The Long View

Great write-up here about what it takes to build the app from this source code: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

Good summary. It's worth pointing out that Borland's Pascal had already diverged from other dialects, including Apple's, and when they tacked on the OO extensions from Wirth's ObjectPascal/MacApp, they diverged further. MacApp is interesting in itself, but I'm not sure how much involvement Wirth had in its development. Delphi certainly owes a lot of its design to it, but nailed the visual UI builder in ways that MacApp didn't (and in a way that Interface Builder never has). Apple actually kept supporting and updating MacApp as late as 2002 (Photoshop was famously written in it) [1]; it's one of those beautiful niche things that eventually die, but keep a lot of people magically productive for a while (just like Delphi, coincidentally). [1] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

What would you expect to happen? Photoshop 1.0 is an almost unusably basic image editor by modern standards. It doesn't even have layers (they were introduced with Photoshop 3.0 4 years later). Even if the code was licensed in a manner that allowed distribution of derivative works (which it isn't), it's written in Apple's Pascal dialect from the mid-80s and uses a UI framework that's also from the mid-80s and only supports classic Mac OS. CHM didn't even release the code in a state that could be usable out of the box if you happen to have a 40 year old Macintosh sitting around. Here's a blog post showing how much work it took someone to compile it: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… I think Adobe decided to release the code because they knew it was only valuable from a historical standpoint and wouldn't let anyone actually compete with Photoshop. If you wanted to start a new image editor project from an existing codebase, it would be much easier to build off of something like Pinta: https://www.pinta-project.com/

You have most of the details right, but not in the right order. Yes, Apple looked at buying in an OS after Copland failed. But all the stuff about Carbon, Blue Box, Yellow Box, etc. -- all those were NeXT ideas after the merger. None of it was pre-planned. So, they bought NeXTstep, a very weird UNIX with a proprietary, PostScript-based GUI and a rich programming environment with tons of rich foundation classes, all written in Objective C. A totally different API, utterly unlike and unrelated to Classic MacOS. Then they had to decide how to bring these things together. NeXT already offered its OPENSTEP GUI on top of other Unixes. OPENSTEP ran on Sun Solaris and IBM AIX, and I think maybe others I've forgotten. Neither were commercial successes. NeXT had a plan to create a compatibility environment for running NeXT apps on other OSes. The idea was to port the base ObjC classes to the native OS, and use native controls, windows, widgets etc. but to be able to develop your apps in ObjC on NeXTstep using Interface Builder. In the end, only one such OS looked commercially viable: Windows NT. So the plan was to offer a NeXT environment on top of NT. This is what was temporarily Yellow Box and later became Cocoa. Blue Box was a VM running a whole copy of Classic MacOS under NeXTstep, or rather, Rhapsody. In Mac OS X 10.0, Blue Box was renamed the Classic environment and it gained the ability to mix windows with NeXT windows. But there still needed to be a way to port apps…

Apple switched away from Pascal due to UNIX market pressure. http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… And it was mostly to C++, not C. Pascal is used daily for embedded system work by MikroElektronika customers using mikroPascal. https://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal/ Any embedded application using Ada's Ravenscar profile, is an OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenscar_profile Additionally regarding Pascal, it was used to build Corvus Systems OS, MicroEngine and Solo OS. Modula-2 was used to build Lilith and Delco's engine control units. Mesa was used to create Xerox Star workstation. ESPOL followed by NEWP was used for Burroughs B5500 in the 60's, nowadays still sold by Unisys as ClearPATH. IBM created their RISC architecture OS using PL/8, with a compiler architecture that now re-resurfaced in LLVM. OS/400, nowadays known as IBM i, was originally written in PL/I. If it wasn't for UNIX's adoption, C would have joined many of those languages many moons ago.

Interesting context and history here: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

I think apps could also be ported (mostly just recompiled?) to run in separate address spaces. So you could have a Mac app that was its own A/UX process. This seems to have some details: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

> …the opaqueness was not conducive to creating a culture of power users and "semi-developers" unlike the PCs of the time. Utter nonsense, as anyone who has ever used ResEdit can tell. http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… Also, extended file attributes are alive and well.

this post may supply [0] some context http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

Wow! I just checked out the copyrights[1] for Photoshop CC, and Photoshop still uses a (a heavily-customized) MacApp![2][3] [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-copyright-trademarks-third… [2] https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/13/3959868/photoshop-is-a-city-for-eve… [3] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

This reminded me that Apple also had a UNIX adventure in the early '90s: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

