[HN Gopher] How the Mac didn't bring programming to the people
___________________________________________________________________
How the Mac didn't bring programming to the people
Author : mpweiher
Score : 92 points
Date : 2023-09-17 15:40 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eclecticlight.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (eclecticlight.co)
| goodmachine wrote:
| See also: Quartz Composer
| mitchbob wrote:
| In the early 90's, Apple had big plans for end-user programming.
| Larry Tesler, the head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group,
| gathered people from ATG and elsewhere at Apple who were working
| on aspects of end-user programming for a project code-named
| Family Farm. The idea was that most of the pieces that were
| needed for end-user programming were already working or close,
| and that with a few months of work they could integrate them and
| finish the job.
|
| The project sputtered when (1) it became clear that it was going
| to take more than a few months, and (2) Tesler was largely absent
| after he turned his attention to trying to save the Newton
| project.
|
| AppleScript was spun out of the Family Farm project, and William
| Cook's paper [1][pdf] includes some of the history, including its
| relationship to Family Farm and HyperTalk, HyperCard's scripting
| language.
|
| AppleScript shifted the focus from creating something that end
| users without previous programming experience could easily use to
| application integration. I was a writer who worked on both Family
| Farm and AppleScript, and I was both surprised and hugely
| disappointed when AppleScript was declared finished when it was
| obviously not suitable for ordinary users. I assumed at the time
| that there had been no usability testing of AppleScript with
| ordinary users, but Cook's paper claims there was. All this was
| even more disappointing in light of the fact that so much more
| could have been learned from the success of HyperCard and
| HyperTalk, and that the HyperCard developer and champion Kevin
| Calhoun was just around the corner.
|
| The Wikipedia article on HyperCard [2] gives the history of the
| product, including the pettiness of Steve Jobs in cancelling it.
|
| [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard
| Clubber wrote:
| Commodore did it.
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| "Computers for the masses, not the classes".
|
| At that time, pretty much every home computer would boot into a
| BASIC interpreter (or a REPL, in modern parlance).
| bowsamic wrote:
| This reads more like a list of successes, rather than failures
| intrasight wrote:
| Programming on the Mac was the second worse experience I'd had -
| second only to a terminal Lisp system that had no backspace and
| thus no ability to fix a typing mistake. Both were in fact worse
| than the punched cards where I first learned to program.
|
| Edit: Mac programming was in 1984; Lisp in 1983; Punched cards in
| 1980
| phoehne wrote:
| Learning C++ programming on OS 7 put hair on my chest. After
| that Unix was a walk in the park.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > second only to a terminal Lisp system that had no backspace
| and thus no ability to fix a typing mistake.
|
| To be fair, the 'proper' way to deal with that is probably to
| write some Lisp code to patch the running editor to add
| backspace functionality. That's not really reasonable for
| someone (presumably) still learning Lisp, though. (And chances
| are it wasn't a true Scotsman^WLisp system and didn't support
| that anyway.)
| intrasight wrote:
| To be fair - it did force me to be 100% correct ;)
| fulladder wrote:
| I think programming was a fairly miserable experience on all
| platforms before about 2000. In the early days, there wasn't
| enough surplus computation available to devote any of it to
| programmer ergonomics. Today we have IDEs that can make
| accurate autocomplete suggestions, compilers with detailed
| error messages (and even suggestions on what the mistake
| probably is), shells that tab complete really effectively, etc.
| Before ~2000, there just weren't enough spare cycles to do any
| of that stuff particularly well.
| JoyfulTurkey wrote:
| The biggest advantage I found when learning on DOS and
| Windows in the 1990s was the overall lack of distractions. No
| smart phone, YouTube, Reddit/HackerNews let me fully
| concentrate.
| fulladder wrote:
| Yeah, I totally agree. Computers for a long time were not a
| communications device the way they are today. You could buy
| a modem and use it communicate, but that was a distinct
| activity and once exited the terminal program you were once
| again by yourself.
|
| Now, the communications function is this always on thing
| that never goes away. It's interwoven with every other
| activity you do. That makes the whole experience much
| different.
| indymike wrote:
| The change happened in the 80s with Borland's Turbo products.
| lispm wrote:
| Lisp programming on the Mac was actually great. Apple
| maintained and sold for a while "Macintosh Common Lisp", which
| was a lot of fun.
| phoehne wrote:
| I think the gold standard for this was Visual Basic, especially
| combined with MS Access. And they didn't touch on File Maker. A
| lot of those one-person, in-house applications I've come across
| were wrappers around databases more than anything else. For
| example, I ported an application that was written on Access and
| VBA to track counts of organisms in stream beds to the Web for a
| county government. Frankly, I'm not sure I made their lives
| better, except for their manager's manager to check a box. And
| there are a bunch of small applications I've run across for
| things like property management that are little more than a GUI
| over a database.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I was about to comment that the article is missing FileMaker.
| Which comes with its own kind of "programming language".
|
| Apple even had a simplified version called Bento for a while,
| which didn't really catch on unfortunately.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bento_(database)
|
| In a previous job, I was looking after the in-house FileMaker
| application which basically managed CRM, finance and sales for
| a small company (around 60 users). Company got bought at some
| stage and the application got replaced by Oracle counterparts.
| From what I've heard, many people were missing the FileMaker
| DB.
| [deleted]
| runjake wrote:
| Shortcuts is one of those rare products that have been acquired
| and have not only not been ruined, but has improved tremendously
| for first and third party app integrations.
|
| I was initially turned off by the visual programming style
| because it was mind-bending. Now I use it a lot because _it is_
| mind-bending and flexes my brain while also being highly useful.
|
| If for some reason I don't want mind-bending, I can hope into
| Pythonista and get stuff done. Or thanks to the tight
| integration, integrate it with Shortcuts.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| As a programmer, I hate Shortcuts. I really can't believe 10
| instructions can take multiple seconds. I can't believe Apple
| decided this product is ready for prime time.
| runjake wrote:
| It depends on what those 10 instructions do.
|
| While Shortcuts isn't the fastest execution platform, I have
| plenty of Shortcuts that I don't have execution time issues
| with.
|
| Typically, I find that if I'm doing something and it's taking
| more time than I'd like, there's a better way to do it.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Admittedly, I do a lot of low level and embedded programming,
| but my one venture into Shortcuts was brief and filled with
| wtfs.
|
| I don't know who thinks about computers in that way. It makes
| zero sense to me.
| labrador wrote:
| The Apple II Basic prompt brought programming to the people.
| Around 1984 Byte magazine published an article about a hot
| language "C" that was used to create special effects in
| Hollywood. Not long after C was available in the Macintosh
| Programmers Workshop (MPW) where many started using it.
| Objective-C was written in C. Most "programming by the people"
| was Excel macros on both PC and Mac. I agree the Mac didn't bring
| programming to the people, but it helped.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| He forgot to mention the Apple ][ which had BASIC in ROM! (Both
| Integer Basic and Applesoft Basic.)
| dehrmann wrote:
| There's a lesson here for everyone who thinks they have a new no-
| code solution. There's a long history of these solutions that
| never caught on, and the best outcome you can hope for is
| Filemaker, Access, or VB. It works for simple things, but it
| quickly escalates to needing a "real" programming language.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Funny enough I'm literally writing an article at this very moment
| that touches on this subject a bit.
|
| I'm surprised the author mentioned Swift Playgrounds but not
| Storyboard. Storyboard was promoted as a way to build apps
| without touching code. It obviously failed, as anyone who has
| used it could predict, but that was definitely part of the
| messaging around it.
| phoehne wrote:
| Is FileMaker also in this camp?
