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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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