[HN Gopher] Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?
___________________________________________________________________
Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?
Author : SeenNotHeard
Score : 113 points
Date : 2024-08-13 18:09 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
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| Suppafly wrote:
| "They didn't" pretty easy answer. Also the idea that they lost
| "even though their products were technically superior to
| Microsoft's offerings" is sorta unsupported and is obviously
| subjective.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Borland made the best dev tools in their day, but they sorta
| lost the edge early in the Builder run and other tools became
| more desirable. At least, that's why I stopped using them.
|
| I don't know about Mac support. I did Apple development during
| those days as well, but I didn't use Borland tools for that, I
| used CodeWarrior.
| Someone wrote:
| > I did Apple development during those days as well, but I
| didn't use Borland tools for that, I used CodeWarrior.
|
| Are you sure "those days" were the same days? Turbo Pascal
| for Mac was released in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T
| urbo_Pascal#Turbo_Pascal_for_...), CodeWarrior in 1994
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior#Release). By that
| time, I think Borland already had left the Mac market.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yes, you're absolutely right. The past starts to all blend
| together.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I think CodeWarrior was just the superior IDE for anything
| Mac back in the day. I wasn't a mac guy, but I recall it
| basically being the only option my buddies would consider
| back then.
| JohnFen wrote:
| CodeWarrior was really great. I think it's one of the best
| IDEs to be produced to this day.
| nobleach wrote:
| Few things unlock my late 90's programming nostalgia like
| hearing "CodeWarrior". "Eiffel" is a close second. Kylix
| is also on that list.
| com wrote:
| Whatever happened to Eiffel?
|
| Just left behind by the March of Java?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, and no, they were left by FOSS programming languages
| and modern devs not wanting to pay for their tools.
|
| Just like Borland/Embarcadero, they now live from
| enterprises with deep pockets.
|
| https://www.eiffel.com/
| pulvinar wrote:
| LightSpeed C, later renamed THINK C, had the Mac market sewn
| up before CodeWarrior. They had an excellent hypertext help
| built in, before web browsers. They were bought by Symantec,
| added C++, and then got beat out by Metrowerks.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yep. I used ThinkC and ThinkPascal besides the MPW toolchain.
| They were just a nicer fit.
| pkphilip wrote:
| Having used both MS and Borland products during the late 90s
| and early 2000s, Borland tools were definitely far superior
| from the standpoint of ease of use, time it takes to develop
| serious applications etc.
|
| The primary advantage of the Borland's tools apart form itse
| its ease of use and was its very interesting component
| architecture which allowed for very easy development of third-
| party components and so many high quality third-party
| components were available free or at low cost. While this was
| happening MS got lost in the bushes trying to get ActiveX, COM
| etc to be the bridge for component inter-usability but it
| didn't come close to the ease of development of components in
| Delphi, CppBuilder etc.
|
| The issue with Borland was the poor quality of management after
| their founder left. They tried to get into the Application
| Development Lifecycle space, bought up a lot of companies in
| that space and increased the cost of their dev tools to the
| point that it was no longer affordable to smaller dev shops who
| were their primary customers.
|
| This problem hasn't gone away. Embarcadero still has ridiculous
| pricing for their products even though now they have a very
| stripped down IDE which can be used for free till you hit the
| USD 5000/year revenue limit.
| jajko wrote:
| We used both at university, for designing UI and
| corresponding events Borland's dev studio was easily 10x
| faster to design if your UI was a bit more complex,
| especially if you are not very familiar with whole ecosystem.
|
| MS design of their stuff in those years was often... shitty
| on multiple levels to be polite, ie MFC comes to mind, over-
| complicated for no good benefit. People jumped to literally
| anything else if they could, be it Borland for C/C++, Java
| had much saner object-oriented design model too (which could
| be compiled to native code with native UI if needed, since
| their default stuff didn't look the best).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Their products were, and still are in many ways tehcnically
| superior to Microsoft offerings.
|
| Back in the day, Visual C++ 6.0 was when we finally migrated
| into Microsoft development tools, and I used Borland tools for
| ages before that, starting with Turbo Basic in 1990.
|
| Additionally to this day, Microsoft doesn't have anything on
| the C++ front that can compete with C++ Builder for RAD GUI
| development, MFC is a fossil, while WinUI with C++/WinRT is a
| bad joke.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Visual C++ 6.0 was still very inferior even as an IDE, but it
| was okay so it won sort of by default. But for GUI building,
| Borland was _great_.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Was and still is, I don't really grasp what kind of
| Stockholm syndrome goes by at WinDev, that they finally had
| something that could match against C++ Builder (UWP with
| C++/CX), only to kill it via a mini-riot, replacing it with
| a development experience akin to doing ATL with Visual C++
| 6.0.
|
| If only IDL tooling, and related C++ code generation wasn't
| frozen in time, just like it first came in Visual Studio
| almost 30 years ago, besides updating the actual language
| to MIDL 3.0, that is.
