13 ms·

MacBasic

149 points by yuhong 12y ago

yuhong 12y ago
I wonder if Apple could have used anti-trust law to void this portion of the contract.
- mikeash 12y ago
  Doubt it would have applied in 1985, when Microsoft was nowhere near a monopoly.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    But I am talking about a monopoly in a specific market.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I don't believe anti-trust gets as specific as "BASIC interpreters for the Apple II" for markets.
      - yuhong 12y ago
        Even now?
        mikeash 12y ago
        I don't understand what you're asking here.
        yuhong 12y ago
        I was asking if anti-trust laws still has this issue today. Thinking about it, I think it probably still does.
        coldtea 12y ago
        It's not an "issue" -- it's what makes sense. Monopoly has a specific, defined, meaning. You cannot bend it to suit every little niche market there is.
        mikeash 12y ago
        Anti-trust laws haven't changed much in the last 30 years. And there's no reason to think it would cover this case just because you don't like it. Even if this behavior should be illegal, it would be a different category of law, much like how punching someone in the face is illegal, but isn't covered under the law prohibiting murder.
danso 12y ago
Basic at Apple is one of my favorite pre-Mac storylines, from Woz inventing Integer Basic in a period of several months (which he described as the hardest thing he's ever done) to Apple having to be dependent on Microsoft for its floating-point Basic, as VisiCalc became the killer app for the Apple ][. In the OP, there's a great comment hidden away in the easy-to-miss comments section. It's by Arthur Luehrmann, a Dartmouth professor who was asked to create a manual from Macintosh Basic. He wrote what I consider one of the best essays about "computing literacy": "Should the Computer Teach the Student, or Vice-Versa?" http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/seminalarticle1.pdf http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/seminalarticle1... Pasting Prof. Lehurmann's comment on MacBasic here for posterity...it has some interesting musings about the importance of personal programming and has a Steve Jobs cameo to boot: > Andy gets this sad tale right. My partner Herb Peckham and I were free-lance writers brought in to create a manual for Macintosh Basic, which we did. More about that later. I first met Donn when we were both serving on the ANSI Basic Standards committee, whose goal was to set up specifications for a modern version of Basic that would contain loop structures, if-then blocks, and procedure calls, so the notorious GO TO statement could go away. Tom Kurtz, co-inventor of Dartmouth Basic, was also active on the ANSI committee. I've known Tom since 1965, when I was teaching physics at Dartmouth, and I knew Tom was keen on implementing a modern, structured version of Basic, and getting beyond the old (and much-criticized) line-number-dependent language that was becoming ubiquitous on micros, thanks to Bill Gates's interpreter (which was mostly correct, except if you wrote FOR I = 1 TO 0, the loop would be executed once:no pre-test). I had added graphics primitives to Dartmouth Basic around 1976 and developed an X-Y pen-plotter to carry out graphics commands mixed in with the text being sent to Teletype terminals. My interest on the ANSI committee was to make sure the new Basic had a standard set of graphics statements. It became clear that Donn also wanted Macintosh Basic to be a modern, structured language that would leave Applesoft Basic as a memory. I pressed for Mac Basic to also include the graphics statements we were standardizing on the committee, and Donn ultimately agreed. That was around 1979. By that time I was at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley heading a program to teach kids about computers, both at LHS and remotely via Teletypes in Bay Area schools. We also had Commodore Pets, and we outfitted a van to take wheeled desks with mounted Apple IIs out to