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Never heard of it, looks like an early GUI DBMS?
| steve1977 wrote:
| Storyboards were basically just an extension of Interface
| Builder of NeXTSTEP days... so more a way to build _GUIs_
| without touching code.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Fair point
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| What an odd statement.
|
| "Programming" as a concept is more accessible to people than it's
| ever been. Some years back I tried to break into React
| development (I'm an iOS developer, but only with native code and
| wanted to expand my skills) and I had built a simple app in a
| language I'd never used before with tooling I'd never used before
| up and running in a couple of hours. I'm sure my prior experience
| in software helped some, but I cannot overstate how completely
| different the tooling was between one and the other.
|
| If you want to build websites, there are more tools and options
| than ever. Basic HTML editing and markdown files paired with
| something like Jekyll, hosted on Amazon S3 is basically free,
| minus the cost of a domain, and is done with simple HTML and text
| files, with massive community-driven documentation and support.
| If you want a fancier website, PHP/MySQL are extremely mature,
| well documented, with probably billions of code samples available
| and who knows how many libraries. If you want to build apps,
| Swift playgrounds is excellent, and Swift itself is an extremely
| flexible and comprehensible language, and Kotlin on Android is
| quite similar as I understand it. If you want to automate your
| daily life, Macs have a whole selection of shells, and PHP can
| work there too. Windows meanwhile has batch files, powershell
| scripts, and if you're willing to do a little work, bash can be
| had too.
|
| And more and more and more. 3D printers with GCODE automation,
| arduino microcontrollers, raspberry pi's to make dumb electronics
| smart on your own terms. I could come up with examples for the
| rest of the day if I wanted and probably not repeat myself.
|
| And anytime you run into a problem, you can slam an error message
| into Google, and pretty reliably find something/someone that can
| help you, and many of them absolutely will because we all love
| this stuff and love solving problems and helping each other out.
|
| This notion that Apple has failed to bring programming to the
| people is fucking bizarre to me. Programming _is with the
| people._ A lot of people don 't wanna do it, that's fair. A lot
| of people don't have the skills, or the desire to get them,
| completely understandable. But to say it's inaccessible is just
| wrong. It's all out there. Whatever you want to do, there is
| probably a solution to it if you're willing to put the time in,
| as has been the case with basically any other skill for all of
| human history.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| > "Programming" as a concept is more accessible to people than
| it's ever been.
|
| I really don't think this is true. The programs and web sites
| we interact with nowadays are far more complex than they used
| to be, so building something feels far less approachable.
|
| I feel lucky that my first exposure to programming was on 8 bit
| machines in the 80s and then got to learn web programming in
| the PHP era.
|
| It provided a gentler introduction than starting afresh
| nowadays would.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I really don't think this is true. The programs and web
| sites we interact with nowadays are far more complex than
| they used to be, so building something feels far less
| approachable.
|
| I mean, sure, you can't build your own Amazon or Facebook in
| an afternoon. But that is not the sole domain of programming.
|
| Just like building a model RC airplane for your own enjoyment
| involves a lot of similar principles to designing a Boeing
| 767, but one is magnitudes more complex to pull off. But
| also, few individuals find themselves wanting a Boeing 767,
| and instead want a model RC airplane.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Applescript could have been great except for two (IMHO) huge
| design misfeatures:
|
| 1. You can't write a BNF for it because its syntax depends on
| what program you're trying to control.
|
| 2. It wants to be "English-like" which means you can always think
| of 20 plausible ways to express any action, only one of which
| will actually compile.
|
| (1) frustrates professional programmers and (2) frustrates
| everybody, so almost nobody uses it.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > You can't write a BNF for it because its syntax depends on
| what program you're trying to control.
|
| More importantly it AppleScript operates on sending and
| receiving messages from those external programs and thus has no
| insight into their current state/progress unless it's
| specifically communicated back to AppleScript.
|
| Many programs would just return back to AppleScript immediately
| after getting a command even if the operation requested took a
| lot of time. There was no way to register callbacks (at least
| no obvious way) so you had to put in boilerplate to check for a
| file at a location to know when a long running process was
| complete.
|
| The challenge level between writing any two scripts could vary
| wildly. A program's script dictionary might technically allow
| you to write a script but actually making it workable or
| reliable was fantastic amounts of effort.
| fulladder wrote:
| My recollection of the English-like nature of Applescript is
| that there would be multiple ways to express something, and
| more than one of them would work, but it always seemed totally
| unpredictable which would work and which wouldn't. That's
| actually a bit worse (more frustrating) than the way you're
| describing it. Overall, I agree with you that it was
| unsatisfying for both professional programmers and non-
| programmers, and that's why it failed to take off.
| mannyv wrote:
| "HyperTalk was both limited and limiting, as most came to
| discover"
|
| People did amazing things with hypercard. Anyone that says this
| probably wasn't there or wasn't paying attention. I knew people
| who put whole museum collections, including audio, into kiosk-
| like stacks.
|
| The problem with hypercard became complexity and geography: at
| some point you couldn't find anything and changes were impossible
| to control.
|
| The thing is, that's the same problem people have today. Visual
| basic had the same essential problems.
|
| In fact, you can argue that programs like Object Master and the
| Think! Series were the genesis of today's IDEs (even though OM
| was based on the smalltalk object viewer from what i remember).
| Back then programmers mocked IDEs.
| Theodores wrote:
| The whole point of the Nac was that you didn't have to write your
| own code for it. It was a consumer device with modeless editing
| and an emphasis on the GUI, not the terminal window.
|
| The only people I ever met that programmed for the Mac were
| converting PC programs over to it.
| bayofpigs wrote:
| [dead]
| lynguist wrote:
| As for me Mac did bring programming to me, just with its durable
| chassis and well working memory management and relatively stable
| OS.
|
| - I can lift a Macbook with one hand creating tension on the
| chassis. When I do the same on a Lenovo T14 Gen 1 it shuts off.
| When I get excited and am just in the middle of programming, just
| grabbing the laptop to bring it closer to me kills my work.
|
| - Stable firmware, stable startup, stable wake from sleep without
| losing progress
|
| - Can swap dozens of gigabytes
|
| - Doesn't corrupt after updated
|
| - Usable trackpad
|
| - Color calibrater high-res screen since 2012
|
| For me it's these purely usability centered aspects that enable
| me to even do programming. Automatic sleep/hibernate features
| don't work with the other models at all.
| [deleted]
| fulladder wrote:
| I like Howard's blog. However, in this post and many others, he
| seems to regard the Mac as a continuous story line from 1984 to
| the present.
|
| I actually think the Apple of today is completely different
| company than the Apple of the late 70s / early 80s, and the two
| companies have basically nothing in common at this point. The way
| I see it, before the iPhone, Apple had never had any truly mass
| market, "it's for everybody" product line. They had a long series
| of niche products. The iPhone really changed them, in ways good
| and bad.
|
| Nevertheless, I appreciate Howard's perspective, even if I'm not
| totally bought into it.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| * before the iPod
|
| Maybe its success didn't reach global scale, but I think it's
| the iPod that turned Apple Computers Inc into Apple Inc.
