> On Aug 17, 2016, at 5:02 PM, P.J. Alling <webstertwenty...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The thing about the IBM PC was that it was open architecture, you could build > any, and I do mean any, device for the BUS, and in the early days Microsoft > pretty much gave the OS away. I actually had a copy of QDos, which was > pretty good, if you didn't expect to much. I worked on a couple of projects > that were successful because of those factors.
The IBM PC was a bought-in design from an outside vendor along with a bought-in operating system from an outside vendor. It wasn't intended to be "open architecture"; it was just relatively simple stuff that came off the shelf from the world external to IBM. They just manufactured and sold it with their brand on it; they didn't really believe in the concept of microcomputers at all, they just saw it as something that might make some money but was probably a waste of time. > The original MAC really turned me off, when I became aware that not only > would I need to buy a machine, then a development environment, and even then > I would need a hardware key to open the system to develop software. MAC is a brand that manufactures and sells machine hand tools. Macintosh is the name of a computer made and sold by Apple, usually abbreviated to "Mac". ;-) Macintosh was designed to be a fully integrated, graphical UI system. All of it was designed and built by Apple, including the original floppy drives that never made it to production (they switched to the Sony drive just before production). The original development system was Pascal and Assembly (evidently Larry Tesler worked directly with Nicholas Wirth to create the required object extensions, etc) and ran on Lisa Workshop because, at the time, the Mac wasn't considered powerful enough for real development work (not that the Lisa was vastly better, mind you!) AND there was no time to build the tools for the Mac that ran on it natively prior to release. You never needed a hardware key to develop software that I recall, but you needed an Apple Developer Programs license to get the development environment and sell software because you were repackaging a good bit of Apple's SDK in your app. You also needed a way to get the programs from the Lisa to the Mac, which was fun because they used different file formats and volume formats … That may be what you are thinking of, I recall there being a custom cabling setup that would do the transfer and install for you from the Lisa to the Mac. I was a certified member of the Apple developer program starting in December 1983, signed up just a month before the Mac was announced to the public. I never did write any software in Lisa Workshop because, frankly, I couldn't afford a Lisa. Native development systems for the Mac started to appear from third party vendors within six months of the computer's first release (TML Pascal, UCSD Pascal, a couple of FORTRANs, BASIC, Apple 68000 Assembler were all available by Winter 1985) and Apple started to develop Macintosh Programmers Workshop that same year. They sold it for a while along with the developer programs license, then made it a free download for anyone who wanted to use it. I was programming on the Mac in TML Pascal and 68000 assembler by late 1984 and wrote a development API and a couple of commercial database apps for the chemical research industry in 1988-1990 using THINK C and MPW. > On a PC it came with a "real" programming language. Sure the original PC > BASIC was pretty crappy programming language, but you didn't need to install > special hardware to write and test programs. Different situation entirely. PCDOS was a very simple thing by comparison to the graphical UI Macintosh OS and didn't require hardly anything at all to write code for, other than a language and a code generator. It was an out of date computer practically before it shipped. The Lisa and then the Mac were well ahead of their time. G -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