|
| And now while WinUI 3.0 folks tell the story that you can
| use C++ with WinUI / WinAppSDK, what they don't tell is the
| castastrophic state of C++/WinRT tooling in Visual Studio,
| that there are no plans to improve it past C++17, and the
| only thing happening ot its repo is bug fixes.
|
| Stay away from it as much as possible, and using it with C#
| and CsWinRT is not much better, as many errors are surfaced
| as HRESULT exceptions, and you need to actually single step
| into C++/WinRT code to actually find out the real cause.
| em500 wrote:
| People at Microsoft would probably agree. In 1996 they hired
| Borland's chief engineer Anders Hejlsberg, who designed Turbo
| Pascal and Delphi at Borland, and C# and Typescript at
| Microsoft.
| eschaton wrote:
| Well, he adapted Clascal & Object Pascal from Lisa &
| Macintosh to the DOS/Windows PC world, and added a couple
| features from CLOS to turn it into Delphi, and married that
| with Sun's C++-syntax bytecode-compiled variant of
| Objective-C to produce C#.
|
| He certainly deserves credit for what he did, but not what
| those whose shoulders he stood on did.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Actually to produce J++, followed by a lawsuit, which
| made cool from MSR become C#, and J# come into existence
| to ease the porting from J++ code into C#.
|
| Ironically 20 years later, Microsoft is again a Java
| vendor, and OpenJDK contributor.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Actually it is a bit more nuanced than that, Anders
| Hejlsberg was so pissed with Borland's management that he
| finally accepted the occasional invites from ex-Borland
| people working at Microsoft.
|
| He tells the story in this interview,
|
| "Anders Hejlsberg: A craftsman of computer language"
|
| https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-
| a-c...
|
| By the way, he also contributed to J++, that where
| P/Invoke, events, Windows Forms, properties came from
| initially (Yes, Delphi also had events and propertiers by
| then).
| mannyv wrote:
| I used all the major mac tools: think c, codewarrior, and mpw. I
| think the money just wasn't there. The PC market was the
| corporate market, and they were the ones who had lots of
| developers.
| acdha wrote:
| Both lots of developers and willingness to provide regular
| revenue. The indie developers would hang onto an expensive
| purchase as long as they could between upgrades since it was
| often their second greatest business expense behind the
| comparatively much more expensive hardware.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Mostly because outside US it was nonexistent.
|
| In Portugal we only had a single distributor in Lisbon, Interlog,
| that we would need to visit in person, or call in via ads in
| computer magazines, only to buy super expensive computers, versus
| the PC market alternative.
|
| For us, Apple only became relevant after NeXT's acquision gave it
| a 2nd life.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Mostly because outside US it was nonexistent.
|
| It was also nonexistent within the US.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... limited and crazy overpriced. The first Mac was an
| awesome demo but not able to do much because it only had
| 128k; within a few years people had shoehorned that demo into
| much cheaper machines (even had something like Plan 9's UI
| for Os-9 on the TRS-80 Color Computer)
|
| Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low
| end with color graphics 68k machines against the still
| monochrome Mac. These were affordable, good for games and
| other media, and in principle more scalable than the PC and
| AT architectures of the time. A little later you got very
| powerful 68k machines running Unix from vendors like Sun
| Microsystems. I first saw a Mac 2 in college after I had used
| a Sun cluster with huge, mostly monochrome, monitors and was
| blown away by the refinement of the desktop (small monitor
| had something to do with it) but the price tag was insane.
|
| Some people swore by mac for desktop publishing, but the Suns
| had great software for that too.
| chuckadams wrote:
| That awesome demo was on a 512K Mac at that. Jobs had
| insisted on a stock 128K model but the engineers expanded
| it without telling him.
| monocasa wrote:
| They shipped the 128k model as the first model.
| chuckadams wrote:
| That was my point: the demo was not on a stock model.
| Took like a year before they even offered upgrade kits.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| From my viewpoint the 128k Mac was itself a demo. It sure
| made a good demo at the computer store, not sure if you
| could do much for real with it.
| smm11 wrote:
| I was a Mac guy at the time and Sun was more expensive by
| far.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Sure, I was not buying the Sun workstations.
|
| I did own a 286-based computer which was tremendous value
| in terms of compute power for the cost, much better than
| the minicomputer machines I was using, able to emulate
| the Z80 at 3 times the speed of any real Z80, etc.
|
| The graphics sucked but as we went through EGA, VGA and
| then various Super VGA. In 1993 I got a 486 machine and
| ran Linux and X Windows and stomped both the Mac and Sun
| in terms of value.
| anthk wrote:
| Macs = loaded media producers
|
| Sun = goverments, big corpos and universities with tons
| of money to burn.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| In the early 90s, my primary school in "rural" Texas (45
| minutes outside of Houston) got it's first computer lab. It
| had 30 Macs. Every class room had an ancient Apple (not sure
| what version at this point - IIe or III?).
|
| Apple had BIG BIG discounts for education, that IBM did not.
| Even being a town outside of Houston, we never got Compaq
| PCs.