| fulladder wrote:
| Yeah, the iPod was a major step along the way to the iPhone.
| I guess the difference to me is that MP3 players were never
| something that literally everyone was going to feel a need to
| own. Not everyone listens to music or podcasts, but everyone
| needs to communicate. It's a size-of-market thing, the
| difference between "our market is anybody who listens to
| music" vs "our market is all human beings." A successful
| product in that second category feels much different to me
| than a successful product in the former category.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| At the time though it really felt everyone would one day
| own an mp3. The entire world had a walkman. The mp3 player
| was like a 10x better version of that.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The entire world had a walkman
|
| Absolutely not the case.
|
| Wikipedia cites an article in Japanese saying that about
| 220 million Sony Walkman devices were produced before
| discontinuation in 2010. Even if you quadruple that for
| other brands, you're not even close to 1/4 of the world
| at the time they first came out.
| fulladder wrote:
| The Walkman was a hugely successful product, but I don't
| think that everyone owned one. It was popular with
| teenagers, exercise/fitness enthusiasts, and a few other
| categories. It wasn't something that a businessman would
| have owned, or an elderly person, or a poor person.
| Today, however, all of those people own smartphones.
|
| I really think it was the iPhone that changed Apple.
| pvg wrote:
| _the Mac as a continuous story line from 1984 to the present_
|
| It's a reasonably continuous storyline for the end user, which
| is what matters given the topic. Personal computers themselves
| weren't a mass market, neither were smartphone so you could
| just as well look at it as, say, "Apple's long-term vision of
| mass market computing succeeded". But it's not clear how either
| of these interpretations would change this blog post much.
| [deleted]
| jheriko wrote:
| a snooty, awful user base and terrible ideas that hurt usability.
|
| and iphone which was awesome, if also a statement in how blind
| and shitty the competition was.
|
| overrated upper middleclassware anyway...
| donatj wrote:
| The lack of any mention of Quartz Composer is really sad. I saw
| so much absolutely amazing things done in Quartz Composer by
| people who knew almost nothing about programming. I recall
| Facebook even talking about using it as a tool for prototyping UI
| animations.
|
| I used to use it to inspect HID devices because it was SO
| unreasonably easy to do so.
| thefz wrote:
| > amazing things done in Quartz Composer by people who knew
| almost nothing about programming
|
| How is this relevant?
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's literally the topic of the blog post
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| How iOS took programming away from the people.
| [deleted]
| whatever1 wrote:
| LLMs will.
| eludwig wrote:
| This is a really silly framing device wrapped around a decent
| high-level review of end-user focused dev environments.
|
| Hypercard was hugely influential and very widely used. Yes, it
| ignored the internet, but that was inevitable based on its
| origins. Heck, 13 years isn't a bad run for any piece of
| software, especially one that crossed the no internet/internet
| divide.
|
| The people that want to program will do so no matter what the
| end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.
| 38 wrote:
| > The people that want to program will do so no matter what the
| end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.
|
| this is something I would expect to hear from an Apple
| executive, and would hope to never hear from a commenter on
| hacker news. the whole point here, is we should be fostering
| environments that make it easy to program should people want
| to, not assuming the default is "no one wants to program" and
| making it as difficult as possible, or just making it difficult
| by laziness (not prioritizing developer experience).
|
| what we DON'T want, is what Apple, Google and Microsoft
| currently push hard. which is essentially, lets make all
| personal computing devices black boxes, that cannot be
| modified, and that the end users dont even own, but rent from
| their overlords. no thank you.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I'm on board with making programming as accessible and easy
| as reasonably possible (though I do think there's an
| unsurpassable upper limit to that), but that's different from
| programming or even somewhat technical tinkering being the
| norm and expected. The former is achievable, the latter is a
| setup for failure.
|
| The reason for this line of thinking is that in my
| experience, some individuals will simply never have the
| mindset required to be technically inclined, let alone be
| able to program. The various people I've encountered who
| freak out at the sight of an alert dialog and won't even read
| what the dialog says no matter how many times it's explained
| to them come to mind.
|
| So while I would agree that programming should always be
| within easy reach I would not expect more than a tiny
| minority to ever reach for it.
| Clent wrote:
| People that want to build their own furniture will do so no
| matter what the end-user environment is. Most people just
| don't want to.
|
| Software engineering is no more magical. Some people like to
| build things. Most do not.
|
| A couch is more of a black box than a smart phone.
| 38 wrote:
| > People that want to build their own furniture will do so
| no matter what the end-user environment is. Most people
| just don't want to.
|
| I would rather have 10% of the population programming than
| 5%. replace those numbers with whatever is more accurate,
| but the point stands.
|
| if we can create devices and operating systems that make
| programming easier, why not do that? why purposefully make
| it more difficult, or make it difficult by not prioritizing
| developer experience? do we want a society of consumers, or
| one of empowered and informed users?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Creating apps -- native or otherwise -- has never been
| easier, so I think we're doing pretty well there. Devices
| are indeed locked down but I would guess that most
| people, even programmers, don't care as long as they can
| create most of the user interfaces they can imagine.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I'd argue more things are easier to do than ever, yet
| making them distributable has narrowed. Before you could
| ship floppies from your garage, partner with a publisher,
| shareware, or sell to local shops. Now you have to pay
| gatekeepers, or train users to do dangerous things.
| mbakke wrote:
| How can we make better operating systems if devices are
| locked down? How can hobbyists keep the hardware useful
| when the manufacturer no longer cares?
|
| Devices must remain open for the kernel programmers and
| hardware hackers of tomorrow to follow their curiosity
| and develop their potential.
| fulladder wrote:
| > I would rather have 10% of the population programming
| than 5%.
|
| Why? I'd rather have a society where everyone is able to
| achieve their full potential, whatever that may be. If
| only 1% (or 0.1%) of people are uniquely good at writing
| programs, then that's who should be writing programs.
|
| Maybe what you're saying is that we live in a world where
| writing programs is an essential skill, so let's make
| sure it's not unnecessarily difficult for artists to
| write programs. But with sufficiently good tools, I don't
| really see why an artist would spend time writing
| programs instead of more directly creating art.
| cglong wrote:
| Pretty much everyone dabbles in art, even if very few are
| good at it. The same can't be said of programming.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Software engineering is no more magical. Some people like
| to build things. Most do not.
|
| This misses the point. There are considerable advantages to
| Free and Open Source software even if you never modify it,
| the most obvious being that it tends to deter software
| vendors from adding user-hostile functionality such as
| tracking. (It isn't perfect in guaranteeing this, but it's
| a strong start.)
|
| For more on these second-order advantages: [0][1]
|
| > A couch is more of a black box than a smart phone.
|
| In what sense?
|
| With a smartphone full of proprietary software, it's
| extremely difficult to find out what it's up to. Same goes
| for modern smart cars. [2][3] Even if the software is
| benign, can you be sure about its future updates? There are
| no such concerns for a couch.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31071180
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.en.html
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443644
|
| [3] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-
| nightmare-on-...
| freedomben wrote:
| I fully agree with you, but with one exception: I think
| hacker news has very much become a place of love for black
| boxes. Many people here love and praise apples "it's not a
| computer, it's an appliance" approach.
| fulladder wrote:
| Certainly there are black-box-ophiles on here, but there is
| much more awareness of the problems of black boxes on HN
| than most places. After all, the post you're replying to
| went out of its way to bring up the problem of black boxes.
