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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

But the saddest thing to me is that the Mac shipped with no user-level programming language.

Right there. If not Basic, HyperCard should have been put into the Macintosh ROM. Things might have been completely different.

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HyperCard came out in '87, the Mac came out in '84.

Correct. But the educational models going forward from that point (like the Classic and LC) could have benefited from having every machine ship with a standard set programming/scripting language.

BBC BASIC in the BBC Master I remember so fondly. It make doing complex tasks, say copy from disk to tape, easy, as it was stored in ROM.

Does anyone remember Genesis on the Archimedes? A multimedia authoring package with some programmable elements itself written in Acorn basic.

Does it really make sense to put apps into the Mac ROM?

Sure, I think so. There was no internet. There were no software stores.

What do you mean no software stores? What year are you targeting? Boxed software was everywhere as early as the early 80's which is when the Apple II series hit its stride with the IIe... There were aisles of it at even pedestrian stores. Computer clubs and other piracy-potential things were available. 300 baud modems and BBS's... You also had mall stores like Babbages (became GameStop eventually), etc. that specialized in software across multiple platforms.

VisiCalc was released about the time that software became a fairly visible retail item.

Maybe he was referring to the concept of always-connected machines being able to update system software and apps remotely. Even updating the Mac system software back then meant trudging to a brick-and-mortar store and buying the large set of floppies.

You have some notions to correct.

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

Since the late 70's, you could just go into a store, buy a box with disks (appropriate to your machine type) and manuals and run it. Or cartridges - many programs were distributed as ROM cartridges, including BASIC interpreters. Cartridge slots were common in home computers. You could buy Lotus 123 in cartridge for the PC Junior.

I take it you weren't around at that time. Well, there was software all over the place in stores and on BBSes, some that was entered from magazine listings, and much that was pirated on tapes and floppy disks.

In the days of the primacy of floppy disks, yes.

When you've only got one floppy and no hard drive, you have to swap software and data disks frequently. The first Mac had only 128KB of RAM.

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