|
| That said, once Win95 hit, EVERYTHING was swapped out for PC
| district wide. I remember my parents complaining that a new
| school tax was getting levied on our town to upgrade
| technology just a couple years after a previous one had
| already hit.
| Gormo wrote:
| Education was the niche that kept Apple afloat back then --
| they'd managed to make the Apple II the de facto standard
| for school computing, and when they wanted to transition
| schools to the Mac in the early '90s, they had to go so far
| as to design an Apple IIe on a card [1] to allow the Mac
| models they were offering to schools to remain compatible
| with the huge library of Apple II educational software.
|
| They never succeeded in actually turning the Mac itself
| into the standard platform for school computing, and as you
| point out, once the Apple II platform was long in tooth,
| schools began migrating in droves to Wintel boxes, and
| Apple's finances took a major hit.
|
| Apple barely made it out of the '90s intact. They had a
| massive turnaround after Jobs returned, and are a major
| powerhouse today, but people forget just how marginal the
| Mac was in its early years.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card
| AlbertCory wrote:
| No, it wasn't nonexistent anymore than Porsches were
| nonexistent. Just niche.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Same in Eastern Europe. You'd only see Macs in professional
| sound, video, graphic design and publishing houses, which was
| only a drop in the ocean compared to Windows PC market share.
| Their super high cost and inability to run most popular SW like
| games made it a no-go for consumer and businesses, especially
| in a low wage market given that Macs here were more expensive
| than in the US due to VAT and import duties but wages were 20x
| lower.
| chx wrote:
| From what I remember in Hungary thirty-ish years ago:
| Professional AV was Commodore Amiga. DTP used Mac because of
| QuarkXPress. Professional design used SGI Indigo.
|
| IBM PC was office and in this period it became _the_ gaming
| machine. Even before Commodore went bankrupt, the Gravis
| Ultrasound and Wolfenstein 3D dethroned the Amiga.
| https://youtu.be/wsADJa-23Sg has an excellent explanation why
| Wolfenstein 3D couldn't be done on the Amiga. The GUS was key
| in moving the demoscene to the PC and while obviously that's
| extremely niche it literally demonstrated what the PC is
| capable of and had a huge effect on the game creators. The
| first Assembly was organized in 1992 by two Amiga groups and
| Future Crew but just one year the latter released Second
| Reality and the Amiga was no more.
| homarp wrote:
| GUS was also the start of Alsa https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Alsa-
| sound-3.html
| chx wrote:
| Sorry for misremembering: it was SGI Indy not the Indigo.
| sybercecurity wrote:
| It was that way in the US too until the iPod and then iPhone
| took off and MacOS X became viable. If it wasn't for Apple's
| legacy hold in education (a lot universities in the 90's sold
| Macs in their bookstores) Apple may have gone the way of
| Amiga before that happened. They were seen as the expensive,
| pretty computer used by creative types or by students.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Famously, Apple was the stock everyone expected to fail,
| for over a decade.
|
| You couldn't short them because they kept not dying. You
| couldn't buy'm because they kept not making money.
|
| IMO, Apple was only able to stay alive because Microsoft
| invested so heavily in them. Microsoft was worried about
| being seen as a monopoly, so investing in Apple ensured
| that Microsoft could both /not/ be a monopoly but also
| benefit no matter how well Apple did.
|
| IIRC they sold their stake after the iPod was released and
| Apple was back on its feet.
| eej71 wrote:
| Entire books were written about the disaster that was
| Apple in the mid-late 90s.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/581496.Apple
|
| They weren't wrong. Just an amazing turn around.
| xattt wrote:
| Widespread adoption of Macs by students really went hand-
| in-hand with the transition to Intel, likely because of a
| boost to battery life that allowed students to take notes
| for at least two lectures before needing to plug in.
| tivert wrote:
| >> You'd only see Macs in professional sound, video,
| graphic design and publishing houses...
|
| > It was that way in the US too until the iPod and then
| iPhone took off and MacOS X became viable.
|
| No. As someone who had experience with existing in the 90s,
| I can say you're dead wrong. Like I don't even know where
| to start. Macs weren't as popular as PCs, but you'd see
| them all over in the consumer space:
|
| You'd see Macs in department store computer displays (Best
| Buy, Sam's Club, Officemax, etc.).
|
| The iMac was released in 1998 (and was so influential you
| had PC makers copying its style). That was the _real_
| beginning of Apple 's turnaround. The iPod wasn't released
| in 2001, and was pretty niche for a long time.
|
| Several families I know had Macs as their family computer
| during the 90s (including my own).
| Sakos wrote:
| Growing up, I didn't know a single person personally who
| owned a Mac. I only knew Macs from schools and the
| handful of teachers I knew who'd bought the new
| PowerBooks ca 2002.
|
| I also had experience existing in the 90s. They were
| extremely niche.
|
| And going into the 2000s, I knew plenty of people with an
| iPod, but no Mac.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| >And going into the 2000s, I knew plenty of people with
| an iPod, but no Mac.