| If this were Reddit or Twitter/X, would there even be a
| person around to bring up this issue?
|
| Overall interest in computing freedom seems to have
| declined from where it was a couple decades ago. I've been
| surprised by that and I have a hard time understanding why
| it happened. I mean, if you show a carpenter two hammers,
| the only difference being that one of them can only drive
| nails from a specific vendor while the other works on any
| nail, he or she would instantly recognize how significant
| that difference is in terms of overall usefulness. How is
| it that computer users intuitively understood this in the
| past, but somehow the level of awareness and understanding
| seems to have declined from where it was? I don't get it.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| It's also worth considering that HyperCard was very effective
| at allowing users to build or customize useful tools for
| themselves while writing little to no code. You could write
| "programs" with HyperTalk, but you could also just pick through
| the extensive examples HyperCard shipped with and kitbash
| something, or make searchable databases with little more than a
| card background with some fields. A small amount of scripting
| could go a long way, because the surrounding environment and
| tools did heavy lifting for you.
|
| The HN audience skews toward programming per se as the ultimate
| expression of power and flexibility with a computer, but
| HyperCard was accessible and empowering in very different ways
| from QBASIC or an iPython notebook.
| andrewjl wrote:
| > The people that want to program will do so no matter what the
| end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.
|
| As an example, take Excel and Python scripting. Almost anyone
| who uses the former can pick up the latter yet that isn't what
| typically happens. There is effectively a chasm between the
| two. Why is that?
| [deleted]
| rogerclark wrote:
| All we needed was for vendors to ship development tools with the
| OS. Nobody ever did that. Apple could include Xcode on every Mac,
| but they don't. macOS and Windows... neither of them come with a
| code editor.
|
| The benefits are obvious. The downsides (disk space?) are not.
| Why didn't anyone ever do this?
| lapcat wrote:
| > Why didn't anyone ever do this?
|
| They did! Back when there were Mac OS X install discs, in the
| 2000s, every Mac came with the Xcode developer tools on disc as
| an optional install.
|
| That's the only reason I'm a programmer today. So I would say
| that in an important sense, the Mac _did_ bring programing to
| the people. And back in those days, there seemed to be a lot
| more amateur Mac developers than there are now (and possibly
| more professional Mac developers too).
| [deleted]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The number one thing that brought programming to the people was
| Excel. Multiple orders of magnitude more people have written
| formulas and macros than have ever used a "real" programming
| language.
| rr808 wrote:
| As a non-American the biggest problem with Macs & the people was
| they were too expensive. No young people could afford them. The
| only real people who used them were designer types and a few rich
| arty people. Everyone else used PCs.
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Everyone else used PCs.
|
| And Commodores, Ataris, TRS-80's... 8-bit home computers (and
| some 32-bit ones) survived long after the introduction of the
| Mac. What really killed them was the cheap PC clone.
| nemo wrote:
| One other little piece of the story was MacBasic:
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
|
| Apple intended to ship the Mac with a user-friendly BASIC-based
| programming environment out of the gate, and Bill Gates killed
| it.
| analog31 wrote:
| I had a Mac from around 1993 to 1997. I even wrote articles for
| minor league Mac journals.
|
| My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming
| to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software
| experience, which I appreciate. But Apple (represented in my mind
| by Steve Jobs) didn't want his platform to be flooded by crappy
| software. Even HyperCard never had his wholehearted support (I
| used it extensively, despite its odd and limited language), and I
| think Apple was glad to finally dump it.
|
| If you had a reason to write crappy software, as I did, you ended
| up with Visual Basic. What I mean by "crappy" is software that
| solves a problem reliably, but can't be scaled. For instance,
| installation might require help from the author, and entering a
| bad value might make it crash, but a small handful of tolerant
| users can handle these issues.
|
| The solution today, with open source, is that the people bring
| programming to the people.
| hulitu wrote:
| > My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring
| programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring
| great software experience
|
| They were both founded to make money. Microsoft was never close
| to the people and the "great software experience" on the Mac,
| if it existed, was limited to rich people.
| fulladder wrote:
| Actually, rich people at that time were probably the least
| likely to own a computer. If you're talking about somebody
| who lives in mansion and has a butler and a chauffeur, that
| type of person was not buying computers and would not have
| had any interest in them. (I don't know what those people did
| with their time, but it sure as hell wasn't computing.)
|
| Personal computers were expensive by middle class standards
| [1], and the sweet spot was educated professionals like
| doctors and lawyers because they could afford it and it was
| interesting/useful to them and their families. A rich person
| who inherited an oil fortune would have been able to afford
| it, but not interested. A teacher would have been interested,
| but unable to afford it.
|
| [1] At a time when a decent, no-frills used car would have
| been around $1,000, you had something like this: ~$700 for a
| more limited VIC-20 or Z80-based machine, ~$2,000 for a PC-
| clone, and maybe double that for the Macintosh. For most
| buyers, it was a big but not impossible expense.
| manderley wrote:
| Seems reasonable to assume that person didn't mean people
| with butlers, the ultra rich, but rich people, just as you
| described.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Open source is completely impenetrable to most of the
| population.
|
| Between an impressive list of incompatible languages, the
| vagaries of Git, the complexities of command line access, the
| reliance on some version of the Unix folder structure - with
| endless confusion between /etc, /local/etc/, /usr/local/etc and
| on and on, the weirdnesses of package managers, and completely
| unfamiliar editors like Emacs and VSCode, the scene might as
| well be proprietary.
|
| VB at least made if possible to write software in a reasonably
| accessible and integrated way. So did Hypercard. So does Excel.
|
| The real problem with Automator, AppleScript, etc, is that
| they're hopelessly underdocumented and the tools are mediocre.
|
| If Apple had made them more prominent and documented them
| thoroughly they'd have been far more successful - perhaps in an
| industry-changing way.
|
| But they seem more like side projects that someone spent a lot
| of time and a little money on. Clearly Apple was never
| seriously interested in them.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Interestingly tools like ChatGPT can make some of these
| slept-on tools more usable. "Write me a script using __ that
| sends me notifications whenever __ happens"
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > the scene might as well be proprietary.
|
| That is such hyperbole. I have no formal IT background and I
| taught myself the Linux command line, Python, and Emacs in
| the course of a single year after I heard about this new
| Linux thing that was free to install. This was 2000, and from
| communities like Slashdot I saw there were plenty of other
| nerdy young people taking up the CLI and other Linux stuff,
| just out of curiosity and without any connection with the IT
| industry.
|
| Sure, none of this software will ever appeal to the broad
| masses*, but since the 1990s programming has become so much
| more accessible to the general public, because of both the
| free-of-charge software and the free-of-charge documentation.
| Learning to program on earlier platforms could be very
| expensive.
|
| * Still, I have heard rumors of a corporation in the 1980s
| where the secretarial staff - middle-aged women with no
| formal computer-science education - wrote some custom Emacs
| Lisp and/or Awk. Maybe learning even relatively arcane stuff
| can be done by anyone if their salary depends on it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The 128k Mac that came out in 1984 might have been the first
| microcomputer that _didn 't_ come with some kind of BASIC,
| machine language monitor, or other tools for developing
| software. That is, the point of every micro up until then was
| that you were going to program it yourself. In some sense it
| was a real step backwards in terms of people losing control of
| computers that Apple has continued with iDevices.
