4 ms·
It seems like you're reacting to the phrase "bring programming to the people" occurring in the same sentence as Microsoft. I don't think GP was trying to prese
by fulladder 3y ago
It seems like you're reacting to the phrase "bring programming to the people" occurring in the same sentence as Microsoft. I don't think GP was trying to present Bill Gates as having been on some kind of altruistic moral crusade. I think the point GP was making is that Microsoft was founded on compilers for hobbyists, whereas Apple was thinking about end user experience.
Maybe the phrase "to the people" is confusing things because it suggests some kind of noble, high-minded motivations on the part of Gates. That wasn't how Gates (or Jobs) thought. Actually, the whole idea of a company having some social responsibility mission was not something that existed at that time. These guys wanted to sell a product that people would pay money for, that's all. In that era, this was perfectly socially acceptable and completely normal.
The statement "Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people" is true, but it may be a little unclear if people are reading it as suggesting something other than the profit motive. However, for a long time, Microsoft really did view its own success as dependent on providing customers ways to write and sell their own software. That is in fact empowering to the customer. I'm pretty sure Gates did care about this because it was what was driving sales of his products.
- GeekyBear 3y agoThere is also the popular conspiracy theory that Apple was somehow opposed to allowing users to program the Mac. They created a Mac native Basic at launch, and only Microsoft's anticompetitive arm twisting kept if from being released.
- Nevermark 3y ago> They created a Mac native Basic at launch, and only Microsoft's anticompetitive arm twisting kept if from being released. Wow, that almost makes me want to cry. I discovered personal computers when the computer basically felt like a programming language. I might be wrong, but if a friendly language installed on every computer out of the box had held, the evolution of “people’s” languages might have been a huge thing to this day.
- flomo 3y agoNot disagreeing with your point about MS, but it's not a conspiracy theory that Macintosh dev tools were nonexistent. Apple's solution was "buy a Lisa". (well, maybe they considered this a 3rd party opportunity.) No indication they even wanted homegrown BASIC type stuff.
- sbuk 3y ago> No indication they even wanted homegrown BASIC type stuff. Further up this very thread is a link from a first party source that refutes that entirely.
- flomo 3y agoNo, not at all, the folklore story doesn't even address Apple's strategy. Their developer relations were "Apply Here" back then. Macintosh shipped with zero developer tooling, not C/C++, not Pascal, not BASIC. And, we have no idea what Donn's BASIC was actually like ... it probably wasn't "Visual Basic", or even a platform. Just better than Microsoft's halfazz port of their micro basic. (which did have some quickdraw commands.)
- GeekyBear 3y ago> we have no idea what Donn's BASIC was actually like We literally know exactly what it was like. Dartmouth was already using a late beta of the software for a Basic class when Microsoft forced Apple to cancel the release of the final version.
- mainland 3y agoIf you'd like to see what Donn's BASIC was like, you can! The Internet Archive has a version that runs in-browser [1]. Although the Folklore article says there were two books describing Donn's BASIC, I believe there were at least three: Introduction to Macintosh BASIC, Using Macintosh BASIC, and The Macintosh BASIC Handbook. All three are available at vintageapple.org [2]. [1] https://archive.org/details/mac_MacBASIC.335 https://archive.org/details/mac_MacBASIC.335 [2] https://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/ https://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/