https://beyondloom.com/blog/thinkc.html

Your First THINK C Program

Welcome, child! Come in, come in! I have so few visitors to this
little hut. Pull up a chair, and I'll put on some tea.

I can see from the wedge of machined aluminum you cradle, its outer
surface festooned with glyphs and incantations, that you, too, are a
programmer. Things have changed so much over the years. What's that?
Oh, you noticed one of my antiques:

[plus]

An elegant machine from a more enlightened age. A 32-bit processor
built by... well, I suppose the details don't matter. Impossibly slow
and cramped compared your starkly modernist folio. Ah, but I see in
you a spark of curiosity! Perhaps, perhaps...

I'm afraid my device is too fragile for the roughousing of a novice-
it has spent so many years feeling only my touch. Recall, however,
the proofs of our saint Turing. We could teach your new machine some
old tricks!

Soul and Simulacrum

Let us begin by weaving a lucid dream; the bones and sinews of my
antique. Teach your contraption the language of the Motorola 68000.
The timings of raster beams and serial protocols. As is so often the
case, another of our order has already made most of the necessary
alignments and gestures- we need only tap into that lifestream.

First, a ward of salt, inscribed with the true name of our subject.
This name still has power in today's world, does it not? Take care,
child, not to break the perimeter:

$ mkdir Macintosh
$ cd Macintosh

Next, retrieve the means of our communion:

$ wget https://www.gryphel.com/d/minivmac/minivmac-36.04/minivmac-36.04.src.tgz
$ tar -zxvf minivmac-36.04.src.tgz
$ cd minivmac

As suits its manifold nature, this body must be instructed as to the
form it should take via a configuration tool which must, itself, be
compiled.

$ cc setup/tool.c -o setup_t
$ ./setup_t -t mc64 > setup.sh
$ chmod +x setup.sh
$ ./setup.sh
$ make
$ mv minivmac.app/ ../
$ cd ..

At last, we need an artifact which brings with it the spirit of the
machine. The read-only memory of another like mine, deftly flensed
from aging silicon and transfigured into pure electrical potential:

$ wget https://sites.google.com/site/minivmacapplicationsv6/disk-images-and-roms/vmac.rom -O vMac.ROM
$ open minivmac.app

It lives!

Your nascent servant hungers Your nascent servant hungers

Finding Yourself

See how the emulated screen scintillates on your modern LCD, the
reserved orderliness of 1-bit gray struggling to escape from meddling
subpixels and anti-aliasing. Soon, old friend. A plaintive glyph
leads us toward our next task. We must assemble a disk image with an
operating system. To begin, we require a living specimen from which
we may take cuttings.

The seventh system brought with it multitasking, which will make it
more familiar to your sensibilities. An older version, stripped of
inessential baubles, will maximize the resources available to your
personal aspirations.

$ wget https://sites.google.com/site/minivmacapplicationsv6/systems-os/System7.zip
$ unzip System7.zip -d System7

Feed System7.DSK to your homunculus, and see how eagerly it springs
into motion:

System folder, in exquisite miniature System folder, in exquisite
miniature

Next, create an empty vessel. 80 megabytes will prove ample:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=devboot.dsk bs=83886080 count=1

The Macintosh will shyly accept this offering, and transform its
internal structure into something more useful.

Transfiguration Transfiguration

Copy the donor System Folder (the one on Disk Tools) into our new
boot volume (DevBoot, in our examples), by dragging it from its
current location to the destination disk's icon. From the Special
menu, choose Shut Down. There, there, Macintosh. Rest your head. A
final command will make the disk we created the default. The time for
rest ends. Reawaken!

$ mv devboot.dsk disk1.dsk
$ open ./minivmac.app/

Four megabytes, with cleverness, is sufficient for many tasks...

Precious Bytes Precious Bytes

Forge and Hammer

You have a machine now. But is it truly yours until it has executed a
program of your own devising? The native tongue of the Macintosh is
Pascal, once a favored tool for instructing the arts of computer
science. Alas, as Unix has trampled all opposition, its own systems
language has, in nepotistic glee, monopolized the minds of countless
students. Ominously taking its name from the speed of light, C has
become a mental cage that traps so many...

Oh, I do apologize. These battles were fought long ago. It's far too
late for tears. Sometimes I lose myself.

You know C, of course. Perfectly understandable. It is in the air
that surrounds us, now, and you would be innocent to think it has
always been so. To begin your exploration of the Macintosh it would
be best to start on some familiar ground. Retrieve the installation
disks for THINK C 5.0 from the Macintosh Repository- the .zip
versions- while I get the kettle.

Of the four disk images, the most important items are the compiler on
disk 1 and the self-extracting archive of headers and libraries on
disk 2.

Nothing shall be restrained from us, that we shall endeavor to do
Nothing shall be restrained from us, that we shall endeavor to do

Self-Actualization

THINK C uses project files. Create one.

In the spirit of keeping things familiar- at least at first- we will
make use of the ANSI library, which provides a simulated terminal and
implementations of the familiar printf(), scanf(), and other friends
from stdio. The built-in text editor can also be used to create a
source file and add it to the project. Watch the motions of my hand:

No need to feel ANSI; your tea is ready No need to feel ANSI; your
tea is ready

Then you need only compose a completely ordinary C89 program, with no
strange tricks or idioms whatsoever:

No lies, only fibs No lies, only fibs

Observe that even from within the warm embrace of ANSI compatibility
the signature of main must be void, and there is no argc or argv to
be seen. Furthermore, this printf() does not tolerate invocation
without at least a single argument beyond its format string. The
familiar "down-to" operator --> behaves just as you expect.

From the Project menu, choose Run, or begin spooling command-R into
your muscle-memory, and watch as your first program blossoms:

Have Macintosh, Will program Have Macintosh, Will program

A humble beginning, yes. Perhaps it is too early to see just what
makes this little world satisfying, but I must confess, all this
talking has left me a bit weary. You have what you need to start, and
you can borrow a volume from my bookshelf if you'd like to venture
further on your own.

It's cold outside, but the fire here is warm. You're welcome to stay
as long as you like. So nice to have a visitor.

Mutatis Mutandis

It isn't necessary to build Mini vMac from scratch- the maintainers
recommend using a prebuilt binary if one is available for your
platform. The process described here is shown for completeness and
narrative immersion.

If you aren't using a modern-era Macintosh as your host, some tweaks
to the command-line bits above will be necessary.

  * On Linux, the target (-t) argument for Mini vMac's setup_t script
    should probably be lx64, and the compiled binary will be a single
    file you can execute with ./ instead of an app bundle launched
    via open.
  * If you're specifically using an OLPC, the target should be either
    lx86 for the XO-1 or larm for any subsequent ARM-based models.
    Additionally, you should set -ci 0 to specify a monochrome
    framebuffer- the OLPCs use a 16-bit framebuffer, which appears to
    confuse Mini vMac without this setting. I've written a setup
    script for OLPCs which fixes a few out-of-the-box issues and
    installs a complete set of development tools and headers. Salt to
    taste. When downloading files via wget you will probably fail SSL
    handshakes; use the --no-check-certificate flag to ignore them.
  * On mobile devices, ports of Mini vMac exist for iOS and Android.
    Good grief; I hope you have an external keyboard.
  * If you're running Windows, here's a nickel, kid- get yourself a
    real operating system.

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