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I had a Mac from around 1993 to 1997. I even wrote articles for minor league Mac journals. My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to

I had a Mac from around 1993 to 1997. I even wrote articles for minor league Mac journals. My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software experience, which I appreciate. But Apple (represented in my mind by Steve Jobs) didn't want his platform to be flooded by crappy software. Even HyperCard never had his wholehearted support (I used it extensively, despite its odd and limited language), and I think Apple was glad to finally dump it. If you had a reason to write crappy software, as I did, you ended up with Visual Basic. What I mean by "crappy" is software that solves a problem reliably, but can't be scaled. For instance, installation might require help from the author, and entering a bad value might make it crash, but a small handful of tolerant users can handle these issues. The solution today, with open source, is that the people bring programming to the people.

dreamcompiler 3y ago
> Even HyperCard never had his wholehearted support When HyperCard was introduced Steve Jobs didn't work at Apple. When he came back, he killed it along with many other projects he had no role in, like the Newton.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  I say this as someone that loved the Newton. The Newton was a millstone for Apple at the time. Just like printers, scanners, and cameras. The Newton had several problems. The first it was intended to be an entirely new platform distinct from the Mac. There was zero overlap between the runtime environments of the two platforms. Nothing you made on a Mac was ever going to run on a Newton. This would stretch already thin third party developers even thinner. The second major problem is it had cheaper competition with a better market fit in the form of Palm. A Palm Pilot was half the price of a MessagePad and did most of the same tasks. It also actually fit in a pocket which meant it could be carried around and used as intended. A third problem was its OS was an older model lacking memory protection and preemption. By 1997 it was clear that multitasking protected memory OSes were the future if for no other reason increased stability in day to day operations. Rebuilding the NewtonOS with those features would be a major project. The MessagePads were bulky and expensive. They were too big to fit in a pocket meaning the only way to carry them was a bespoke case or a briefcase. They weren't that capable so a true road warrior worker was just going to get a laptop. Their target market was John Sculley, executives that didn't want to tote around even bulkier laptops. The Newton didn't make a lot of sense as a product and killing it off with the rest of the Apple peripherals made complete business sense.
  - dreamcompiler 3y ago
    I don't disagree. I have a soft spot for the Newton because I had a lot of respect for Larry Tesler, who got Apple interested in Common Lisp for a while as part of the Newton project. CL was used to invent Dylan which was originally intended as the Newton programming language. Dylan ended up like the Newton: The invention itself didn't have much impact but the project and the people who worked on it moved computer science forward in many important ways. Oh, and the genesis of what we now call the ARM computer architecture was the Newton project.
  - criddell 3y ago
    The Newton was out for 5 years by the time the US Robotics Palm Pilot debuted. However, the first really good Newton was the 2000 and that was right around the time the Palm Pilot was released. I was rooting for the Newton but at the same time, I found myself mostly using my Palm Pilot (and later my Handera 330) while my MessagePad sat on my desk unused.
fulladder 3y ago
You're exactly right that Apple has always had an ambivalent relationship with software developers. On the one hand, they needed them for their products to have any value for consumers. On the other hand, Jobs clearly saw low-quality, third party software as something that could taint the product Apple was selling. They really saw app developers as something very dangerous and difficult to control. Gates's view was always to just let anybody write anything they wanted, and the market would sort the good from the bad. I like the egalitarian nature of the Gates view, but ultimately I think Jobs was correct that the mere existence of low-quality software hurts your entire platform, and no amount of high-quality software can completely offset this.
- corbezzoli 3y ago
  It feels like they eventually managed to enforce this when the App Store came along, rejecting “useless” or “redundant” apps. Eventually they gave up on that idea because they loved seeing the number of apps rise, even if those apps were, in the end, low-quality software.
  - plussed_reader 3y ago
    If they didn't have hidden 1st party api stuff that 3rd parties have difficulty leveraging this moniker would feel more useful/relevant, IMO. In the current context they use these labels to protect their workflow from other entities.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Jobs' view sounds essentially the same as Nintendo's view in the wake of the video games crash, which eventually became the unanimous model in that industry. With iOS they also got to enforce it like a console, with a whitelist of acceptable software
  - fulladder 3y ago