|
| Which took some doing as iPods were all Firewire up until
| ~2004 when Apple transitioned to USB. Firewire was pretty
| unusual in the PC ecosystem - usually requiring
| purchasing a PCI card.
| Sakos wrote:
| First gen version also didn't have Windows software. I'm
| thinking more once they were convenient for PC users to
| use, I guess 2005 onwards? I don't think I saw any iPods
| before then.
| samatman wrote:
| > _I can say you 're dead wrong. Like I don't even know
| where to start._
|
| This kind of aggressive riposte is never called for.
|
| It's true that the Bondi Blue iMac arrived three years
| before the iPod, and was influential. It bought Apple
| some breathing room, and took it off life support. A
| success by any measure.
|
| It's also true that prior to this, and for a considerable
| time after, Macs were largely found in exactly the niches
| described by the post you're responding to. I would add
| education as well, as did, let's note, the directly
| parent post to your own. Sure, you'd find them in other
| places, like <checks notes> less than 5% of household
| computers, including your household it turns out. I can
| see why that would distort your impression of its
| ubiquity.
|
| The iPod was an immediate sensation. It didn't start to
| sell in numbers for a few years, but everyone knew what
| it was (speaking from the US perspective) and craved it.
| There's no question in my mind that it was the touchstone
| product which gave life to the entire company, and the
| halo effect it produced gave a crucial leg up to the
| iPhone, which is what made Apple the multi-trillion-
| dollar company it is today.
|
| Leaving off a few details and compressing a timeline
| doesn't make someone wrong, let alone 'dead wrong'.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The iPod was so much later than the period of Borland and
| Turbo Pascal that it's not even relevant to this
| discussion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod
| anthk wrote:
| This. In Europe, Macs were for people around arts,
| printed press, audio/video and such. CMYK people. For
| genZers, think about THE platform to run Adobe software
| fast and reliabily + audio tools.
|
| These people must be either young or delusional. No one
| used Macs at home. Even under Mac OSX for Power PC, if
| you weren't a media producer, your interest in Macs was
| zero.
| samatman wrote:
| > _it 's not even relevant to this discussion_
|
| I suppose it's possible to think that, if you jump
| straight from the title of the Fine Article to my post,
| without reading the thread which leads to it.
|
| Is that what happened here?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Borland is the subject, correct?
|
| And they became prominent in the early 80's, correct?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 3Com made an Ethernet card for the Mac in the late 80's.
| 3+File/Print/Share existed for the Mac as well. I knew
| people who worked on it. Claris Software was initially an
| independent company selling software for the Mac.
|
| PowerPoint was initially Mac-only (1987). It got bought
| by Microsoft so they could port it to Windows.
|
| So yeah, Macs were around, but hardly ubiquitous.
| tivert wrote:
| > So yeah, Macs were around, but hardly ubiquitous.
|
| And I'm not claiming they were ubiquitous, just that they
| weren't so niche you'd only see them in schools or on the
| desk of a graphic designer. They had something like a
| 5-10% market-share in the US. Anecdotally, that played
| out in my community as far as I can tell (e.g. 1 in 20
| kids having a Mac at home sounds about right). You didn't
| have to go anywhere special to buy them, but the store
| might have 20-30 PC models on display with 2-3 Macs.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| yeah. 5-10% sounds about right.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The teach who was put in charge of updating and design our new
| computer lab and educational material, back in the late 80s,
| was heavily into Amigas. The Amiga had a pretty large market
| share in Northern Europe, but our teacher wasn't naive or blind
| sighted by his own preference, so he opted to equip the schools
| lab with Macs. Now that was not common at all, the obvious
| choice would have been PCs running Windows 3.0, but I think
| that might have come out exactly to late, so he would have been
| looking at Windows 2 or 2.1 when starting out, and coming from
| the Amiga, that would probably have been unacceptable.
|
| Still the Mac wasn't big in Denmark at that point, but in the
| late 80s, early 90s our school had an insane amount of
| Macintosh computers. Had the teacher in charge been a DOS guy,
| that lab might have looked very different.
| Gormo wrote:
| Even in the US, the Mac was very marginal early on. It wasn't
| until it established a foothold in the DTP market in the late
| '80s that it was clear the Mac would even survive as a
| platform. A ton of important business software never made it to
| the platform.
|
| There's a lot of revisionism that stems from Apple having made
| a magnificent comeback over the past 25 years, but a lot of
| people are forgetting that Apple was _not_ the dominant player
| it is today back then. They spent most of the '90s on the
| verge of bankruptcy, and were sustained only by a few niche
| markets -- the Mac was not regarded as a serious platform for
| business computing back then. If things had gone slightly
| differently, the Mac might have shared the same fate as the
| Amiga and the ST.
| some-guy wrote:
| I was blinded by this growing up in the 90s in a college town
| in Northern California where it felt like the market share
| was 50% Apple.