|
| At first you could not do any software development for a Mac at
| all on a Mac, instead you were expected to get a Lisa if you
| wanted to develop for the Mac. Part of that was that even
| though the Mac had twice the memory as most computers at that
| time, the GUI ate up a lot of it, so you could just barely run
| the bundled MacWrite and MacPaint. Part of the reason why Jobs
| insisted on keeping the Mac monochrome until the 1987 Mac II
| was to conserve memory. (When it did come out, the Mac II was
| priced closer to a Sun workstation than even an IBM PC AT.)
| fulladder wrote:
| You're exactly right that Apple has always had an ambivalent
| relationship with software developers. On the one hand, they
| needed them for their products to have any value for consumers.
| On the other hand, Jobs clearly saw low-quality, third party
| software as something that could taint the product Apple was
| selling. They really saw app developers as something very
| dangerous and difficult to control. Gates's view was always to
| just let anybody write anything they wanted, and the market
| would sort the good from the bad.
|
| I like the egalitarian nature of the Gates view, but ultimately
| I think Jobs was correct that the mere existence of low-quality
| software hurts your entire platform, and no amount of high-
| quality software can completely offset this.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| When I setup computers for family members I've used things
| like Windows 10 S mode BECAUSE it limits the software that
| can be installed. They are too low skill to know what
| applications to trust.
|
| At my work, I similarly have gotten secure administrative
| workstations deployed with again, very limited lists of
| software. These users being compromised has such extreme
| consequences that one cannot trust any application to run on
| these computers.
|
| So I can certainly appreciate the need to be very exclusive
| with the software allowed on a device. Yet I see this
| exclusivity being rather anti-consumer in practice. iOS is
| the most secure operating system I've ever seen for the
| average person, and yet things like adblocking are behind a
| paywall. Neutering Adblock for the sake of security is
| considered acceptable. Blocking alternatives to WebKit may
| reduce the overall attack surface area Apple contends with
| and it also limits the functionality of the phone since v8 is
| the de facto standard. Blocking alternatives to the App Store
| absolutely enhances security while also forcing consumers to
| pay more. Then you get into things which have nothing to do
| with security truly, like how you can only make "Music" your
| default music player on iOS, not Spotify.
|
| I really appreciate what Windows did with "S mode" because
| it's optional yet provides benefits to consumers in niche
| situations. I similarly appreciate the enterprise features of
| Windows to configure a laptop which has limited access to
| software to enhance security. Apple on the other hand forces
| the exclusive use of their software to benefit themselves at
| the expense of their customers. It is unacceptable and I
| would vote for anybody pledging to outlaw it as monopolistic
| abuse. Software exclusivity is useful, shoving it down
| people's throats is abhorrent.
| andrewjl wrote:
| > yet things like adblocking are behind a paywall
|
| Are you referring to iCloud Private Relay?
| faeriechangling wrote:
| More that most Adblock extensions on safari are paid such
| as AdGuard, whereas on Android I can get better
| AdBlockers working for free.
| andrewjl wrote:
| AdGuard ad blocking is free on iOS Safari. DNS privacy
| and custom filters do require a subscription.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Gates's view was always to just let anybody write anything
| they wanted, and the market would sort the good from the bad.
| I like the egalitarian nature of the Gates view, but
| ultimately I think Jobs was correct that the mere existence
| of low-quality software hurts your entire platform, and no
| amount of high-quality software can completely offset this._
|
| That is wrong on so many levels. I grew up in a Windows
| environment in the '90s tro '00s and had the best video games
| in the world at my finger tips, while Mac users at the time
| had what, some high quality photo editing software? Good for
| them I guess.
|
| So unless you don't count video games as software, Gates was
| right. DOS and Windows being the main platforms for the
| hottest videogames of the moment, was what led to the
| popularity of the PC over Macs at the time. I think Doom
| alone was responsible for millions of PC and MS-DOS sales.
|
| Yeah, Job's Next-Step machines and SW were cool, UNIXy and
| all, but to what end if nobody but the wealthiest businesses
| and institutions bought them in numbers you can count on a
| few hands? In fact, Jobs understood from the fail of the
| Next-step and the success of the DOS-PC that you need to get
| your devices cheaply in the hands and homes of as many casual
| consumers as possible (hence the success of the colorful and
| affordable iMac G3) and forget the premium business
| workstation market.
| sealeck wrote:
| Apple has always gone for the premium end of the market,
| and with vastly increasing wealth inequality, that's where
| the money is these days. You can see this is in other
| luxury industries which make incredible amounts of money
| considering how small their markets are (in terms of
| numbers of participants).
|
| This focus on high-quality software has also encouraged
| _better_ software developers to build in Apple's ecosystem.
| Even today a lot of the best software is only available for
| Mac or iPhone.
| thefz wrote:
| > Even today a lot of the best software is only available
| for Mac or iPhone
|
| 1% of the whole games industry is available for Mac and
| there are amazing pieces of software just there.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I see a lot of poor people with iPhones, Apple Watches,
| Earpods and such. These are what you'd call an
| "affordable luxury" and probably a bargain when you
| consider you might go through 5 $300 Android devices in
| the time that you get out of a $1000 iPhone and all that
| time you are struggling with an Android.
|
| It's kinda like
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-
| the-r...
|
| but the psychology is weirder in that rich people know a
| "luxury" watch costs upwards of $10k so it is quite the
| trick to convince the hoi polloi that a $500 watch is a
| luxury device at the same time.
|
| I've noticed also that poor folks are also very aware of
| expensive wireless plans from Verizon but seem to have
| little awareness of wired internet plans, free Wi-Fi,
| etc.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Good boots are like PV panels. Poor people don't have the
| money to buy them. Middle class spends less in the end,
| since the investment pays off.
|
| Rich people on the other hand usually did not get rich by
| saving money.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> you might go through 5 $300 Android devices in the
| time that you get out of a $1000 iPhone_
|
| Maybe take care of your Android as you would an iPhone
| and it will also last as much as an iPhone, but at 1/3
| the cost.
|
| Most people (worldwide) are not spending 1k on a phone,
| even 300 is a lot.
| [deleted]
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> that's where the money is these days._
|
| We were talking about the past. And back in those days
| when computers were expensive, most people and companies
| were writing SW for the most popular platform out there,
| which at the time was watever had the best bang for the
| buck thjat home users could afford: Coomodore, Sinclair,
| Amiga, MS-DOS, etc.
|
| _> Even today a lot of the best software is only
| available for Mac or iPhone._
|
| Again, we are talking about the past. TikTok might be the
| hottest app today, but back then it was Doom.
| fulladder wrote:
| I agree with FirmwareBurner's sibling. All personal
| computers were expensive luxury items at that time. Most
| of them cost as much or more than a used car, which
| people would have considered much more useful than a
| computer.
|
| Apple's machines were the most expensive, but it wasn't
| because they were higher quality (that was not the
| general perception outside the Apple world). It was
| because Apple refused to allow clone makers into the
| market, so they were manufacturing in tiny volumes
| compared to Dell and Compaq and a million other random
| names like Packard-Bell (Sear's store brand PC) that
| probably no one remembers.
|
| > Even today a lot of the best software is only available
| for Mac or iPhone.
|
| I really don't see that at this point, and I do use my
| Mac every day. Most of the software I use is also
| available on Windows and Linux, and anything that isn't
| has a clear Windows or Linux equivalent.
