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It's interesting (based on the poll "tell us about your first mac") that the Programming category essentially disappears in the early 90s. This roughly corresp
by kabdib 13y ago
It's interesting (based on the poll "tell us about your first mac") that the Programming category essentially disappears in the early 90s.
This roughly corresponds to the decline and near extinction of the Mac. Having programmers leave your platform is a very, very bad thing.
- huxley 13y agoOr you could read it as programmers being only subset of all people and computers were finally becoming mainstream enough that the ratio began to reflect that?
- 4ad 13y agoNo, because the parent poster is right. Look into the history of Apple in the '90s, how Jobs came back, NeXT etc.
- kabdib 13y agoThanks. I should have included that part; after The Return, the number of programmers on the Mac do indeed become visible again.
- huxley 13y agoI wrote extensively for a number of sites and magazines about NeXT technologies in the mid to late 1990s, I can give you chapter and verse on the history. The number of developers increased in absolute terms just as they did when the iPhone came out, but the ratio of developers to regular users didn't, because the technologies mainstreamed and the sales to regular users were very high. Back in the pre-acquisition NeXT days, the ratio of developers to users was incredibly high because overall sales weren't that great.
- mironathetin 13y agoI started investigating java on my first personal Mac, which was a blueberry iBook. This was end of the 90s though. In my physics lab, we used Performas to develop our software. In physics labs, Macs never really disappeared. Still, I liked the colorful Macs a lot. They cheered up daily work. A pity, that we are back to gray boxes.