    Yeah, I think a big part of how Gates and others came into their view was that there were so many examples like Nintendo where a platform vendor had artificially limited the third party ecosystem and it constrained the success of the platform as a whole. Basically, the Gates view was the more "correct" one for the 1980s/1990s. At that time, most people did not own personal computers, even many businesses didn't, and growth came from on-boarding these non-users. The more apps available on your platform, the more likely a non-user would be to see a reason to buy a computer at all. Also, the platform Gates was selling was much cheaper to try. Today, everyone owns at least one computing device. Platforms aren't competing for non-users (there are none left), they are competing for users of other platforms. The Jobs view works better in that world since it improves platform quality perceptions.
Zambyte 3y ago
> My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people Why do you think that? I was not around in that period, but the impression I get is that the foundation of Microsoft[0] was antithetical to "bringing programming to the people". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
- freefaler 3y ago
  They sold software tools at the beginning and further down the line used the tools to become the platform of choice for corporations. They controlled the OS and the tooling and this gave them great advantage in business software market share. You could get Windows source (or parts of it) if you needed to work on low-level stuff from MS and their MSDN was and is miles better than Apple developer documentation and tooling.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  Their first product was a programming language for a hobbyist computer.
- fulladder 3y ago
  That famous Gates letter is not inconsistent with the idea of large numbers of hobbyist programmers. He cared a lot about the piracy issue, but he was never trying to gate who was "allowed" to be a programmer. Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter. It was all about bringing programming to the masses. Saying "to the people" implies some kind of empowerment, and I don't think that was ever quite as much a part of Microsoft's identity (although it was there in some form). "To the masses" is a better way to describe it in my opinion.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    If you booted up an IBM PC without putting a boot disk in, it booted to a Microsoft BASIC prompt that was burned into the rom.
    - 3y ago
quijoteuniv 3y ago
I think that apple wanted to appeal to the makers at the beginning to get traction but really what they wanted was more consumers. Great hardware and long lasting but is for the elite that can afford it, most people in HN are in that elite. But ultimately apart from raising the bar in user experience is just another money making corporation. And that does not make a world a better place.
- fulladder 3y ago
  Yeah, the whole Apple cult thing has never made much sense. I remember talking to some environmentalists in the mid nineties who cared a lot about reducing industrial activity but were also strongly advocating the Mac. I was trying to ask why they felt so strongly about that given that any computer is basically a non-essential luxury good that requires a lot of toxic metals to produce [1], whereas pencil and paper has very low environmental impact and even some recycleability. There wasn't a clear answer. I think it's irrational. [1] at that time, electronics used a lot of lead, cadmium and mercury. It's less of an issue now.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Woz wanted to appeal to the makers (basically, he made the machine he wanted himself because nobody else was making it) Jobs wanted to make an appliance for the masses . That’s why the Apple II had a case and wasn’t just a bare circuit board like the Apple I.
hulitu 3y ago
> My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software experience They were both founded to make money. Microsoft was never close to the people and the "great software experience" on the Mac, if it existed, was limited to rich people.
- fulladder 3y ago
  Actually, rich people at that time were probably the least likely to own a computer. If you're talking about somebody who lives in mansion and has a butler and a chauffeur, that type of person was not buying computers and would not have had any interest in them. (I don't know what those people did with their time, but it sure as hell wasn't computing.) Personal computers were expensive by middle class standards [1], and the sweet spot was educated professionals like doctors and lawyers because they could afford it and it was interesting/useful to them and their families. A rich person who inherited an oil fortune would have been able to afford it, but not interested. A teacher would have been interested, but unable to afford it. [1] At a time when a decent, no-frills used car would have been around $1,000, you had something like this: ~$700 for a more limited VIC-20 or Z80-based machine, ~$2,000 for a PC-clone, and maybe double that for the Macintosh. For most buyers, it was a big but not impossible expense.
  - manderley 3y ago
    Seems reasonable to assume that person didn't mean people with butlers, the ultra rich, but rich people, just as you described.
    - fulladder 3y ago
      Yeah, that's totally fair. I think I misunderstood because the word "rich" in that era was really reserved for people with butlers and yachts, and excluded those who were merely highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. But the word "rich" today is used somewhat differently, for most people it probably means to include highly paid professionals as well as CEOs and oil fortune heirs. Also, at that time, there was not this extreme divergence in income that you have today. A lawyer might have made more money than a police detective, but the difference wasn't really that extreme and often these two people lived in the same neighborhood. Since that doesn't seem to be true anymore, it makes sense that the definition of "rich" has shifted.
7speter 3y ago