| coliveira wrote:
| Apple also had a good market share in education. The first
| Mac I used was at the university, and many schools had Macs
| even when it was viewed as a very niche system.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Borlands tools were mostly used by business professionals. Sure
| they sold at discount to students/ hobbyists etc but
| professionals were the core of their market. It wasn't cheap
| software.
|
| The Mac market (until very recently) was predominantly for home
| not business use.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| On the other hand, Mac hardware was super expensive. Today Mac
| hardware commands a little premium but pre OS 9 the difference
| in price was _huge_. So Mac owners could not have been very
| price sensitive in general.
| eschaton wrote:
| A baseline Mac wasn't any more expensive than the competition
| (IBM), it just wasn't inexpensive like Commodore, Atari, and
| PC clones. Apple also had essentially the same price
| structure for decades, while PC clones raced to the bottom on
| both price and quality.
|
| And the Mac II was actually priced better than most
| competitive systems--because those competitive systems were
| 16MHz 68020/68881-based workstations from Apollo, HP,
| Tektronix, Sun, et al. In early 1987, a name-brand 16MHz
| 80386 system with 80387 was comparably priced, which is why
| most people buying PC clones didn't get a 386 until 1990-91
| or so, around when the 80486 (and 68040) came out.
| usrusr wrote:
| "wasn't any more expensive than the competition (IBM)"
|
| In other words: no more expensive than the other thing
| nobody ever bought? The success of the PC did not lie in
| _IBM_ selling large numbers.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It fluctuated. During the first few years of the Mac era they
| were stupid expensive. In the later Scully & Amelio years
| they dropped in price a lot as the component prices in the
| 68k Macs became way cheaper, and they became fairly
| affordable esp if you could get an education (teacher or
| student) discount, which they were aggressive about.
|
| Still was not at all a common machine in people's homes.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Borlands tools were mostly used by business professionals.
| Sure they sold at discount to students/ hobbyists etc but
| professionals were the core of their market. It wasn't cheap
| software._
|
| No, the early Borland of 1980s was the opposite of what you
| describe.
|
| Borland _marketed to the hobbyists_ and ran ads for Turbo
| Pascal in hobby computer magazines like BYTE and PC MAGAZINE
| with low pricing of $49. E.g. :
| https://blog.marcocantu.com/images/forblog/turboad.png
|
| Borland Turbo C with the lower price of $99 was also advertised
| to hobbyists compared to competitors such as Microsoft
| Professional C Compiler costing $299. (E.g.
| https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1987-05-12/mode/2up) ;
| Microsoft responded to Turbo C's pricing with lower-end
| products such as "Microsoft Quick C".
|
| It's the later years of Borland trying to go up-market with
| more expensive "enterprisey" products such as Interbase and
| subsequently Embarcadero, etc.
|
| The main reason Borland didn't create much software for
| Macintosh was that they were a small company and didn't have
| the manpower to build tools for the tiny Apple customer base.
| masklinn wrote:
| And qualifying the mac market as "for home use" is pretty
| wild, during Borland's heydays design houses were pretty much
| mac only unless they needed SGI's prowess. Borland had
| started tripping over its own feet before Photoshop was even
| ported to Microsoft.
|
| Photoshop 1.0 was 75% pascal by LOC incidentally (the rest
| was 68k assembly).
| whstl wrote:
| Before 2005 I only ever saw Macs in offices, studios and
| universities. There was one guy I knew had a Mac at home,
| but he was a designer. For context, I'm in EU.
|
| One of my first jobs was working with printing/scanning
| software and my company would install Macs in some large
| enterprises because of AppleTalk's printer sharing
| capabilities.
| jen20 wrote:
| Before 2000 that was also my experience (I was in the EU
| then too). Between 2000-2005 there was a steady increase
| of iBook/Powerbook owners thanks to being the only laptop
| with a reasonable battery that could run a Unix.
| cyberax wrote:
| Design software for Wintel and DOS was actually pretty good
| around 1993-1994 time frame. Aldus PageMaker for PC was
| released in 1991 and QuarkXPress in 1992.
| Tor3 wrote:
| As jasode said. Borland's low pricing was a revolution and
| suddenly made it possible for hobbyists to get a real compiler
| without paying a fortune. This created an explosion of activity
| back then. We all jumped on Turbo Pascal for CP/M and DOS at
| the time.
|
| It was much later that things changed, but then it was another
| world already.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> It wasn 't cheap software._
|
| It was cheap enough for me to afford Turbo Pascal and later
| Delphi when I wasn't a business professional, just a hobbyist
| programmer.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My recollection is the Mac market was certainly _not_ home use
| in the late-80s, 90s. They were relatively pricey and in fact
| not common in homes, but mostly in offices that did DTP,
| schools (we had _1_ in my primary school office for staff to
| use, and then a handful in a "visual communications" lab at my
| high school), and, later, "multimedia" type shops. I worked in
| a shop that was full of them in 96, used by web developers
| doing photoshop stuff. There were a few in my university
| computer lab.
|
| Late in the early-mid 90s this changed a bit as the Mac II
| series dropped in price a lot and became affordable at home. My
| mother (a teacher) bought one as her home machine because she
| got a good educational discount. This was on the tail end of
| the 68k era and just as the PowerPC transition was starting.