schools. Essentially, we taught programing in Basic on all systems. I left the Hall in 1980 and, with Martha Luehrmann and Herb Peckham, started Computer Literacy Press. Our purpose was to serve the needs of all the new computer users that were suddenly appearing, thanks to micros. Our first book project was "Apple Pascal:A Hands-On Approach." Apple liked it and included a copy with each Pascal software package it sold. (If anyone is interested, I still have a dozen copies of the book.) That brings us to Macintosh Basic. Apple invited us to create "Macintosh Basic:A Hands-On Approach" and have it ready in time for shipping with the software, which was six or eight months away. Herb and I took up offices at Apple and met with Donn several times a week to review progress. And what a pleasure it was to work with Donn! He was good at explaining details we had questions about, and he was completely open to ideas we had about the graphics elements. The same was true of Marianne Hsiung. So, as the months went by, it looked like Macintosh Basic would be the user-oriented language for the Mac:and it would be great. Our book was finished and in page proof, ready for the press. BUT . . . Steve Jobs invited me into his office one morning. Our office was a few doors away, and we talked from time to time. Steve seemed uncertain about something. Then he handed me a disk and said, "What do you think about this?" I took it to our Mac, loaded the software, and what I saw was Microsoft's version of Basic for the Mac. Against Donn's and Marianne's creation, it looked antique: no structured programming elements, line numbers essential for GO TOs, primitive graphics commands, limited data types:a throwback, in a word. So, the next day I went back to see Steve. He asked, "What do you think?" I said, "Steve, it's a piece of shit." He didn't say anything, but looked grim. A week or so later, we learned that Apple's Macintosh Basic project had been canceled. Andy Herzfeld explains the situation accurately. The Apple II was the cash cow at that time, and without Applesoft Basic it would be worthless. Gates played hardball, and Apple caved. And so, sitting on a shelf in our basement are the page proofs of our book, "Macintosh Basic:A Hands-On Approach." It's the best of the 20 or 30 books we've done. But the saddest thing to me is that the Mac shipped with no user-level programming language. It was the beginning of the end of ordinary people writing their own programs. Computer buyers became customers of programs (now renamed "applications") written by experts, not creators of their own, albeit modest, programs. It didn't have to be that way.
aruggirello 12y ago
Makes me think about the story of AmigaBASIC, since Microsoft was there too, ready to sign $$$ with Commodore, ready to abandon thousands of loving users without looking back... but that's another story, isn't it?
st3fan 12y ago
I loved MacBasic. I was only 8 or 9 but I wrote so many little 'hacks' in it.
chipsy 12y ago
There's something strange about this story. Apple could have turned "MacBasic" into a marginally different language and product and still shipped it, right? Why didn't that occur to them?
- djur 12y ago
  Microsoft would have perceived it as competition regardless. That's why they insisted on buying it from Apple, rather than just securing an agreement not to release it.
- mikeash 12y ago
  They'd have had to start a new implementation from scratch, since Microsoft bought their existing work, and if the timeline of the original project held true for the new one, it would have taken years to build.
idlewords 12y ago
I remember being blown away by my first encounter with a Mac, as a twelve year old kid. After learning how the mouse worked, I started to wonder "how can I write a program on this thing?". Every computer I had used before let you type BASIC programs right on the command line. But all the Mac had was an 'interrupt' switch that dropped you into an unfathomable console. It was a very discouraging feeling; it had never occurred to me that there could be a computer that didn't let you write programs.