How did microsoft bring programming to the people if you had to pay to use their programming tools?
- indymike 3y ago
  Most of the time MS BASIC came with the computer (or OS).
- JohnBooty 3y ago
  Yeah, I see your point. Officially, their dev tools cost money. Here is the 1997 pricing for various versions of Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual C++ 5.0 in 1997: ($99, $499, $1,199) https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-pricing-visual-studio-97 https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-pricing... Unofficially, almost nobody ever paid for that stuff in my experience and it was ridiculously easy to get for "free." As was the norm in those days there was zero copy protection. You could sail the pirate seas, you could buy one "legit" copy and share it with the whole org, you could get the MSDN subscription and get "evaluation" editions of literally their entire dev tools catalog on a big stack of CDs with zero limitations besides the legality of the situation. I'm sure that with minimal effort it was easy to get a hold of Mac dev tools for free as well. But Windows was so ubiquitous, as was "free" Microsoft software, and you could build a nice little PC for cheap. I always wondered why Microsoft charged for that stuff in the first place. Were they actually making money on it directly? Did they sort of want to give it away for free, but were wary of antitrust implications? Apple had a different strategy. Perhaps this is an incorrect perspective it seemed like they just didn't care about independent garage and small business developers. They left things up to 3rd parties. In a lot of ways this was better -- it probably led to a richer ecosystem? For example, looking at the Microsoft strategy, it's not hard to see that they drove Borland into the grave.
  - leviathant 3y ago
    This was a little bit later in the timeline, but I remember attending an event in Philadelphia about F#, and I walked out of it with a licensed copy of Visual Studio .NET and SQL Server. They were just handing them out. I had an earlier copy of Visual Studio from when I was in college, and I was working in .NET at work, but no one at the event knew that. It was just - thanks for showing up to hear about functional programming, take some DVDs on your way out! It always felt to me like there was a culture of openness in the world of Microsoft in a way that didn't exist in Apple culture. You gotta pay for dev tools to use dev tools on a Mac. You want an FTP client on a Mac? Buy Cyberduck or Fetch. My impression of Apple was that everything was proprietary and had a price. Whereas I could cobble a computer together that ran Windows, there was oodles of shareware and freeware as well as professional tools. You have full access to the registry and file system in Windows, and you could very easily hack the bejesus out of the OS if you wanted to. It was great for tinkering. Everything was backwards compatible - the point where I had Windows 10 running on a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with Windows XP, and I had managed to upgrade legitimately without paying (I think the Windows 8 beta converted into a full Windows 8 upgrade, free). Today, I'm typing this from a 2021 Macbook Pro with USB-C ports - when I travel for work, I bring one charger, and it charges my laptop, my phone, my earbuds, even my mirrorless camera. When I need software, I can usually find something using Homebrew. The value you get for your money on a Mac is much better, but it's still a steep barrier to entry, IMO - even though I'm in a much better position today, and bought this without breaking a sweat. There's a lot of tinkering-related things I miss about the Microsoft ecosystem, but I've largely moved out of the weeds for my day to day work on a computer. All the software I was using on my Windows machine is multi-platform now, and the performance and battery life on these Apple native chips is hard to ignore. As a developer, it's just as simple, if not easier now, to build on Macs - ever since OSX opened up the Linux ecosystem to these devices. That, in conjunction with superior hardware, finally convinced me to switch after at least three decades of being staunchly Microsoft.
GeekyBear 3y ago
> My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software experience, which I appreciate. Apple did develop a native version of Basic that let you create Basic programs that took advantage of the Mac UI, but Microsoft forced them to cancel it as a condition for continuing to license their Basic for the Apple II. > Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it. He also used the renewal of Applesoft, which would be obsolete in just a year or two as the Mac displaced the Apple II, to get a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface, in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history, executed by John Sculley in November 1985. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt So in the case of the Mac, Microsoft used anticompetitive pressure to keep programming away from the people.
- turndown 3y ago
