"Ceruzzi: For legal reasons? Bricklin: Both. We couldn’t afford to spend money on time-sharing. We could buy our own machine. In those days, development – a lo

"Ceruzzi: For legal reasons? Bricklin: Both. We couldn’t afford to spend money on time-sharing. We could buy our own machine. In those days, development – a lot of people did development, as Bob explained, on another machine. And then from that other machine, you loaded to the micro because the development systems on the micros weren’t up to it. That’s how Microsoft Basic was done – that’s how Microsoft ended up having a PDP-10 I think. They eventually used XENIX to do their development. We did the same thing. We developed all our own tools over the years. We improved the tools. We wrote our own implementation language, a higher level language. In fact, that’s one of the issues that eventually came in, is that in the early days of the PC industry, there were so many different machines and you didn’t know which was a winner. You sold to each manufacturer. So you had to port all over the place. That’s what Digital Research was – a porting company. Microsoft was a porting company. That’s what we did. We had to figure out ways to port the same product and cookie cutter it out. And everybody went a little different and you had to fight with them. Otherwise, the costs would go up. So we eventually moved things to a higher level language. We did our version 2 of VisiCalc, in a higher level language. Ceruzzi: What language? Bricklin: We wrote it in something we called IL, which is a Lisp derivative. It was like writing in Java or something like that today. An interpreter. Microsoft had a similar type of thing for Multiplan. They wrote in a language which let them use a cookie cutter to put it on many different machines. But the Apple II version of the VisiCalc II (VAV) was written in assembly code. We realized that to port that was going to be so expensive. When we ported from the Apple II and Apple III, doing the IIe was next, then to port to the IBM PC it’s a different code base. The way we did the VisiCalc code base is, since we had our own tools, we hired Seth Steinberg, who had worked at the [MIT] Architectural Machine Group – Media Lab, real experience, real bright guy, helped bring a culture into our company. Free Cokes came from him. He ordered it and all that stuff. Lotus and others all copied this. It helped bring that type of environment from MIT into our company and spread hopefully to others. What Seth did is he said, “I’m going to do an idiomatic translation, basically, from the 6502 code to a Z80 code to do the TRS80.” And what he did was he modified the compiler to list the two sources synced on labels. The compiler we used had macros and it had no ‘go-to’s in it. Basically it was all IF THEN ELSE and stuff. It was a macro assembler" https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113026/oh402b%26f.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/113026/oh...