- kalleboo 12y ago
  My first interactions with a Mac were through HyperCard[0], which was included with the all the early Macs (basically until Apple sold it off to Claris). Without HyperCard, I would never have become a programmer. HyperCard was very much the BASIC for the Mac, but wildly more powerful and user-friendly. I find it very sad Apple don't ship something like HyperCard with iOS devices. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
  - idlewords 12y ago
    HyperCard was one of those rare products (along with Excel and FileMaker Pro) that made people into programmers without them knowing it. It was astonishing what people were able to put together in HyperCard, and how much sadness there was when Apple finally axed it.
    - rbanffy 12y ago
      A baby unicorn dies every time someone builds an overly complex Excel spreadsheet that should actually be a program.
      - te_chris 12y ago
        Yes, why should people solve problems they have themselves in ways that disagree with our aesthetic?
nostrademons 12y ago
This still happens all the time in the software industry. I've been told to put projects on hold because they relied upon 3rd-party APIs from companies whose relationship with my employer was souring, or to shelve certain areas of research because they might anger important corporate partners. I've had coworkers that slaved away for 2 years on a very well-liked feature, only to have it killed because of contract negotiations. Unfortunately business hardball is a fact of life. I do wish there were laws against using contract terms to explicitly kill a competitors' products or features, since these are blatantly against consumers' interests. I guess they'd be virtually impossible to enforce, though, because you can always get around them by buying the offending software and then choosing not to allocate resources to it.
- yuhong 12y ago
  That is one of the reasons why I asked about using anti-trust law.
irollboozers 12y ago
I wonder what the equivalent of MacBasic would be today?
- luke_s 12y ago
  Probably your web browser and notepad for doing simple html and javascript files.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  Considering how advanced it was compared to other BASICs of the time, I'd say it would be like a sophisticated IDE and Python or Ruby built-in into the OS.
_delirium 12y ago
So many little things always always pop up to remind you that Bill Gates got rich in an unsavory manner.
- analog31 12y ago
  Bill Gates got rich by understanding that people want to write their own software. I'm not sure Jobs ever understood that. Granted, I won't try to write a paean to Bill Gates and his business practices over the years, but I think his enthusiasm for user programming is one indulgence that I'd grant him.
  - judk 12y ago
    The OP explains a specific example where Bill Gates took away user programming in order to screw over Apple. Bill Gates got rich by getting a sweetheart deal (arranged by family connections) that paid per installation of DOS.
nipponese 12y ago
I had the opportunity to work with Donn at my first job out of school in 2007. Literally could not have happened to a nicer human being, but I guess that's how it usually goes.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
mambodog 12y ago
If you want to try it out for yourself, I tracked down a copy of MacBasic .335 and wrapped it up in an in-browser emulator here: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/macbasic/ http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/macbasic/
- pervycreeper 12y ago
  Thanks. There appears to be a more recent version available here: http://macgui.net/downloads/?file_id=17340 http://macgui.net/downloads/?file_id=17340 , although, I haven't put in the time to get it to work to see if it has the features suggested in the screenshot here http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/stories/EarlyMacStories.html#basic http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/stor... , namely syntax highlighting and formatting, interactive stepping, and so on

