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Comment by sbuk | Hacker News Reader

Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode, and the associated tooling, without forgetting that until recently, every Mac came pre-installed with Perl, Python and Ruby. I will concede that Objective-C is not AppleSoft Basic, but how useful is that now? And aren’t the previously listed languages a more powerful version in many ways? Also didn’t all Macs after 1986 come with HyperCard? I know NeXT machines all shipped with Project Builder.

My point, your link is, like your theory, fiction.

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> Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode,

Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment, in a time where every other personal computer had one built-in. As a matter of fact the only way to develop software for the Macintosh was to drop $10,000 on a Lisa

Fact: the link the OP provided was from a Hollywood movie, a know reliable source of historical accuracy. /s

That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing, certainly not the fact that programmable personal computers were so vehemently "despised by Steve Jobs."

Edit: Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...

> Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...

Right. No python. No C. No Perl. No Pascal. No Ruby. No C++. No Basic. Even the Apple IIc with it's puny 64k of ram had a decent Basic in it for the time. Talk about a feat of engineering from Microsoft!

One thing I was able to do with my AppleIIc was control the serial port through Basic (1984 ish). Hypertalk released support for doing that in 1992 -- a full 8 years (!) after the original mac was released.

I don't know what you're trying to prove. Your original point, which you laughably attempted to prove with a clip from a movie, was that Jobs "despised" programable computers. This is demonstrably false.

Well, being that I am the OP, I'm pretty confident about my point. ( and thanks for recognizing that. :)

> This is demonstrably false.

So demonstrate it.

I, and several others have done precisely that in this thread.

Next time, don't use a Hollywood dramatisation to back up your stories. They aren't real! Woz is on record as saying that the conversation never happened. Fundamentally, you're making things up to reflect your own biases and doubling down on them. It's clear that Apple, the business, doesn't see iPhone and iPad a general computing devices. That, though, is a very different point to the one you have failed to make.

Not really a surprise there was no Python (1991), Perl (1987), Ruby (1993), or C++ (public-ish in 1985) on a computer released in 1984.

Apple had a basic Pascal compiler on the Apple II/III, but it would have been an unbelievable feat to stretch that into a product with solid links to the System 1 OS, including the new GUI API, on the first few Macs.

Sample applies to BASIC. It would have been possible to squeeze the old MS Basic into the Mac but it would have had to run in some kind of Apple II emulation mode - not the point of the exercise. If you wanted BASIC you could buy an Apple II and carry right on.

Your point is clearly wrong. It took a few years to develop good tools for the original Mac because it was - you know - actually quite hard.

But when Jobs returned good, or at least adequate, free dev tools for MacOS were included almost immediately. And have been included ever since.

> the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...

The OS was booted from a floppy disk, computers didn't use CDs back then.

Steve didn't want people mucking around with his perfect creation https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

WHAT? he was responding to your words that stated

"Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode..."

when he pointed out that the mac DIDN'T come with CD or any dev environment. you responded with "That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing"

can't you see how wrong your response is?

I did point out that "Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode...", and in the same post pointed out that "Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it..."

So you're annoyed that I pointed out that every version of Mac OS (including System 7.5, 8 and 9) all shipped with some kind of dev environment (and I concede that Hypercard is applying that loosely) and pointed out that the 128K Mac did not have an OS shipped on a CD or a method for reading the CDs at the time (were CD-ROMs even a thing in 1984 - I can't remember)?

I tell you what it doesn't prove either way; programable computer were "despised by Steve Jobs". That is what I was taking umbrage with.

For someone who doesn't seem to know what a floppy disk is you seem to think you know a lot about computers from the 80s

The OP point was that Jobs hated users having access to programming tools and not wanting to ship them with his computers.

The original 1984 Mac on release not having a dev environment was just an example he used to make his point.

But the example can be correct, without making the point valid (as numerous people have answered here).

Especially since the same Jobs had shipped tons of computers with development environments, including things like PBX, XCode, all kinds of scripting languages, the whole NeXT suite of dev tools (that were one of its strong points, and became the later basis for OS X dev tools), and so on.

If the parents point was "at the point of the release of the original Mac in 1984, and only then, Jobs didn't want to give users development environment" he might have a point. But Jobs of the subsequent 20+ years agreeing to ship development tools just fine, makes the point moot.

can't you see how wrong his point is and how irrelevant the example?

Also a fact: Steve Jobs spent the first half of the 90's trying to sell NeXT machines specifically on their dev tools for quickly making custom applications. From the late 1980's on, whenever he spoke of his visits to Xerox PARC he would mention the GUI, networking, and object-oriented programming as the three equally world-changing technologies shown to him.

Side note: For some reason Jobs insisted it only have an optical drive instead of a hard drive. Which I'm sure many engineers advised against. Hard drive was like 2.5k extra. What a decision.

That was only the very first model. Most NeXT machines shipped with floppy and HD.

> Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment

The programming environment for the Mac was a total shitshow in 1984, and continued to be so for a couple of versions after. You needed a 128k Mac, a Lisa, *and* an Apple II to make it work *at all*.

Fact: Project Builder X for Mac Os was released 2001ish a full 17 years after the original Mac was introduced in 1984. (2001-1984 = 17)

Also Fact: The original 1984 Mac did come not pre-installed with Perl, Python, nor Ruby.

You're absolutely right, how could I miss it! Steve Jobs hated the thought of programmable computers so much that he stopped these languages being included a full 3 years before any of them existed! /s

What you think you've "proved", you haven't. I'll repeat myself; that there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing, certainly not the fact that programmable personal computers were so vehemently "despised by Steve Jobs."

Maybe you're angry or maybe you're pissed at being called out on this. I don't know.

But there were two issues with the Mac release in 1984.

1. The price.

2. It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user.

In fact it was such a complete flop, it forced out Jobs by 1985.

The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic.

> It was a computer that was not programmable out of the box by the user.

That depends on what you mean by "out of the box." It's true that no development tools were included, but they were available from third parties. I wrote the code for my masters thesis in 1986 using Coral Common Lisp on a Mac Plus, so if you wanted to program a Mac you certainly could.

Not angry about anything my friend, just incredulous that you seemingly cannot separate Hollywood from what is front of you. Your definitions, as demonstrated by lisper, are at best debatable.

> The other competitors in the area around that time were the C64, Apple IIc/e, Vic 20, Atari 400/800, MS Dos PCs, TI 99/4a, TRS/80. All had a form of basic.

Interesting. Where are they now? It's as if in 1984 a paradigm shift happened. /s

Also, DOS didn't ship with basic. Some vendors may have bundled it, but DOS never had it built in.

Actually, starting with MS-DOS 5, QBasic - a feature reduced version of the commercial QuickBasic - was included.

I stand corrected. Though that was in 1991, which is 7 years after the timeframe the OP is arguing about.

There was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC before that, which allowed me to start programming. Edit: fixed link

I may very well be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that was a Compaq thing. I certainly don't remember BASIC coming with any version of DOS or Windows out of the box in 1984. May be later on in the decade.

Best I watch 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' to check a reliable source... /s

I wasn't sure about GW-BASIC. I remember running it on a PC that came with MS-DOS 4.0, but that came with the PC (a Laser 286) as well.

MS-DOS 5.0 was a shrink-wrapped box purchase, so I was sure it was "pure".

What?

The original IBM PC came with BASICA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Advanced_BASIC

From 1983, MS DOS came with GW-BASIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW-BASIC

From 1991, GW-BASIC was replaced by QBasic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBasic

I would say, DOS always shipped with Basic. QBasic remained included up to Windows ME (the last Windows that came with DOS).

> "Some vendors may have bundled it, but DOS never had it built in."

I'm partially incorrect. It clearly was bundled, and not as I said may have been bundled. The OP was alluding that it was built in like it was for the CBM64, ZX81 etc. Being bundled and installing it as a separate process is subtly different IMHO. But I will concede that I was wrong to say otherwise.

It's complicated, not only by the fact of BASIC being available in ROM originally, but by the fact that there were OEM versions of MS-DOS that didn't come with BASIC. The DOS that came with one's PC was rarely vanilla MS-DOS. I had a couple of PCs where the only programming tools that came in the box were EDLIN and DEBUG.

Yeah, I was there. At the time, Apple was making a ton of money selling the bit, 6502 based computers.

These machines were a completely open book, featured slots to plug anything you could imagine into (and people did, using those computers as quite capable 8 bit workstations: test and measure, cross dev, business, publishing, and so many more...)

I will stop there as the story of the 8 bit Apple computers is well known.

I will say Jobs hobbled the 16 bit machine so it would not spank the Mac silly.

Delivering serious use value to users is what funded the Mac and then some.

The only people I knew who wanted a Mac back then were ones that would never write a program.

Funny enough, many of those went on to use the crap out of HyperCard.

> Also Fact: The original 1984 Mac did come not pre-installed with Perl, Python, nor Ruby.

It would have been quite extraordinary, considering that none of these languages existed. Also fact: it did not come with Go or Rust built in, and did not have a CUDA-compatible GPU.

It also didn't come with BASIC built-in or included unlike its contemporaries at the time.

That’s a really strange hill to die on. I know I learnt Pascal as a teenager on a Mac Plus. It had several third party development environments and there was a thriving shareware/freeware scene, developer tools were there. In the end what harmed the Mac was that it was much more expensive than PC clones.

Even when a BASIC implementation was built in, getting a better one from third parties was very common on all platforms. You can look at magazines from the time if you don’t believe it. The Mac was by design more of an appliance than the Apple ][, but it was not the black box some people here seem to think it was. This whole thread is full of assertions that are demonstrably false in about 10s worth of Google search.

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