  From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn’t a priority at all to Apple, even on the Mac team. The fact they let MacBasic slip from the launch window is a pretty big red flag, I’d be interested to hear why Bryan Stearns decided to leave(I feel the author is saying a lot by not touching on this more) I think the idea that Microsoft or Apple were founded for any reason but money is pretty much a joke. Every action and reaction in the story revolves around money and how to get it.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn’t a priority at all to Apple Did you miss the part about Microsoft threatening the hardware line that produced the vast majority of Apple's profits at the time? It sounds to me more like the priority was not having their profitability decimated. They killed a Mac native version of Basic that had been completed because Microsoft forced their hand. >The fact they let MacBasic slip from the launch window is a pretty big red flag, As mentioned in the article, they needed to wait for the system APIs to stabilize. > Basic still had a hard time getting traction, especially since the system was evolving rapidly beneath it.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Open source is completely impenetrable to most of the population. Between an impressive list of incompatible languages, the vagaries of Git, the complexities of command line access, the reliance on some version of the Unix folder structure - with endless confusion between /etc, /local/etc/, /usr/local/etc and on and on, the weirdnesses of package managers, and completely unfamiliar editors like Emacs and VSCode, the scene might as well be proprietary. VB at least made if possible to write software in a reasonably accessible and integrated way. So did Hypercard. So does Excel. The real problem with Automator, AppleScript, etc, is that they're hopelessly underdocumented and the tools are mediocre. If Apple had made them more prominent and documented them thoroughly they'd have been far more successful - perhaps in an industry-changing way. But they seem more like side projects that someone spent a lot of time and a little money on. Clearly Apple was never seriously interested in them.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  Interestingly tools like ChatGPT can make some of these slept-on tools more usable. "Write me a script using __ that sends me notifications whenever __ happens"
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > the scene might as well be proprietary. That is such hyperbole. I have no formal IT background and I taught myself the Linux command line, Python, and Emacs in the course of a single year after I heard about this new Linux thing that was free to install. This was 2000, and from communities like Slashdot I saw there were plenty of other nerdy young people taking up the CLI and other Linux stuff, just out of curiosity and without any connection with the IT industry. Sure, none of this software will ever appeal to the broad masses*, but since the 1990s programming has become so much more accessible to the general public, because of both the free-of-charge software and the free-of-charge documentation. Learning to program on earlier platforms could be very expensive. * Still, I have heard rumors of a corporation in the 1980s where the secretarial staff – middle-aged women with no formal computer-science education – wrote some custom Emacs Lisp and/or Awk. Maybe learning even relatively arcane stuff can be done by anyone if their salary depends on it.
PaulHoule 3y ago
The 128k Mac that came out in 1984 might have been the first microcomputer that didn't come with some kind of BASIC, machine language monitor, or other tools for developing software. That is, the point of every micro up until then was that you were going to program it yourself. In some sense it was a real step backwards in terms of people losing control of computers that Apple has continued with iDevices. At first you could not do any software development for a Mac at all on a Mac, instead you were expected to get a Lisa if you wanted to develop for the Mac. Part of that was that even though the Mac had twice the memory as most computers at that time, the GUI ate up a lot of it, so you could just barely run the bundled MacWrite and MacPaint. Part of the reason why Jobs insisted on keeping the Mac monochrome until the 1987 Mac II was to conserve memory. (When it did come out, the Mac II was priced closer to a Sun workstation than even an IBM PC AT.)
- Falkon1313 3y ago
  I remember that, it's why I didn't get a Mac. Although it was a few years later for me. The only computer that I'd used up until then was an Apple II that had been donated to our school. I managed to talk my parents into buying one, and they took me to the store but I couldn't find one. Asked the salesman and he said they didn't sell them anymore but now they had these new Macintosh computers. I looked at the rinkydink black and white screen with a mostly-blank desktop with just a few icons you could drag around or click on it. Couldn't even figure out how to get to the command line, let alone into BASIC. When I asked the salesman he said that you couldn't and seemed utterly baffled that someone would actually want to use their computer. So I left and went and bought a PC clone instead. Plugged it in and booted it up and I was coding immediately. PCs just worked, and let you do whatever you wanted. Macs were kind of toy computers at the time. That philosophy still kind of holds to this day, though less so now. I use a Mac for work, and luckily they did finally make it possible to get to a command line and to program on it. At some point, they realized they had to give some power to it or else become utterly irrelevant. But you can tell that it's still not intended for power users. It still can't run most software, and what it does have is limited and simplified, from the OS on up, and still defaults to making things difficult except for the simplest use cases.
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webworker 3y ago
> Apple (represented in my mind by Steve Jobs) didn't want his platform to be flooded by crappy software. This kind of shocks me. When you go through macintosh garden and look at all the software (there were tons) a hefty enough portion of it looks like the 80s'/90's equivalent of AppStore fart apps. "Porno" apps with interfaces and interactivity that could have been constructed in Powerpoint. So that (gatekeeping) didn't work. And then they extended the life of all of that garbage with blue box.