|
| The only software I use that is absolutely only available
| on a single platform with no equivalent is actually
| Windows software. I'm not a gamer, but that's apparently
| a whole category that is Windows-only.
|
| I'm curious what Mac software you use in 2023 that is
| only available on Mac.
| fulladder wrote:
| I wrote the comment and I too grew up in the MS-DOS/Windows
| world. My family had a Mac and an Apple ][e, but I didn't
| use them as much as the various PCs.
|
| As I say in another comment, I think Gates's view was right
| for that time. The Jobs view was needlessly limiting the
| potential market for his machines. Gates didn't make the
| machine, but he was making a thing that was sold with every
| machine, and he understood that more apps means more
| reasons why people might want to buy a PC.
|
| One problem with the Gates view today is that if you make
| it easy for anyone to write and distribute any kind of app,
| you end up with not only a lot of low-quality software but
| even negative-quality software like ransomware and malware.
| It's surprising that so many people want to write that
| stuff, but apparently they do. Every modern platform,
| including Windows, has gone to extreme lengths to block
| this stuff, even though the more laissez-faire approach
| would be to just ignore it and assume other 3rd parties
| will write programs to block it. The problem was that
| malware was an existential threat to the entire Windows
| platform, and Microsoft couldn't afford to just let the
| market sort that one out.
|
| I believe the Jobs view is the correct one for the present
| era. Every platform has app stores, code signing, DRM, and
| other kinds of security and non-security restrictions. It's
| certainly easier to run random code on Windows 10 than
| macOS Ventura (or especially iOS), but no platform vendor
| is completely app neutral these days.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Indeed I think Jobs approach to software dev was too far
| ahead of time, Gates pragmatic approach proved to have
| more leverage for computer/platform sales and growth.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't think closed app stores are the answer. It
| doesn't actually prevent malware.
|
| Much better is a genuine permissions system that the user
| controls and the apps can't circumvent.
|
| The reason closed app stores are so popular isn't because
| of security but because everyone wants a finger in that
| sweet 30% take pie.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Gates 's view was always to just let anybody write
| anything they wanted, and the market would sort the good from
| the bad._
|
| Gates's view was also that, once the market had sorted the
| good from the bad, Microsoft would, if desired, just
| implement whatever killer apps third party developers had
| discovered and make them part of Windows, cutting the floor
| out from under the third party developers. In other words,
| Gates viewed third party developers as doing market research
| for Microsoft that Microsoft didn't have to pay for.
|
| _> ultimately I think Jobs was correct that the mere
| existence of low-quality software hurts your entire platform_
|
| Windows is still well ahead of both macOS and iOS in terms of
| market share, so I think it's more that Jobs and Gates had
| different definitions of success.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| MS made killer software, literally killing the competition
| by any means.
| sealeck wrote:
| How is Windows ahead of iOS in terms of market share? The
| Windows phone was discontinued _years_ ago?
| DerekL wrote:
| If you look at all types computing platforms combined,
| then Windows is ahead of iOS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_sy
| ste...
| corbezzoli wrote:
| It feels like they eventually managed to enforce this when
| the App Store came along, rejecting "useless" or "redundant"
| apps. Eventually they gave up on that idea because they loved
| seeing the number of apps rise, even if those apps were, in
| the end, low-quality software.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| If they didn't have hidden 1st party api stuff that 3rd
| parties have difficulty leveraging this moniker would feel
| more useful/relevant, IMO. In the current context they use
| these labels to protect their workflow from other entities.
| networkchad wrote:
| [dead]
| didntcheck wrote:
| Jobs' view sounds essentially the same as Nintendo's view in
| the wake of the video games crash, which eventually became
| the unanimous model in that industry. With iOS they also got
| to enforce it like a console, with a whitelist of acceptable
| software
| _def wrote:
| I was so used to this view by Nintendo that it was hard to
| believe seeing a lot of really low quality games in the
| Nintendo switch store nowadays. The worst part is that it's
| still not easy to publish there (or get access to the SDK
| in the first place) in an independent way without a
| publisher or a history of already successfully released
| games.
| fulladder wrote:
| Yeah, I think a big part of how Gates and others came into
| their view was that there were so many examples like
| Nintendo where a platform vendor had artificially limited
| the third party ecosystem and it constrained the success of
| the platform as a whole.
|
| Basically, the Gates view was the more "correct" one for
| the 1980s/1990s. At that time, most people did not own
| personal computers, even many businesses didn't, and growth
| came from on-boarding these non-users. The more apps
| available on your platform, the more likely a non-user
| would be to see a reason to buy a computer at all. Also,
| the platform Gates was selling was much cheaper to try.
|
| Today, everyone owns at least one computing device.
| Platforms aren't competing for non-users (there are none
| left), they are competing for users of other platforms. The
| Jobs view works better in that world since it improves
| platform quality perceptions.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Only if the users can be satisfied by the supposedly
| higher quality software, produced by devs willing to pay
| the Apple tax and unafraid of being Sherlock-ed
|
| If your need was niche then go away.
| fulladder wrote:
| There are only two smartphone platforms, and both of them
| have app stores and make other efforts to control the
| overall end user experience. What do you disagree with?
| fulladder wrote:
| By the way, there is no particular reason why the
| computer field had to go in this direction. If you look
| at the history of aviation, there were a lot of kit
| airplanes in the 1920s and 1930s because people thought
| that over time more and more people were going to want to
| own an airplane. That turned out to be wrong. Most people
| are content to pay somebody else to transport them.
|
| Saas is the computing equivalent of an airline, and it's
| very popular, but it hasn't fully displaced individual
| computer ownership. We'll see what happens long term.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Saas [...] hasn't fully displaced individual computer
| ownership.
|
| The writing is on the wall though, isn't it? Even
| companies that you'd expect to go all-in on user freedom
| and ownership have locked down their platforms and
| ratcheted up the service offerings. Not a single FAANG
| company is willing to take a definitive stand in defense
| of their users. They all just see a bottom line waiting
| to be butchered.
|
| And for most users, I'd wager SaaS _has_ displaced
| computer ownership. Stuff like the App Store, Play Store
| and even game consoles are ultimately a service unto
| themselves. Even disregarding that, the "happy path" of
| modern software is paved far away from user empowerment.
| People are generally more willing to pay for a
| subscription than to switch to a more convenient hardware
| platform.
| fulladder wrote:
| > The writing is on the wall though, isn't it?
|
| I'm really not sure. Five years ago, I thought that SaaS
| would completely replace local computing. Now, I'm less
| certain.
|
| Yes, SaaS is very popular and there are far fewer local
| applications now. However, there still seems to be some
| value in local applications because it's thought to be a
| better end user experience. Look at Slack. It started out
| as a website, pure browser-based SaaS. Over time they
| developed a local app, which is basically the same
| Javascript but packaged up as a local Electron app. This
| seems to be regarded as superior to the web version for
| most people.
|
| Consider Zoom. There was initially a native client and an
| equivalent web version. They seem to be actually killing
| off the web version now -- access to it is a non-default
| option for the meeting creator, buried on a screen with
| 100+ meeting settings nobody understands or reads. They
| apparently want to be a local-only program.