|
| I didn't know anybody else who owned one at home.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Borland sold by mail order for $99, at a time when
| "respectable, business-class software" was only sold in stores
| or direct, and for $299 or more. dBase sold for $699, as I
| recall.
|
| I went to a talk by Philippe Kahn in the early 80's, and he was
| very much a rebel for going so much against conventional
| wisdom.
| seanhunter wrote:
| For one, you could use ucsd pascal for free on mac so turbo
| pascal would have struggled to get traction among learners and
| hobbyists.
|
| Source: used turbo pascal on pc at home and ucsd pascal on apple
| IIcs at school.
| eschaton wrote:
| You used Apple Pascal on the Apple II, not the Mac, and it
| wasn't actually free but a couple hundred dollars a seat. It
| was based on UCSD Pascal, as were many implementations at the
| time, but it was a commercial product and one used by many
| Apple II developers. Your school either licensed or pirated it
| for you to use.
|
| Apple didn't even ship self-hosted assembly tools for the Mac
| until the Macintosh Development System later in 1984, and when
| Apple did ship Macintosh Pascal it was a learning environment
| with a (non-UCSD) bytecode interpreter rather than a native
| compiler with Toolbox access. That was still something most
| people used a Lisa for until after both the Mac 512 and the
| HD20 came out.
| seanhunter wrote:
| I definitely used ucsd pascal version II (not apple pascal,
| which came a bit later) on Apple II. Looking at this
| source[1], it looks like it both existed for Apple II and
| wasn't free so I must have assumed that incorrectly.
|
| I also realise I was talking about Apple II not mac. My
| assumption/point was that the market for apple pascal devs
| had been captured previously by the "power" of the UCSD
| p-system before the mac came along so borland figured they
| didn't have a chance.
|
| Personally I wasn't that much of a fan of ucsd pascal vs
| turbo pascal for reasons I can't remotely remember. I think
| ucsd pascal you could only do things in the "p-system"
| bytecode thing which meant it had a slightly more
| restrictive/pure pascal variant vs turbo pascal had some
| language extensions like being able to do dynamic memory
| allocation so you could make trees and linked lists and stuff
| that iirc you could'nt do very easily in vanilla/ucsd pascal.
| It's been a while so I may be misremembering.
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine-1982-08/page/n193/... 15yo me didn't realise that
| using UCSD pascal made me one of the elite. My whole life may
| have gone differently had I known that.
| Tor3 wrote:
| Borland would definitely have had a chance with Turbo
| Pascal on the Apple II (if there had actually been a 6502
| version available), for a couple of reasons:
|
| - Speed
|
| - Size
|
| Speed: I used Apple Pascal as well as Turbo Pascal for the
| same purposes (steering satellite dishes, and also multi-
| tasking data collection) on dual-CPU Apple II clones (6502,
| z80). Using Turbo Pascal was a different world w.r.t. speed
| - way, way faster.
|
| Size: When I developed my multi-tasking data collection
| system in Apple Pascal I had to use four floppy disk
| drives, set up for "swapping" (the UCSD/Apple Pascal system
| had that ability, it could segment itself) simply so that
| there would be a tiny bit of RAM available for the Apple
| Pascal editor. No such problem when using Turbo Pascal on
| the z80 system, with equal amounts of RAM.
|
| When that's said, UCSD Pascal and Turbo Pascal weren't that
| dissimilar as far as Pascals were concerned - Wirth's
| Pascal wasn't very practical, so every useful Pascal
| version had their own extensions. UCSD and Turbo had some
| commonality there which made it easy to port between them.
| chuckadams wrote:
| IIRC the Wizardry games were all written in UCSD Pascal. I
| wouldn't be surprised if a Mac port existed, it got ported
| to damn near every platform out there.
| drooopy wrote:
| In the 90s it would have been newsworthy if someone remembered
| the Macintosh market, not the other way around.
| acdha wrote:
| They weren't dominant but it wasn't even remotely newsworthy to
| remember that entire industries like publishing, education,
| audio/video, science & medicine, etc. existed.
|
| Since PCs were starting from so far behind the industry had
| something of a chip on its shoulder and it was common to see
| print ad comparisons where they were showing how a PC was just
| as good for less money, where they'd list the optional
| components like a sound card and mouse not adding as much as
| the base difference.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Were you there? From the late 80s to mid-late 90s all my
| classrooms had Apple computers and Macs. Late 90s seemed to be
| the transition to "IBM compatible" PCs.
| drooopy wrote:
| I was there (and then) living across different European
| countries in the 90s and IBM compatibles were the de facto
| computing standard followed by niche products like the Amiga
| which had a dedicated following, mostly hobbyists. But for
| all intents and purposes the mac was just a zombie platform
| over here. The first Mac that I had ever seen was the
| original blue iMac.