dreamcompiler 3y ago

> Even HyperCard never had his wholehearted support When HyperCard was introduced Steve Jobs didn't work at Apple. When he came back, he killed it along with many other projects he had no role in, like the Newton.

giantrobot 3y ago
I say this as someone that loved the Newton. The Newton was a millstone for Apple at the time. Just like printers, scanners, and cameras. The Newton had several problems. The first it was intended to be an entirely new platform distinct from the Mac. There was zero overlap between the runtime environments of the two platforms. Nothing you made on a Mac was ever going to run on a Newton. This would stretch already thin third party developers even thinner. The second major problem is it had cheaper competition with a better market fit in the form of Palm. A Palm Pilot was half the price of a MessagePad and did most of the same tasks. It also actually fit in a pocket which meant it could be carried around and used as intended. A third problem was its OS was an older model lacking memory protection and preemption. By 1997 it was clear that multitasking protected memory OSes were the future if for no other reason increased stability in day to day operations. Rebuilding the NewtonOS with those features would be a major project. The MessagePads were bulky and expensive. They were too big to fit in a pocket meaning the only way to carry them was a bespoke case or a briefcase. They weren't that capable so a true road warrior worker was just going to get a laptop. Their target market was John Sculley, executives that didn't want to tote around even bulkier laptops. The Newton didn't make a lot of sense as a product and killing it off with the rest of the Apple peripherals made complete business sense.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  I don't disagree. I have a soft spot for the Newton because I had a lot of respect for Larry Tesler, who got Apple interested in Common Lisp for a while as part of the Newton project. CL was used to invent Dylan which was originally intended as the Newton programming language. Dylan ended up like the Newton: The invention itself didn't have much impact but the project and the people who worked on it moved computer science forward in many important ways. Oh, and the genesis of what we now call the ARM computer architecture was the Newton project.
- criddell 3y ago
  The Newton was out for 5 years by the time the US Robotics Palm Pilot debuted. However, the first really good Newton was the 2000 and that was right around the time the Palm Pilot was released. I was rooting for the Newton but at the same time, I found myself mostly using my Palm Pilot (and later my Handera 330) while my MessagePad sat on my desk unused.

fulladder 3y ago

You're exactly right that Apple has always had an ambivalent relationship with software developers. On the one hand, they needed them for their products to have any value for consumers. On the other hand, Jobs clearly saw low-quality, third party software as something that could taint the product Apple was selling. They really saw app developers as something very dangerous and difficult to control. Gates's view was always to just let anybody write anything they wanted, and the market would sort the good from the bad. I like the egalitarian nature of the Gates view, but ultimately I think Jobs was correct that the mere existence of low-quality software hurts your entire platform, and no amount of high-quality software can completely offset this.

corbezzoli 3y ago
It feels like they eventually managed to enforce this when the App Store came along, rejecting “useless” or “redundant” apps. Eventually they gave up on that idea because they loved seeing the number of apps rise, even if those apps were, in the end, low-quality software.
- plussed_reader 3y ago
  If they didn't have hidden 1st party api stuff that 3rd parties have difficulty leveraging this moniker would feel more useful/relevant, IMO. In the current context they use these labels to protect their workflow from other entities.
didntcheck 3y ago
Jobs' view sounds essentially the same as Nintendo's view in the wake of the video games crash, which eventually became the unanimous model in that industry. With iOS they also got to enforce it like a console, with a whitelist of acceptable software
- fulladder 3y ago
  Yeah, I think a big part of how Gates and others came into their view was that there were so many examples like Nintendo where a platform vendor had artificially limited the third party ecosystem and it constrained the success of the platform as a whole. Basically, the Gates view was the more "correct" one for the 1980s/1990s. At that time, most people did not own personal computers, even many businesses didn't, and growth came from on-boarding these non-users. The more apps available on your platform, the more likely a non-user would be to see a reason to buy a computer at all. Also, the platform Gates was selling was much cheaper to try. Today, everyone owns at least one computing device. Platforms aren't competing for non-users (there are none left), they are competing for users of other platforms. The Jobs view works better in that world since it improves platform quality perceptions.

