to build a game to say you did, you could build just about anything in the browser using vector graphics primitives reminiscent of DOS.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    > Compiler design is no harder today than 20 years ago Depends on how much one takes interactive compilers on environments like Energize C++, Visual Age for C++, Strongtalk, Dylan,Oberon,Cedar... into consideration. While similar to modern compiler based IDEs, their language servers, compiling while typing, static analysis while typing,...,weren't as feature rich.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Everything that was simple 20 years ago is now 100x more complicated. Part of the reasons made programming interesting for me long time ago was that fact that one person could tackle a rather complex job all by himself. You could write a GUI, a game, a text processor, a compiler and even an OS as a one person team. Now you can't and some of the most complicate aspects of software engineering is how to interface your work with the work of others, how to understand what others have done, to have a high level global view of the whole software application and tools your company works on while having a very low level view of the part of the software you are working on.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
  > You could write a GUI, a game, a text processor, a compiler and even an OS as a one person team. You still can and many still do, but we expect a lot more from our tools in 2023 than we did in 1983.
- vram22 3y ago
  >You could write a GUI, a game, a text processor, a compiler and even an OS as a one person team. Yup. And I had read earlier that Niklaus Wirth created a computer and many of the layers above, with just a small team. (I guess there must be other such examples from the early days of computing.) Don't have the reference. May be related to his work on Lilith, Ceres, Oberon, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth Also see Wirth's Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law The derived / related laws mentioned there are also interesting.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    As Wirth's work fan, his creations were great for their time. I am old enough to have used Native Oberon back when it was still a novelty, and compare Modula-2 to Object Pascal compilers. Nowadays they feel out of place, both in OS capabilities, as well as the languages used to develop them.
    - 3y ago
pavlov 3y ago
QuickTime for Windows contained pretty much exactly this: a port of all the required Classic Mac APIs. QT wasn’t just a video player but also an interactive environment, so this was a lot of API surface.
rjsw 3y ago
The HLH Orion [1] had a GUI that was a copy of the Macintosh one, it kept the appearance as well as the API. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion

winrid 3y ago

What was the application? So interesting.

OnlyMortal 3y ago

Heh. I did a partial port of Resource Manager so I could load up Macintosh Fonts on an Amiga. Aspect ratio was fun as the Mac had square pixels.

DeathArrow 3y ago

elevation 3y ago
You could still do all these things before the summer is out. Compiler design is no harder today than 20 years ago. Any text processor you would have created single-handedly 20 years ago is similarly doable. Simple, performant GUIs are easy if you restrict yourself to a single platform. Windows 11 still runs win32 apps, Ubuntu/GTK is also straightforward. For an OS, consider targeting a well-documented microcontroller. Some variants are approaching a similar amount of compute and RAM as 25-year-old PC hardware but have Ethernet ports and/or LCD displays. And if you just want to build a game to say you did, you could build just about anything in the browser using vector graphics primitives reminiscent of DOS.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  > Compiler design is no harder today than 20 years ago Depends on how much one takes interactive compilers on environments like Energize C++, Visual Age for C++, Strongtalk, Dylan,Oberon,Cedar... into consideration. While similar to modern compiler based IDEs, their language servers, compiling while typing, static analysis while typing,...,weren't as feature rich.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Everything that was simple 20 years ago is now 100x more complicated. Part of the reasons made programming interesting for me long time ago was that fact that one person could tackle a rather complex job all by himself. You could write a GUI, a game, a text processor, a compiler and even an OS as a one person team. Now you can't and some of the most complicate aspects of software engineering is how to interface your work with the work of others, how to understand what others have done, to have a high level global view of the whole software application and tools your company works on while having a very low level view of the part of the software you are working on.

TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
> You could write a GUI, a game, a text processor, a compiler and even an OS as a one person team. You still can and many still do, but we expect a lot more from our tools in 2023 than we did in 1983.
vram22 3y ago
>You could write a GUI, a game, a text processor, a compiler and even an OS as a one person team. Yup. And I had read earlier that Niklaus Wirth created a computer and many of the layers above, with just a small team. (I guess there must be other such examples from the early days of computing.) Don't have the reference. May be related to his work on Lilith, Ceres, Oberon, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth Also see Wirth's Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law The derived / related laws mentioned there are also interesting.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  As Wirth's work fan, his creations were great for their time. I am old enough to have used Native Oberon back when it was still a novelty, and compare Modula-2 to Object Pascal compilers. Nowadays they feel out of place, both in OS capabilities, as well as the languages used to develop them.
  - 3y ago

pavlov 3y ago

QuickTime for Windows contained pretty much exactly this: a port of all the required Classic Mac APIs. QT wasn’t just a video player but also an interactive environment, so this was a lot of API surface.

rjsw 3y ago

The HLH Orion [1] had a GUI that was a copy of the Macintosh one, it kept the appearance as well as the API. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HLH_Orion