MacBasic

149 points by yuhong 12y ago

yuhong 12y ago

I wonder if Apple could have used anti-trust law to void this portion of the contract.

mikeash 12y ago
Doubt it would have applied in 1985, when Microsoft was nowhere near a monopoly.
- yuhong 12y ago
  But I am talking about a monopoly in a specific market.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I don't believe anti-trust gets as specific as "BASIC interpreters for the Apple II" for markets.
    - yuhong 12y ago
      Even now?
      - mikeash 12y ago
        I don't understand what you're asking here.
        yuhong 12y ago
        I was asking if anti-trust laws still has this issue today. Thinking about it, I think it probably still does.
        coldtea 12y ago
        It's not an "issue" -- it's what makes sense. Monopoly has a specific, defined, meaning. You cannot bend it to suit every little niche market there is.
        mikeash 12y ago
        Anti-trust laws haven't changed much in the last 30 years. And there's no reason to think it would cover this case just because you don't like it. Even if this behavior should be illegal, it would be a different category of law, much like how punching someone in the face is illegal, but isn't covered under the law prohibiting murder.

danso 12y ago

Basic at Apple is one of my favorite pre-Mac storylines, from Woz inventing Integer Basic in a period of several months (which he described as the hardest thing he's ever done) to Apple having to be dependent on Microsoft for its floating-point Basic, as VisiCalc became the killer app for the Apple ][. In the OP, there's a great comment hidden away in the easy-to-miss comments section. It's by Arthur Luehrmann, a Dartmouth professor who was asked to create a manual from Macintosh Basic. He wrote what I consider one of the best essays about "computing literacy": "Should the Computer Teach the Student, or Vice-Versa?" http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/seminalarticle1.pdf http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/seminalarticle1... Pasting Prof. Lehurmann's comment on MacBasic here for posterity...it has some interesting musings about the importance of personal programming and has a Steve Jobs cameo to boot: > Andy gets this sad tale right. My partner Herb Peckham and I were free-lance writers brought in to create a manual for Macintosh Basic, which we did. More about that later. I first met Donn when we were both serving on the ANSI Basic Standards committee, whose goal was to set up specifications for a modern version of Basic that would contain loop structures, if-then blocks, and procedure calls, so the notorious GO TO statement could go away. Tom Kurtz, co-inventor of Dartmouth Basic, was also active on the ANSI committee. I've known Tom since 1965, when I was teaching physics at Dartmouth, and I knew Tom was keen on implementing a modern, structured version of Basic, and getting beyond the old (and much-criticized) line-number-dependent language that was becoming ubiquitous on micros, thanks to Bill Gates's interpreter (which was mostly correct, except if you wrote FOR I = 1 TO 0, the loop would be executed once:no pre-test). I had added graphics primitives to Dartmouth Basic around 1976 and developed an X-Y pen-plotter to carry out graphics commands mixed in with the text being sent to Teletype terminals. My interest on the ANSI committee was to make sure the new Basic had a standard set of graphics statements. It became clear that Donn also wanted Macintosh Basic to be a modern, structured language that would leave Applesoft Basic as a memory. I pressed for Mac Basic to also include the graphics statements we were standardizing on the committee, and Donn ultimately agreed. That was around 1979. By that time I was at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley heading a program to teach kids about computers, both at LHS and remotely via Teletypes in Bay Area schools. We also had Commodore Pets, and we outfitted a van to take wheeled desks with mounted Apple IIs out to schools. Essentially, we taught programing in Basic on all systems. I left the Hall in 1980 and, with Martha Luehrmann and Herb Peckham, started Computer Literacy Press. Our purpose was to serve the needs of all the new computer users that were suddenly appearing, thanks to micros. Our first book project was "Apple Pascal:A Hands-On Approach." Apple liked it and included a copy with each Pascal software package it sold. (If anyone is interested, I still have a dozen copies of the book.) That brings us to Macintosh Basic. Apple invited us to create "Macintosh Basic:A Hands-On Approach" and have it ready in time for shipping with the software, which was six or eight months away. Herb and I took up offices at Apple and met with Donn several times a week to review progress. And what a pleasure it was to work with Donn! He was good at explaining details we had questions about, and he was completely open to ideas we had about the graphics elements. The same was true of Marianne Hsiung. So, as the months went by, it looked like Macintosh Basic would be the user-oriented language for the Mac:and it would be great. Our book was finished and in page proof, ready for the press. BUT . . . Steve Jobs invited me into his office one morning. Our office was a few doors away, and we talked from time to time. Steve seemed uncertain about something. Then he handed me a disk and said, "What do you think about this?" I took it to our Mac, loaded the software, and what I saw was Microsoft's version of Basic for the Mac. Against Donn's and Marianne's creation, it looked antique: no structured programming elements, line numbers essential for GO TOs, primitive graphics commands, limited data types:a throwback, in a word. So, the next day I went back to see Steve. He asked, "What do you think?" I said, "Steve, it's a piece of shit." He didn't say anything, but looked grim. A week or so later, we learned that Apple's Macintosh Basic project had been canceled. Andy Herzfeld explains the situation accurately. The Apple II was the cash cow at that time, and without Applesoft Basic it would be worthless. Gates played hardball, and Apple caved. And so, sitting on a shelf in our basement are the page proofs of our book, "Macintosh Basic:A Hands-On Approach." It's the best of the 20 or 30 books we've done. But the saddest thing to me is that the Mac shipped with no user-level programming language. It was the beginning of the end of ordinary people writing their own programs. Computer buyers became customers of programs (now renamed "applications") written by experts, not creators of their own, albeit modest, programs. It didn't have to be that way.

aruggirello 12y ago

Makes me think about the story of AmigaBASIC, since Microsoft was there too, ready to sign $$$ with Commodore, ready to abandon thousands of loving users without looking back... but that's another story, isn't it?

st3fan 12y ago

I loved MacBasic. I was only 8 or 9 but I wrote so many little 'hacks' in it.