Zambyte 3y ago

> My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people Why do you think that? I was not around in that period, but the impression I get is that the foundation of Microsoft[0] was antithetical to "bringing programming to the people". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

freefaler 3y ago
They sold software tools at the beginning and further down the line used the tools to become the platform of choice for corporations. They controlled the OS and the tooling and this gave them great advantage in business software market share. You could get Windows source (or parts of it) if you needed to work on low-level stuff from MS and their MSDN was and is miles better than Apple developer documentation and tooling.
bazoom42 3y ago
Their first product was a programming language for a hobbyist computer.
fulladder 3y ago
That famous Gates letter is not inconsistent with the idea of large numbers of hobbyist programmers. He cared a lot about the piracy issue, but he was never trying to gate who was "allowed" to be a programmer. Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter. It was all about bringing programming to the masses. Saying "to the people" implies some kind of empowerment, and I don't think that was ever quite as much a part of Microsoft's identity (although it was there in some form). "To the masses" is a better way to describe it in my opinion.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  If you booted up an IBM PC without putting a boot disk in, it booted to a Microsoft BASIC prompt that was burned into the rom.
  - 3y ago

quijoteuniv 3y ago

I think that apple wanted to appeal to the makers at the beginning to get traction but really what they wanted was more consumers. Great hardware and long lasting but is for the elite that can afford it, most people in HN are in that elite. But ultimately apart from raising the bar in user experience is just another money making corporation. And that does not make a world a better place.

fulladder 3y ago
Yeah, the whole Apple cult thing has never made much sense. I remember talking to some environmentalists in the mid nineties who cared a lot about reducing industrial activity but were also strongly advocating the Mac. I was trying to ask why they felt so strongly about that given that any computer is basically a non-essential luxury good that requires a lot of toxic metals to produce [1], whereas pencil and paper has very low environmental impact and even some recycleability. There wasn't a clear answer. I think it's irrational. [1] at that time, electronics used a lot of lead, cadmium and mercury. It's less of an issue now.
kalleboo 3y ago
Woz wanted to appeal to the makers (basically, he made the machine he wanted himself because nobody else was making it) Jobs wanted to make an appliance for the masses . That’s why the Apple II had a case and wasn’t just a bare circuit board like the Apple I.

hulitu 3y ago

> My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software experience They were both founded to make money. Microsoft was never close to the people and the "great software experience" on the Mac, if it existed, was limited to rich people.

fulladder 3y ago
Actually, rich people at that time were probably the least likely to own a computer. If you're talking about somebody who lives in mansion and has a butler and a chauffeur, that type of person was not buying computers and would not have had any interest in them. (I don't know what those people did with their time, but it sure as hell wasn't computing.) Personal computers were expensive by middle class standards [1], and the sweet spot was educated professionals like doctors and lawyers because they could afford it and it was interesting/useful to them and their families. A rich person who inherited an oil fortune would have been able to afford it, but not interested. A teacher would have been interested, but unable to afford it. [1] At a time when a decent, no-frills used car would have been around $1,000, you had something like this: ~$700 for a more limited VIC-20 or Z80-based machine, ~$2,000 for a PC-clone, and maybe double that for the Macintosh. For most buyers, it was a big but not impossible expense.
- manderley 3y ago
  Seems reasonable to assume that person didn't mean people with butlers, the ultra rich, but rich people, just as you described.
  - fulladder 3y ago
    Yeah, that's totally fair. I think I misunderstood because the word "rich" in that era was really reserved for people with butlers and yachts, and excluded those who were merely highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. But the word "rich" today is used somewhat differently, for most people it probably means to include highly paid professionals as well as CEOs and oil fortune heirs. Also, at that time, there was not this extreme divergence in income that you have today. A lawyer might have made more money than a police detective, but the difference wasn't really that extreme and often these two people lived in the same neighborhood. Since that doesn't seem to be true anymore, it makes sense that the definition of "rich" has shifted.