| kbolino wrote:
| I was. There were lots of Apple computers, yes. There were
| not very many Macs, though. The labs full of IIe and IIgs
| gave way to PCs, with no era for Macs in between. There were
| never more than a handful of Macs around at all, and they
| were the cheaper ones (LC and low-end Performa). There was a
| small resurgence in schools with the first iMacs, but by then
| PC was solidly dominant. The iMacs weren't that popular with
| students, though, because they lacked floppy drives. Flash
| drives were still small and expensive, the cloud didn't exist
| yet, and CD-Rs weren't a good fit for small, short-lived,
| often-changed files.
| classichasclass wrote:
| In my high school (late 1980s, early 1990s) we had mostly
| Apple IIe systems for student use and a couple PCs in the
| school office. When I was copy editor for the school
| newspaper, articles were done in AppleWorks, printed on an
| ImageWriter in NLQ in columns and literally pasted up on a
| master for layout which we photocopied.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 3Com made an Ethernet card for the Macs in the late 80's.
| Claris Software was a significant company writing software for
| them.
|
| It was certainly a small niche, though.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Back when I was taking programming classes in the early 90s,
| everything was done on "IBM compatible" PCs because of the job
| market. I remember one professor talking about how everyone that
| learned to program in high school did it on Apple computers, but
| said they had to switch because there were no professional
| programming jobs for Apple.
|
| The school had Macs, but those were for graphics-oriented
| classes, and they had Apples, but those were for word processing.
| kopirgan wrote:
| Great company. Long long back bought their C++ compiler which
| came in those thick binders with a very well written guidebook on
| the language, OOP concept etc.
|
| Fun to read their " no nonsense licensing" legalese
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most of their great stuff has been archived in bitsavers, if
| you want to review those manuals.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Speaking as a person that worked on the original Mac OS, the
| "story" that the OS was originally based on Pascal is not really
| correct. It was written in Assembly, with the belief that later
| developers would be using Pascal, and so Apple wrote the
| developer facing Inside Macintosh with Pascal as the language
| used for the examples. However, as far as I know no major
| software houses seriously worked in Pascal on the Mac; C and
| Assembly were the kings during the 80's and continued with C/C++
| during the 90's.
| nobleach wrote:
| Adobe Photoshop? That was written in Pascal.
| dlachausse wrote:
| Adobe Photoshop was originally written in Pascal. MacPaint was
| as well.
| bsenftner wrote:
| With a good amount of Assembly. Look at the source files:
| https://github.com/amix/photoshop Even the Pascal files have
| assembly in them.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It goes both ways, it cannot be a feature in C, and
| something bad to point out in Pascal.
| foobarian wrote:
| The point is, back then you didn't end up writing nice
| software because your language was awesomer than other
| languages. You wrote nice software by escaping to
| assembly, so support for that was important for state of
| the art tools.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah, and while both ecosystems allowed for using
| external and inline Assembly tools, C only had inline
| assembly keyword (and nothing else beyond that) as part
| of ISO C89, a couple of years later after 1972, usually
| it is only pointed out as negative when Pascal based
| applications reach out to it.
|
| Another thing that usually escapes, is that actually
| writting cool games on any 16 bit home computers,
| required the full deck of tricks of Assembly programming,
| neither C nor Pascal dialect were up to the job, with the
| first two decades of their existence.
|
| Even arcade systems like Midway Games units, used mostly
| Assembly, despite their TMS34010 having a C SDK
| available.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010
| amiga386 wrote:
| Mac OS used Pascal strings rather than C's null-terminated
| strings ( _Inside Macintosh_ volume 1, p90 -- Using assembly
| language / Calling conventions -- "Pointer to string (first
| byte pointed to is length byte)"
| https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum...
|
| They were an absolute pain to switch between when writing C
| code for Mac OS, and are evidence of the Mac OS designers
| having Pascal on the brain when designing the OS, not just
| their choice of example language in the documentation.
|
| > as far as I know no major software houses seriously worked in
| Pascal on the Mac
|
| Adobe Photoshop for the Macintosh was written in Pascal:
|
| https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code...
| bsenftner wrote:
| Yeah, I remember. The string issue was easily fixed by simply
| placing a null at the end of one's strings and maintaining a
| Pascal string pointer for OS traps and using the C string
| pointer for everything expecting C strings.
|
| I still have a work-in-progress mimeographed and hand written
| copy of Inside Macintosh that was used by the original 3rd
| party developers, back when a good 2/3rds of the OS was still
| being completed.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As far as I understoond by several interviews, and podcasts,
| that I cannot now refer to, MPW and the whole migration from
| Object Pascal and App Toolbox into C and C++, was a kind of
| submarine project from a couple of folks that weren't into
| Object Pascal.
|
| As they succeeded, MPW came to be, followed later by the
| partnership with Metrowerks and their PowerPlant C++ framework.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >As far as I understoond by several interviews....
|
| What a delightful typo is 'understoond'.
| jmclnx wrote:
| AFAIK, the MACs at the time was all point and click. Building GUI
| applications is not easy. Borland's IDE was text base, making
| that a GUI may have been to expensive based upon the amount of $
| that could be made.
