Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

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Andy Hertzfeld shared the background on why MacBASIC didn't ship with the Mac.

> Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it.

https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html

It was a shame, since MacBASIC allowed users to write software that supported the features of the Mac UI and Microsoft's BASIC did not.

> Benchmarks published in Washington Apple Pi Journal suggested that MacBASIC had better performance as compared to Microsoft's MS BASIC for Macintosh. The language included modern looping control structures, user-defined functions, graphics, and access to the Macintosh Toolbox. The development environment supported multiple programs running simultaneously with symbolic debugging including breakpoints and single-step execution.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBASIC

However, the late betas were out in the wild with no copy protection, so it was passed around by user groups.

> It was a shame, since MacBASIC allowed users to write software that supported the features of the Mac UI and Microsoft's BASIC did not.

Practically speaking perhaps yes, but technically MS Basic on the Mac did enable you to make many Mac Toolbox/Quickdraw calls, enabling one to make buttons, shapes, draw, use fonts, etc. All of this ran inside the BASIC window, so it wasn't like you could open new windows or file dialogs.

I have no idea what Apple's MacBasic was like, but I did use MS Basic to make some very simple games. For junior high school me it was mostly using buttons in unsophisticated guessing or choose-your-own-adventure games.

I had a floppy with Pong-like game written in MS basic for the Mac. It used toolbox routines to draw the ping-pong-like paddle, the ball, the oval-shaped (iirc) bricks, and follow mouse movements while hiding the default pointer. I don't know who wrote it, but it came to me via a parent who worked at Jet Propulsion Lab and brought it home to run on our 128k Mac.

> I have no idea what Apple's MacBasic was like

This was already apparent.

Microsoft BASIC for Mac was a lowest common denominator sort of product.

It did the sorts of things BASIC could do on any platform fairly well (since most platforms ran a Microsoft BASIC variant), but it did an incredibly poor job of allowing a user to write programs that worked as if they were designed for a Mac.

> This was already apparent

On edge? We're just talking here. I'm not trying to hold up MS Basic as some awesome programming environment, just describing how I experienced it

Being trapped in the MS BASIC window was _incredibly_ limiting for anything which was constrained by screen real estate --- starting out with only 512 x 342 and subtracting the menubar didn't leave much even for applications which weren't so constrained.

Sigh, why can't we have nice things?

Because Bill Gates was an ass

It's unlikely he changed, he just stepped away from business management and so doesn't need to don that cap any longer.

Personality compartmentalization is a fascinating thing.

The billions Gates has dropped on "education reform", including support for Common Core, is the sort of thing a rich ass convinced of the rightness of his techno-managerial views would do.

Is Common Core really that bad? It seems to be yet another globalist boogeyman for the online ultra-independent-personality types like "15 minute cities" and similar quips.

It's pointless numbers which don't provide any insight into a student's learning while on the school level are used to punish schools rather than provide more support.

Since it isn't meaningful to learning, students won't actually care about the test unless there are severe consequences, like taking away the ability to graduate, for not doing well.

Since it's high-stakes for the school as well, they develop lesson plans around teaching for the test (eg, taking time away from subjects which aren't tested), and setting up school rally events to add emotional reinforcement.

This is all opportunity cost taking away from actual effective teaching.

I don't know how you turn that into 'globalist boogeyman'. It's techno-managerial blind faith in measurement rather than trust in educators, combined with the classist view that most people should be trained as meat widgets for corporations, not citizens.

Are you sure you mean No Child Left Behind (HW Bush 1)/Race to the Top (Obama 2)'s emphasis on measurable objectives backed by standardized tests? The Common Core is a program/sequence of Grade 2-12 curriculum objectives.

https://corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ELA_Sta...

https://corestandards.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Math_St...

I say this as someone who hates exams as assessment in general, because I'm simply not wired to do any meaningful thinking given a piece of paper, no ability to walk around and think, and always just too little time to gather my thoughts. (I always enjoyed tough problem sets instead.)