That's fascinating. I googled a little and found [1], which speaks highly of Trapeze. It even says that modern spreadsheets still haven't caught up to it. I'd heard of Improv, but not Trapeze. It sounds like you were earlier. Did you see a lot of similarity when Improv (and later Quantrix) came out? Also, why do you think that Excel users, even sophisticated ones, tend to stick to Excel instead of using higher-level modeling tools? Is it simply that Excel is entrenched, or are there conceptual reasons? [1] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

Software development basically peaked in the mid 1980's. Macintosh Common Lisp circa 1987: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… specifically: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… Firebug circa 2013: http://getfirebug.com/logging, specifically http://getfirebug.com/img/logging/consoleDir.png

I'm surprised I haven't seen this site before. As someone who cut his teeth on the early Mac it sure explains a lot. Not many people would write an entire blog entry about how the Mac's dynamic memory allocation worked: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

Haven't finished reading it myself, but here: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

True enough, and there's an interesting history of Smalltalk on early Apple computers that I wasn't aware of: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… Makes sense, since you can see the Smalltalk influence today in Objective-C.

i would rather say that steve jobs's vision was to make the dynabook impossible; the central feature of the dynabook is that it is a tool for computational thinking for the masses, while the central feature of most of the designs of the projects jobs led (mac 128, imac, ipod, iphone, ipad—though not next) is that they're closed to the users, requiring special tools to open and modify that are only available to a chosen elite, and nowadays, even to write software for. it's a vision of society that sees it primarily as a market for products, not a community of intellectual collaboration or autonomous individual flourishing, which was the intent of the dynabook the story of smalltalk at apple is fairly complex apple did also implement smalltalk-80 on the lisa, and there's a screenshot of that in the smalltalk-80 book (01984), but it was apparently never released, even as proprietary software. apple shipped a macintosh smalltalk in august 01985 (according to http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… but i don't think squeak (the apple smalltalk that eventually became open-source) was derived from it alan kay didn't join apple until 01984 (the year after jobs hired sculley as ceo), jobs left in september 01985, and squeak wasn't announced until 01996, which is about the time kay left, and i think squeak as a whole departed for disney at that point. jobs came back in 01997, and though he didn't kill squeak, he did…

Suspicion based on some of the other articles is just somebody who's really an in-depth Apple user. Listens to folklore.org, notes in a couple articles that they appear to be on the outside and need to buy stuff just like everybody else. Some of the articles mention "awe" at how tiny the old Mac binaries were. May have been Apple tech support. In "The Standard File Package" [1] from Saturday, February 27, 2010: > It has never been my job to provide technical support to casual (I mean non-professional) Mac users, but I have helped friends and family members. [araes note: Implies may have been professional technical support] In "Name it Scrapbook" [2] from Saturday, February 20, 2010: > I am not an iPhone developer, and I don't know everything about it, but I write cocoa programs on Macs, and I have read the iPhone developer documentation. Seems like somebody who just reads everything about Mac history, culture, and development. Quite plausible the author may actually know "more" than the original developers, because a lot don't care about their own products as much as the user base. [1] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… [2] http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie…

I grew up in the 80s during the era of MacroMaker and QuickKeys, when you could just hit the record button and make macros to play back sequences of mouse and keyboard events. It was especially useful in programs like Photoshop before they added their own macro systems. I'm having trouble finding links about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_6#MacroMaker http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… The frontier was to eventually make everything scriptable and deterministic by getting more apps to have hooks that could be controlled directly (so like a specific command to click the close box of a window for example, rather than sending a click event right and down from the top left corner). Anyway, this whole concept of how to use computers seems to be all but dead today and I can't help but feel that something of tremendous value has been lost. Please, if you ever write macro tools like Phoenix, add a record feature.

I made years ago a presentation about Lisp on the Mac: http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~ferguson/Lisp%20Docs/lisp-and-macosx.pdf Generally the influence of Lisp on Apple was starting in the mid 80s. There were Lisps available for the Apple II, but they did not have much impact. But a few highlights from the mid 80s on: Coral developed a Lisp for the Macintosh. See for example: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entrie… and https://ccl.clozure.com/history.html Coral Lisp was developed into a Common Lisp and marketed under the name 'Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp' (MACL). At some point MACL was bought by Apple. Why did Apple buy it? Well MCL was becoming popular at Apple and specifically at their research lab called the 'Advanced Technology Group' (ATG). A lot of ATG projects were Lisp-based. Lisp was used to develop a multimedia development tool called Sk8 (which was used in probably hundred projects with universities) - Sk8 had a scripting language called Sk8script, which was the model for AppleScript. So Apple used MCL for a bunch of research and production applications. But the biggest reason for buying MCL and its development team was that Apple at that time was working a portable computers: tablet computers and small PDAs. Apple was developing a new Lisp dialect for that (Ralph, later renamed to Dylan) and had written an OS for and with it. The development environment was MCL and the later target were…