7speter 3y ago

How did microsoft bring programming to the people if you had to pay to use their programming tools?

indymike 3y ago
Most of the time MS BASIC came with the computer (or OS).
JohnBooty 3y ago
Yeah, I see your point. Officially, their dev tools cost money. Here is the 1997 pricing for various versions of Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual C++ 5.0 in 1997: ($99, $499, $1,199) https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-pricing-visual-studio-97 https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-pricing... Unofficially, almost nobody ever paid for that stuff in my experience and it was ridiculously easy to get for "free." As was the norm in those days there was zero copy protection. You could sail the pirate seas, you could buy one "legit" copy and share it with the whole org, you could get the MSDN subscription and get "evaluation" editions of literally their entire dev tools catalog on a big stack of CDs with zero limitations besides the legality of the situation. I'm sure that with minimal effort it was easy to get a hold of Mac dev tools for free as well. But Windows was so ubiquitous, as was "free" Microsoft software, and you could build a nice little PC for cheap. I always wondered why Microsoft charged for that stuff in the first place. Were they actually making money on it directly? Did they sort of want to give it away for free, but were wary of antitrust implications? Apple had a different strategy. Perhaps this is an incorrect perspective it seemed like they just didn't care about independent garage and small business developers. They left things up to 3rd parties. In a lot of ways this was better -- it probably led to a richer ecosystem? For example, looking at the Microsoft strategy, it's not hard to see that they drove Borland into the grave.
- leviathant 3y ago
  This was a little bit later in the timeline, but I remember attending an event in Philadelphia about F#, and I walked out of it with a licensed copy of Visual Studio .NET and SQL Server. They were just handing them out. I had an earlier copy of Visual Studio from when I was in college, and I was working in .NET at work, but no one at the event knew that. It was just - thanks for showing up to hear about functional programming, take some DVDs on your way out! It always felt to me like there was a culture of openness in the world of Microsoft in a way that didn't exist in Apple culture. You gotta pay for dev tools to use dev tools on a Mac. You want an FTP client on a Mac? Buy Cyberduck or Fetch. My impression of Apple was that everything was proprietary and had a price. Whereas I could cobble a computer together that ran Windows, there was oodles of shareware and freeware as well as professional tools. You have full access to the registry and file system in Windows, and you could very easily hack the bejesus out of the OS if you wanted to. It was great for tinkering. Everything was backwards compatible - the point where I had Windows 10 running on a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come with Windows XP, and I had managed to upgrade legitimately without paying (I think the Windows 8 beta converted into a full Windows 8 upgrade, free). Today, I'm typing this from a 2021 Macbook Pro with USB-C ports - when I travel for work, I bring one charger, and it charges my laptop, my phone, my earbuds, even my mirrorless camera. When I need software, I can usually find something using Homebrew. The value you get for your money on a Mac is much better, but it's still a steep barrier to entry, IMO - even though I'm in a much better position today, and bought this without breaking a sweat. There's a lot of tinkering-related things I miss about the Microsoft ecosystem, but I've largely moved out of the weeds for my day to day work on a computer. All the software I was using on my Windows machine is multi-platform now, and the performance and battery life on these Apple native chips is hard to ignore. As a developer, it's just as simple, if not easier now, to build on Macs - ever since OSX opened up the Linux ecosystem to these devices. That, in conjunction with superior hardware, finally convinced me to switch after at least three decades of being staunchly Microsoft.

GeekyBear 3y ago

> My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software experience, which I appreciate. Apple did develop a native version of Basic that let you create Basic programs that took advantage of the Mac UI, but Microsoft forced them to cancel it as a condition for continuing to license their Basic for the Apple II. > Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it. He also used the renewal of Applesoft, which would be obsolete in just a year or two as the Mac displaced the Apple II, to get a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface, in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history, executed by John Sculley in November 1985. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt So in the case of the Mac, Microsoft used anticompetitive pressure to keep programming away from the people.

turndown 3y ago
From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn’t a priority at all to Apple, even on the Mac team. The fact they let MacBasic slip from the launch window is a pretty big red flag, I’d be interested to hear why Bryan Stearns decided to leave(I feel the author is saying a lot by not touching on this more) I think the idea that Microsoft or Apple were founded for any reason but money is pretty much a joke. Every action and reaction in the story revolves around money and how to get it.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn’t a priority at all to Apple Did you miss the part about Microsoft threatening the hardware line that produced the vast majority of Apple's profits at the time? It sounds to me more like the priority was not having their profitability decimated. They killed a Mac native version of Basic that had been completed because Microsoft forced their hand. >The fact they let MacBasic slip from the launch window is a pretty big red flag, As mentioned in the article, they needed to wait for the system APIs to stabilize. > Basic still had a hard time getting traction, especially since the system was evolving rapidly beneath it.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