chipsy 12y ago

There's something strange about this story. Apple could have turned "MacBasic" into a marginally different language and product and still shipped it, right? Why didn't that occur to them?

djur 12y ago
Microsoft would have perceived it as competition regardless. That's why they insisted on buying it from Apple, rather than just securing an agreement not to release it.
mikeash 12y ago
They'd have had to start a new implementation from scratch, since Microsoft bought their existing work, and if the timeline of the original project held true for the new one, it would have taken years to build.

idlewords 12y ago

I remember being blown away by my first encounter with a Mac, as a twelve year old kid. After learning how the mouse worked, I started to wonder "how can I write a program on this thing?". Every computer I had used before let you type BASIC programs right on the command line. But all the Mac had was an 'interrupt' switch that dropped you into an unfathomable console. It was a very discouraging feeling; it had never occurred to me that there could be a computer that didn't let you write programs.

kalleboo 12y ago
My first interactions with a Mac were through HyperCard[0], which was included with the all the early Macs (basically until Apple sold it off to Claris). Without HyperCard, I would never have become a programmer. HyperCard was very much the BASIC for the Mac, but wildly more powerful and user-friendly. I find it very sad Apple don't ship something like HyperCard with iOS devices. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
- idlewords 12y ago
  HyperCard was one of those rare products (along with Excel and FileMaker Pro) that made people into programmers without them knowing it. It was astonishing what people were able to put together in HyperCard, and how much sadness there was when Apple finally axed it.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    A baby unicorn dies every time someone builds an overly complex Excel spreadsheet that should actually be a program.
    - te_chris 12y ago
      Yes, why should people solve problems they have themselves in ways that disagree with our aesthetic?

nostrademons 12y ago

This still happens all the time in the software industry. I've been told to put projects on hold because they relied upon 3rd-party APIs from companies whose relationship with my employer was souring, or to shelve certain areas of research because they might anger important corporate partners. I've had coworkers that slaved away for 2 years on a very well-liked feature, only to have it killed because of contract negotiations. Unfortunately business hardball is a fact of life. I do wish there were laws against using contract terms to explicitly kill a competitors' products or features, since these are blatantly against consumers' interests. I guess they'd be virtually impossible to enforce, though, because you can always get around them by buying the offending software and then choosing not to allocate resources to it.

yuhong 12y ago
That is one of the reasons why I asked about using anti-trust law.

irollboozers 12y ago

I wonder what the equivalent of MacBasic would be today?

luke_s 12y ago
Probably your web browser and notepad for doing simple html and javascript files.
rbanffy 12y ago
Considering how advanced it was compared to other BASICs of the time, I'd say it would be like a sophisticated IDE and Python or Ruby built-in into the OS.

_delirium 12y ago

So many little things always always pop up to remind you that Bill Gates got rich in an unsavory manner.

analog31 12y ago
Bill Gates got rich by understanding that people want to write their own software. I'm not sure Jobs ever understood that. Granted, I won't try to write a paean to Bill Gates and his business practices over the years, but I think his enthusiasm for user programming is one indulgence that I'd grant him.
- judk 12y ago
  The OP explains a specific example where Bill Gates took away user programming in order to screw over Apple. Bill Gates got rich by getting a sweetheart deal (arranged by family connections) that paid per installation of DOS.

nipponese 12y ago

I had the opportunity to work with Donn at my first job out of school in 2007. Literally could not have happened to a nicer human being, but I guess that's how it usually goes.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mambodog 12y ago

If you want to try it out for yourself, I tracked down a copy of MacBasic .335 and wrapped it up in an in-browser emulator here: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/macbasic/ http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/macbasic/

pervycreeper 12y ago
Thanks. There appears to be a more recent version available here: http://macgui.net/downloads/?file_id=17340 http://macgui.net/downloads/?file_id=17340 , although, I haven't put in the time to get it to work to see if it has the features suggested in the screenshot here http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/stories/EarlyMacStories.html#basic http://school.anhb.uwa.edu.au/personalpages/kwessen/web/stor... , namely syntax highlighting and formatting, interactive stepping, and so on