|
| As long as there is demand for local apps, people will
| continue owning general purpose, re-programmable
| microcomputers. Maybe the vendor can lock you out of some
| low-level stuff like Intel ME or the BIOS, but these
| platforms are still allowing people to download a
| compiler and run their own programs directly on the
| metal.
|
| I'm not sure what direction it will ultimately go, but my
| hunch is that if it were possible for SaaS to 100%
| displace local computing, it would have already happened.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Perfectly fair response. I think your examples are also
| good evidence that people like native software, or at
| least the appearance of a cohesive platform. Apparently
| "non-native" apps like an SPA or WASM tool will probably
| turn most normal users off. Good enough native support
| can make a web client redundant, even if 'native' means
| Javascript with OS-native controls.
|
| To counter that though, I think we have to define SaaS
| concretely and ask what a _more_ service-driven world
| would look like. I consider SaaS to not _only_ be the
| paid components of an OS, but also the "free" services
| like Google and the App Store. Holistically speaking, our
| OSes are saturated with services; Find My, Android Notify
| services, OCSP/Microsoft/Google telemetry, online
| certificate signing, and even 'assistants' that fail to
| assist without internet. What more could we _possibly_
| put online?
|
| It's a bit of a rhetorical conclusion to leave things on.
| I'll certainly see worse examples in my lifetime, but the
| status quo is bad enough in my opinion.
| fulladder wrote:
| I agree with you about the absurd degree of service
| saturation. I've discovered many things I cannot do
| without an Internet connection because one trivial step
| in the process absolutely requires communication with
| some network endpoint. I found one app where, if you
| block it's ability to send analytics reports back to
| Mixpanel, it will run 3 or 5 times but after that refuse
| to run again until an Internet connection is available. I
| thought it was absurd since it proves the developers
| actually considered offline use cases, but decided that
| they couldn't allow that to go on indefinitely.
|
| Anyway, sure, let's leave it there and see where things
| are in 5 years. It'll be interesting to find out!
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring
| programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring
| great software experience, which I appreciate.
|
| Apple did develop a native version of Basic that let you create
| Basic programs that took advantage of the Mac UI, but Microsoft
| forced them to cancel it as a condition for continuing to
| license their Basic for the Apple II.
|
| > 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.
|
| He also used the renewal of Applesoft, which would be obsolete
| in just a year or two as the Mac displaced the Apple II, to get
| a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface, in what
| probably was the single worst deal in Apple's history, executed
| by John Sculley in November 1985.
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
|
| So in the case of the Mac, Microsoft used anticompetitive
| pressure to keep programming away from the people.
| turndown wrote:
| From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn't a priority at
| all to Apple, even on the Mac team. The fact they let
| MacBasic slip from the launch window is a pretty big red
| flag, I'd be interested to hear why Bryan Stearns decided to
| leave(I feel the author is saying a lot by not touching on
| this more)
|
| I think the idea that Microsoft or Apple were founded for any
| reason but money is pretty much a joke. Every action and
| reaction in the story revolves around money and how to get
| it.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn't a priority
| at all to Apple
|
| Did you miss the part about Microsoft threatening the
| hardware line that produced the vast majority of Apple's
| profits at the time?
|
| It sounds to me more like the priority was not having their
| profitability decimated.
|
| They killed a Mac native version of Basic that had been
| completed because Microsoft forced their hand.
|
| >The fact they let MacBasic slip from the launch window is
| a pretty big red flag,
|
| As mentioned in the article, they needed to wait for the
| system APIs to stabilize.
|
| > Basic still had a hard time getting traction, especially
| since the system was evolving rapidly beneath it.
| turndown wrote:
| >Did you miss the part
|
| Did you miss the part where I said what everyone did here
| was motivated by money?
|
| >It sounds to me more like the priority was not having
| their profitability decimated.
|
| See above.
|
| >They killed a Mac native version of Basic that had been
| completed because Microsoft forced their hand
|
| See above.
|
| >As mentioned in the article, they needed to wait for the
| system APIs to stabilize
|
| See above.
|
| Did you miss that part?
| fulladder wrote:
| It seems like you're reacting to the phrase "bring
| programming to the people" occurring in the same sentence as
| Microsoft. I don't think GP was trying to present Bill Gates
| as having been on some kind of altruistic moral crusade. I
| think the point GP was making is that Microsoft was founded
| on compilers for hobbyists, whereas Apple was thinking about
| end user experience.
|
| Maybe the phrase "to the people" is confusing things because
| it suggests some kind of noble, high-minded motivations on
| the part of Gates. That wasn't how Gates (or Jobs) thought.
| Actually, the whole idea of a company having some social
| responsibility mission was not something that existed at that
| time. These guys wanted to sell a product that people would
| pay money for, that's all. In that era, this was perfectly
| socially acceptable and completely normal.
|
| The statement "Microsoft was founded to bring programming to
| the people" is not wrong, but it may be a little unclear if
| people are reading it as suggesting some motivations on the
| part of Gates and Allen that I think we can all agree they
| did not have.
| [deleted]
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| I think that apple wanted to appeal to the makers at the
| beginning to get traction but really what they wanted was more
| consumers. Great hardware and long lasting but is for the elite
| that can afford it, most people in HN are in that elite. But
| ultimately apart from raising the bar in user experience is
| just another money making corporation. And that does not make a
| world a better place.
| fulladder wrote:
| Yeah, the whole Apple cult thing has never made much sense. I
| remember talking to some environmentalists in the mid
| nineties who cared a lot about reducing industrial activity
| but were also strongly advocating the Mac. I was trying to
| ask why they felt so strongly about that given that any
| computer is basically a non-essential luxury good that
| requires a lot of toxic metals to produce [1], whereas pencil
| and paper has very low environmental impact and even some
| recycleability. There wasn't a clear answer. I think it's
| irrational.
|
| [1] at that time, electronics used a lot of lead, cadmium and
| mercury. It's less of an issue now.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > Even HyperCard never had his wholehearted support
|
| When HyperCard was introduced Steve Jobs didn't work at Apple.
| When he came back, he killed it along with many other projects
| he had no role in, like the Newton.
| giantrobot wrote:
| I say this as someone that loved the Newton. The Newton was a
| millstone for Apple at the time. Just like printers,
| scanners, and cameras.
|
| The Newton had several problems. The first it was intended to
| be an entirely new platform distinct from the Mac. There was
| zero overlap between the runtime environments of the two
| platforms. Nothing you made on a Mac was ever going to run on
| a Newton. This would stretch already thin third party
| developers even thinner.
|
| The second major problem is it had cheaper competition with a
| better market fit in the form of Palm. A Palm Pilot was half
| the price of a MessagePad and did most of the same tasks. It
| also actually fit in a pocket which meant it could be carried
| around and used as intended.
|
| A third problem was its OS was an older model lacking memory
| protection and preemption. By 1997 it was clear that
| multitasking protected memory OSes were the future if for no
| other reason increased stability in day to day operations.
| Rebuilding the NewtonOS with those features would be a major
| project.
|
| The MessagePads were bulky and expensive. They were too big
| to fit in a pocket meaning the only way to carry them was a
| bespoke case or a briefcase. They weren't _that_ capable so a
| true road warrior worker was just going to get a laptop.
| Their target market was John Sculley, executives that didn 't
| want to tote around even bulkier laptops.
|
| The Newton didn't make a lot of sense as a product and
| killing it off with the rest of the Apple peripherals made
| complete business sense.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I don't disagree. I have a soft spot for the Newton because
| I had a lot of respect for Larry Tesler, who got Apple
| interested in Common Lisp for a while as part of the Newton
| project. CL was used to invent Dylan which was originally
| intended as the Newton programming language. Dylan ended up
| like the Newton: The invention itself didn't have much
| impact but the project and the people who worked on it
| moved computer science forward in many important ways.
|
| Oh, and the genesis of what we now call the ARM computer
| architecture was the Newton project.
| criddell wrote:
| The Newton was out for 5 years by the time the US Robotics
| Palm Pilot debuted. However, the first really good Newton
| was the 2000 and that was right around the time the Palm
| Pilot was released.
|
| I was rooting for the Newton but at the same time, I found
| myself mostly using my Palm Pilot (and later my Handera
| 330) while my MessagePad sat on my desk unused.
| 7speter wrote:
| How did microsoft bring programming to the people if you had to
| pay to use their programming tools?
| indymike wrote:
| Most of the time MS BASIC came with the computer (or OS).