Open source is completely impenetrable to most of the population. Between an impressive list of incompatible languages, the vagaries of Git, the complexities of command line access, the reliance on some version of the Unix folder structure - with endless confusion between /etc, /local/etc/, /usr/local/etc and on and on, the weirdnesses of package managers, and completely unfamiliar editors like Emacs and VSCode, the scene might as well be proprietary. VB at least made if possible to write software in a reasonably accessible and integrated way. So did Hypercard. So does Excel. The real problem with Automator, AppleScript, etc, is that they're hopelessly underdocumented and the tools are mediocre. If Apple had made them more prominent and documented them thoroughly they'd have been far more successful - perhaps in an industry-changing way. But they seem more like side projects that someone spent a lot of time and a little money on. Clearly Apple was never seriously interested in them.

brailsafe 3y ago
Interestingly tools like ChatGPT can make some of these slept-on tools more usable. "Write me a script using __ that sends me notifications whenever __ happens"
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> the scene might as well be proprietary. That is such hyperbole. I have no formal IT background and I taught myself the Linux command line, Python, and Emacs in the course of a single year after I heard about this new Linux thing that was free to install. This was 2000, and from communities like Slashdot I saw there were plenty of other nerdy young people taking up the CLI and other Linux stuff, just out of curiosity and without any connection with the IT industry. Sure, none of this software will ever appeal to the broad masses*, but since the 1990s programming has become so much more accessible to the general public, because of both the free-of-charge software and the free-of-charge documentation. Learning to program on earlier platforms could be very expensive. * Still, I have heard rumors of a corporation in the 1980s where the secretarial staff – middle-aged women with no formal computer-science education – wrote some custom Emacs Lisp and/or Awk. Maybe learning even relatively arcane stuff can be done by anyone if their salary depends on it.

PaulHoule 3y ago

The 128k Mac that came out in 1984 might have been the first microcomputer that didn't come with some kind of BASIC, machine language monitor, or other tools for developing software. That is, the point of every micro up until then was that you were going to program it yourself. In some sense it was a real step backwards in terms of people losing control of computers that Apple has continued with iDevices. At first you could not do any software development for a Mac at all on a Mac, instead you were expected to get a Lisa if you wanted to develop for the Mac. Part of that was that even though the Mac had twice the memory as most computers at that time, the GUI ate up a lot of it, so you could just barely run the bundled MacWrite and MacPaint. Part of the reason why Jobs insisted on keeping the Mac monochrome until the 1987 Mac II was to conserve memory. (When it did come out, the Mac II was priced closer to a Sun workstation than even an IBM PC AT.)

Falkon1313 3y ago
I remember that, it's why I didn't get a Mac. Although it was a few years later for me. The only computer that I'd used up until then was an Apple II that had been donated to our school. I managed to talk my parents into buying one, and they took me to the store but I couldn't find one. Asked the salesman and he said they didn't sell them anymore but now they had these new Macintosh computers. I looked at the rinkydink black and white screen with a mostly-blank desktop with just a few icons you could drag around or click on it. Couldn't even figure out how to get to the command line, let alone into BASIC. When I asked the salesman he said that you couldn't and seemed utterly baffled that someone would actually want to use their computer. So I left and went and bought a PC clone instead. Plugged it in and booted it up and I was coding immediately. PCs just worked, and let you do whatever you wanted. Macs were kind of toy computers at the time. That philosophy still kind of holds to this day, though less so now. I use a Mac for work, and luckily they did finally make it possible to get to a command line and to program on it. At some point, they realized they had to give some power to it or else become utterly irrelevant. But you can tell that it's still not intended for power users. It still can't run most software, and what it does have is limited and simplified, from the OS on up, and still defaults to making things difficult except for the simplest use cases.

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webworker 3y ago

> Apple (represented in my mind by Steve Jobs) didn't want his platform to be flooded by crappy software. This kind of shocks me. When you go through macintosh garden and look at all the software (there were tons) a hefty enough portion of it looks like the 80s'/90's equivalent of AppStore fart apps. "Porno" apps with interfaces and interactivity that could have been constructed in Powerpoint. So that (gatekeeping) didn't work. And then they extended the life of all of that garbage with blue box.