I could well be wrong on the details, but note that Bill Gates and his foundation funding enabled Common Core to meet RttP goals, in a way that https://dianeravitch.net/2014/06/08/the-inside-story-of-how-... describes as a "coup".

Curriculum standards only work if people follow the standards, which for the US means tests, along with the artificial high-stakes I mentioned.

(Ooops! RttP should be RttT, for Race to the Top, not toP!)

Don’t worry - I’m not innocent here either - I forgot that it was George W Bush, not HW Bush!

He hasn’t changed at all. He pulled the exact same bullshit with opposing efforts to waive intellectual property rights for vaccines during the pandemic, using Gates Foundation money and influence to block anyone who attempted. If anything, he’s even more of a monster, now playing his malevolent games in the domain of global public health.

While portraying a "retired and calmed down rich man" with his blog posts and "books of the year" lists.

Ugly.

For a look at what his non-retired, non-calm management style was like see:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

That's a good tale, but I also read "The Halloween Documents", so that's more than enough knowledge about that guy's ethics.

Ah, and the "hidden Microsoft Trademark" in every BASIC image. I think Apple guys found and nullified in theirs, and pissed off Bill a little.

For more of this, see the book _StartUp_ by Jerry Kaplan, which basically devolves to the story of how Microsoft killed off Go Corporation and PenPoint:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3826418-startup

Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, sharing the story of how Gates and Ballmer tried to screw Allen out of his equity in Microsoft while he was distracted by his first cancer diagnosis really tells you all you need to know about what sort of person Gates was back then.

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/microsoft-co-foun...

It’s a shame he didn’t set up a foundation to keep his computer history museum open.

All a little odd given that AmigaBasic was pretty sweet.

The thing about Microsoft's BASIC suite was that it wasn't generally bad (it was their launching software, after all), it was just generic. So implementations for different platforms could vary in quality depending on necessary integrations.

Amiga BASIC, AppleSoft, and QBasic/QuickBasic were generally good. But the Macintosh version was a little less refined than MacBasic, by all accounts.

Amiga BASIC was pretty bad. It was slow, generally shared similar types of restrictions to Macintosh MS BASIC, and it didn't work on future 68k CPUs. I wouldn't be surprised if, similarly to Z80 and 6502 MS BASIC, their 68k BASIC was built from a single codebase. There are just too many similarities.

QBasic was as different to Microsoft BASIC as Visual Basic is different to QBasic.

It doesn’t really make sense to lump them into the same group.

As for Microsoft BASIC, I generally found it to be amongst the worst BASIC product on the market at that time.

They're lumped in the same group by measure of being from the same source and following mostly the same core dialect. What I (and is usually) referred to as "Microsoft BASIC", not a specific product:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC

E.g.:

> Applesoft BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC

> Type Microsoft BASIC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Basic

> Type Microsoft BASIC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickBASIC

The point wasn't that they are they same, in fact quite the opposite. So it would make sense that some variants (the Amiga variant, in this case) could be good while others are less well received.

I’m familiar with the different variants of Microsoft BASIC.

What I’m saying is that QBasic isn’t the same product as what Microsoft sold to 3rd parties like Altar, Apple, Commodore and co.

So it doesn’t really make sense to discuss QBasic in that context despite it technically still being a dialect of BASIC written by Microsoft.

I gave you my reasoning, we simply disagree. And that's ok.

Fair enough :)

As I remember it, the Mac was the first home computer that didn't come with BASIC out of the box.

I don’t think many people considered Mac a “home computer” back then given its price tag.

Perhaps the major purpose of the "home computer" (like RSTS/E on the PDP-11) was teaching people to program with BASIC. BASIC was also a way to develop applications, which was something you want on a "business" computer.

It was an expensive home computer, but it was not targeted at businesses and was always a personal productivity tool.

If you are rich enough, any computer that the DoD doesn't find too interesting can be your home computer.

Are any of those late betas available anywhere? Would love to see what that was like

Eventually, even the 1.0 version that Apple turned over to Microsoft leaked.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macbasic-10

Here are a few books on using MacBASIC that had already been printed before Microsoft forced the cancellation of the product.

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/26114-vintage-macbasic-b...

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