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah, I see your point.
|
| Officially, their dev tools cost money. Here is the 1997
| pricing for various versions of Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual
| C++ 5.0 in 1997: ($99, $499, $1,199)
|
| https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-sets-
| pricing...
|
| Unofficially, almost nobody ever paid for that stuff in my
| experience and it was ridiculously easy to get for "free." As
| was the norm in those days there was zero copy protection.
| You could sail the pirate seas, you could buy one "legit"
| copy and share it with the whole org, you could get the MSDN
| subscription and get "evaluation" editions of literally their
| entire dev tools catalog on a big stack of CDs with zero
| limitations besides the legality of the situation. I'm sure
| that with minimal effort it was easy to get a hold of Mac dev
| tools for free as well. But Windows was _so_ ubiquitous, as
| was "free" Microsoft software, and you could build a nice
| little PC for cheap.
|
| I always wondered why Microsoft charged for that stuff in the
| first place. Were they actually making money on it directly?
| Did they sort of _want_ to give it away for free, but were
| wary of antitrust implications?
|
| Apple had a different strategy. Perhaps this is an incorrect
| perspective it seemed like they just didn't care about
| independent garage and small business developers. They left
| things up to 3rd parties. In a lot of ways this was better --
| it probably led to a richer ecosystem? For example, looking
| at the Microsoft strategy, it's not hard to see that they
| drove Borland into the grave.
| leviathant wrote:
| This was a little bit later in the timeline, but I remember
| attending an event in Philadelphia about F#, and I walked
| out of it with a licensed copy of Visual Studio .NET and
| SQL Server. They were just handing them out. I had an
| earlier copy of Visual Studio from when I was in college,
| and I was working in .NET at work, but no one at the event
| knew that. It was just - thanks for showing up to hear
| about functional programming, take some DVDs on your way
| out!
|
| It always felt to me like there was a culture of openness
| in the world of Microsoft in a way that didn't exist in
| Apple culture. You gotta pay for dev tools to use dev tools
| on a Mac. You want an FTP client on a Mac? Buy Cyberduck or
| Fetch. My impression of Apple was that everything was
| proprietary and had a price. Whereas I could cobble a
| computer together that ran Windows, there was oodles of
| shareware and freeware as well as professional tools. You
| have full access to the registry and file system in
| Windows, and you could very easily hack the bejesus out of
| the OS if you wanted to. It was great for tinkering.
| Everything was backwards compatible - the point where I had
| Windows 10 running on a 2005 era Dell laptop that had come
| with Windows XP, and I had managed to upgrade legitimately
| without paying (I think the Windows 8 beta converted into a
| full Windows 8 upgrade, free).
|
| Today, I'm typing this from a 2021 Macbook Pro with USB-C
| ports - when I travel for work, I bring one charger, and it
| charges my laptop, my phone, my earbuds, even my mirrorless
| camera. When I need software, I can usually find something
| using Homebrew. The value you get for your money on a Mac
| is much better, but it's still a steep barrier to entry,
| IMO - even though I'm in a much better position today, and
| bought this without breaking a sweat. There's a lot of
| tinkering-related things I miss about the Microsoft
| ecosystem, but I've largely moved out of the weeds for my
| day to day work on a computer. All the software I was using
| on my Windows machine is multi-platform now, and the
| performance and battery life on these Apple native chips is
| hard to ignore. As a developer, it's just as simple, if not
| easier now, to build on Macs - ever since OSX opened up the
| Linux ecosystem to these devices. That, in conjunction with
| superior hardware, finally convinced me to switch after at
| least three decades of being staunchly Microsoft.
| Zambyte wrote:
| > My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring
| programming to the people
|
| Why do you think that? I was not around in that period, but the
| impression I get is that the foundation of Microsoft[0] was
| antithetical to "bringing programming to the people".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
| adrian_b wrote:
| Long before entering the operating system business, Microsoft
| was a company dedicated to making tools for programmers, like
| compilers and interpreters for many languages, for the CP/M
| operating system and for most kinds of early personal
| computers.
|
| The tools for programmers have remained a major part of their
| products during the MS-DOS era, until the early nineties. The
| documentation for their compilers and libraries was excellent
| and many people have learned much about programming from the
| Microsoft manuals (or from reverse engineering their
| programs).
|
| Only after the transition to Windows and their success in
| suppressing the competition for MS Office by their control
| over the development of the operating system, the programming
| tools business has progressively become only a small part of
| the Microsoft products and the programmers only a small part
| of their customers.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| All you need to do is head over to archive.org and look at
| a Byte magazine from "back in the day". It was filled with
| ads and reviews for programming tools like Turbo C and
| Turbo Pascal. It was a golden age, and I was there for it.
| freefaler wrote:
| They sold software tools at the beginning and further down
| the line used the tools to become the platform of choice for
| corporations. They controlled the OS and the tooling and this
| gave them great advantage in business software market share.
| You could get Windows source (or parts of it) if you needed
| to work on low-level stuff from MS and their MSDN was and is
| miles better than Apple developer documentation and tooling.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Bringing programming to the people does not mean giving away
| your work for _gratis_. The fuss over the increasing use of
| non-free but source available licenses instead of OSI
| approved FOSS licenses shows that people are coming around to
| Gates ' viewpoint.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Maybe we should encourage people to charge more for Free
| Software instead of licensing software in a way that
| arbitrarily restricts users.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Their first product was a programming language for a hobbyist
| computer.
| fulladder wrote:
| That famous Gates letter is not inconsistent with the idea of
| large numbers of hobbyist programmers. He cared a lot about
| the piracy issue, but he was never trying to gate who was
| "allowed" to be a programmer.
|
| Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter. It was all
| about bringing programming to the masses. Saying "to the
| people" implies some kind of empowerment, and I don't think
| that was ever quite as much a part of Microsoft's identity
| (although it was there in some form). "To the masses" is a
| better way to describe it in my opinion.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you booted up an IBM PC without putting a boot disk in,
| it booted to a Microsoft BASIC prompt that was burned into
| the rom.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They wanted to bring programming to the people, as long as
| they got rich from it.
|
| Nobody ever thought they'd do that for free (except when they
| used piracy as a form of dumping, by turning a blind eye to
| it when convenient).
| djaouen wrote:
| I didn't read the article, but you can't blame Apple for people's
| stupidity. When I got my first Macbook, programming is literally
| the first "app" I installed lol
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