Oral history of Caroline Rose, writer of Inside Macintosh (2023) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Oral history of Caroline Rose, writer of Inside Macintosh (2023) [video]

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57 pointsmsephton14 comments

Caroline Rose was a technical writer at Apple from 1982, lead writer and editor of "Inside Macintosh". Apple-era starts at 1h22m in the video, NeXT-era at 1h58m.

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I own one of her drafts, as I was a 3rd party beta tester for the Mac a good 9 months before release. My copy is mimeographed and filled with pencil and pen corrections and notes that were scribbled on the mimeographs as I worked with the Apple OS developers. It's all in a binder I keep in an airtight zip locked bag. I've been meaning to get it scanned and put online for decades now.

This comment needs more attention and upvoting. Please do so - you'll end up getting hugged to death on day 1 for such an interesting and esoteric primary source.

Be sure to check out her stories on Folkore.org:

https://www.folklore.org/0-index.html?author=Caroline+Rose

and esp.:

https://www.folklore.org/Inside_Macintosh.html

Ah, remembering the phone-book Inside Mac volumes! Those were the days.

(Kids these days with StackExchange and Copilot have no idea.... now get off my lawn!)

It got better when tools like ObiWan came out to do basic lookups from your computer, along the lines of "what book and page is this function documented on?".

("But couldn't you just jump to the definition in your IDE?" Oh, you sweet summer child. First of all, most IDEs didn't have that functionality. Second, the header files didn't contain documentation. If you were lucky, they might have the argument names.)

> Pretty soon, I figured out that if Caroline had trouble understanding something, it probably meant that the design was flawed. On a number of occasions, I told her to come back tomorrow after she asked a penetrating question, and revised the API to fix the flaw that she had pointed out. I began to imagine her questions when I was coding something new, which made me work harder to get things clearer before I went over them with her.

This alone is enough to justify hiring great technical writers (and technical writers with programming experience.)

My introduction to Pascal and Assembly Language were after finding one of those huge paperbacks on the shelves of a Salvation Army in North Huntington, Pennsylvania. This was long after the book had lost all relevance. But before that I was stuck thinking about programming in terms of Java and C++ OOP. Small things that changed the course of my programming career.

Interestingly, her first task at NeXT was writing the user manual for WriteNow for Macintosh (apparently in WriteNow, and certainly on a Macintosh).

For folks who aren't familiar w/ it, it was contracted for by Apple as a hedge against MacWrite not making it and as an "advanced MacWrite" --- ~100,000 lines of assembly language, it was blazingly fast, yet still had quite nice features and was _very_ capable (my wife wrote her Master's Thesis in it) which I then had to coax out of HP LaserJet (IV I think --- the first 600 dpi one).

Remarkable interview.

It's amazing that she wrote the Mac documentation without actually having access to a working development system.

I also like the idea that writers should be embedded in the software group.

The "joy and excitement" and camaraderie of the Mac group is interesting as well, as a key to its success.

Interesting that the Mac group worked in one room.

Surprising that (pre-ADA) she could legally be fired from NeXT for having an RSI disability.

And that Jobs fired her again (as part of shutting down Apple's technical journal, presumably to cut costs) after he returned to Apple.

Pretty amazing, huh. I'm going through some other interviews: currently Bas Ording

"I didn't want to work for IBM. IBM was the enemy.", she said, especially after IBM had declined to hire her.

"You were there for us when we needed you, we'll be there for you, now that you need us", said Steve Jobs, before NeXT fired Caroline Rose, when her RSI became debilitating. After talking to a labor lawyer, she went back to NeXT and got her NeXT shares vested - which turned into AAPL shares when Apple bought NeXT.

Title at develop magazine was "editor in cheek"

Ah, yes. Back in the '90s I'd visit Wordsworths in Harvard Square every few weeks to pick up the latest volume of Apple developer documentation. Great bookstore, great books. (Didn't use most of them, but it definitely made me feel hip in an Apple-centric way.)

The Computer History Museum's long form interviews are a wonderful resource.

I wish Apple still wrote good documentation.

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