How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people

Re:How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people by flomo on Monday September 18, 2023 @03:19AM (#37553279)

No, not at all, the folklore story doesn't even address Apple's strategy. Their developer relations were "Apply Here" back then. Macintosh shipped with zero developer tooling, not C/C++, not Pascal, not BASIC.

And, we have no idea what Donn's BASIC was actually like ... it probably wasn't "Visual Basic", or even a platform. Just better than Microsoft's halfazz port of their micro basic. (which did have some quickdraw commands.)

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Re:How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people by GeekyBear on Monday September 18, 2023 @11:14AM (#37557291)

> we have no idea what Donn's BASIC was actually like

We literally know exactly what it was like. Dartmouth was already using a late beta of the software for a Basic class when Microsoft forced Apple to cancel the release of the final version.

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Re:How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people by mainland on Monday September 18, 2023 @11:28AM (#37557548)

If you'd like to see what Donn's BASIC was like, you can! The Internet Archive has a version that runs in-browser [1].

Although the Folklore article says there were two books describing Donn's BASIC, I believe there were at least three: Introduction to Macintosh BASIC, Using Macintosh BASIC, and The Macintosh BASIC Handbook. All three are available at vintageapple.org [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/mac_MacBASIC.335

[2] https://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/

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Re:How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people by flomo on Monday September 18, 2023 @05:27PM (#37562320)

Thanks! I had no idea it was out there. (Although it looks like it's not very 'visual'.)

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