|
| Also, most MAC people considered themselves Artists, not
| developers. Most individual developers (all) were hacking on DOS
| at the time. So that may have played into it too. To me, it is
| all about potential revenue vs expense.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder how much games played a part. In my case, deep down
| all I wanted to do is just play games. Ataris and Amigas had
| nice games but at one point the PC just blew their doors off.
| The Mac was a sad non-contender you used in your print shop to
| design calendars.
| bluedino wrote:
| I often wonder where the all-caps 'MAC' originated.
| tjakab wrote:
| My suspicion from early in my career is it was people that
| came from IT who just assumed that 'MAC' was an acronym for
| something, like pretty much everything else they dealt with,
| as opposed to the shortening of the proper noun 'Macintosh.'
| p1mrx wrote:
| Confusion with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control ?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| In fact the first programming I did on the Macintosh was using
| Borland's Turbo Pascal for the Mac.
|
| I took an introductory programming class at the University of
| Kansas. it taught us Pascal and it was a new language for me
| (having really only known BASIC, noodled with assembly). It was a
| bit surprising that the class used Macintosh's -- these running a
| kind of "project-less" version of Turbo Pascal as I recall where
| you simply fed in your source file with ReadLn() and WriteLn()
| functions sprinkled throughout and observed the result in some
| kind of console window.
|
| I'm not sure if I was aware of THINK Pascal (or THINK C) at that
| time but when I soon after bought my first Macintosh (a Mac Plus)
| I went looking for software to program it and it happens that a
| professor was selling his copy of Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh.
|
| So perhaps it was serendipitous, but Turbo Pascal became my
| introduction to Mac programming. I stuck with it for perhaps a
| year or two before moving over to the richer THINK Pascal. (And
| later I migrated to THINK C to run with the big dogs -- having to
| learn about pointers and C parameter passing was a right pain in
| the ass for this naive young coder).
|
| (By chance, I happened to be on a mini-quest recently to try to
| recover these old programs that I started and abandoned back in
| the 1980's. And I have come across my original Turbo Pascal
| floppies as well as some of the crude apps I tried creating with
| the tool.)
|
| As others have said, I suspect Borland jumped into the game early
| gambling that the Mac might be the Next Big Thing, bailed early
| too when it turned out that it was not (that of course would
| quickly be the IBM PC clone market).
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I had the vague sense at the time -- and, to be clear, I wasn't a
| Mac person until the late 1990s so it's before I knew anything
| about the platform -- that for reasons I never understood it was
| more difficult to write code for the pre-MacOS Macs actually ON
| those Macs.
|
| The other thing that may escape a modern reader is that the Mac
| timeline is really two eras: The original classic Mac era, with
| its Chicago-and-sepia look, and then a huge and stark transition
| to what was initially called OS X and is now called MacOS.
|
| They are _entirely_ different systems, but people outside the Mac
| world often mistake the transition to something more like Win95 -
| > NT/XP. It's not that. It's way more.
|
| OS X is when the Mac got shiny to technical people, because it
| was (and is) based on FreeBSD, and even shipped (and ships) with
| a host of the sorts of tools you'd expect from a Linux distro.
| And it was introduced in a time when LAMP development was huge,
| so if you were in that world writing an interpreted language
| targeting MySQL and Apache it was EASIER to work on a Mac than it
| would've been to stay on Windows.
|
| So, sure, today we see lots of devs and even whole software
| companies standardizing on the Mac, but in 1995 this would have
| been unthinkable.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| If I recall, it was mainly due to the market size, and to a
| lesser extent Apples xenophobic posturing toward 3rd party
| developer control.
|
| Information appliances like Mac are a streamlined workflow for
| Desktop Publishing, but are not intended to be repurposed in an
| arbitrary manner.
|
| For example, you would see a dozen choices for CAD or IDE
| solutions on PC, but there would only be 1 option that cost 1200%
| more on Mac (OS 7.5.3).
|
| Eventually the MacOS application/compiler options users had would
| slowly diversify under OSX/intel-cpu, but the M1/M2 architecture
| shift would drop again to burn down any progress people made
| opening the platform. The easy to cross-port GNU applications
| still cling to the underbelly of modern posix based MacOS, but
| you can guarantee it is an uphill battle to get anything deployed
| outside the Apple App store ecosystem build tree.
|
| Apples irrational need to monopolize their own ecosystem meant
| they always locked down their platform though obscurity and or
| DRM security. It is unfortunate Microsoft Windows 11 and Google
| Android still copied Apples worst design choices, as users had
| their control slowly stripped off hardware they purchased.
|
| Thus, most modern computer user interface design is just a sales
| funnel for App stores, and gentle racketeering. =3
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0
| jen20 wrote:
| > to a lesser extent Apples xenophobic posturing toward 3rd
| party developer control.
|
| Classic MacOS didn't even have a first-party IDE. Everything
| was third-party.
|
| > but you can guarantee it is an uphill battle to get anything
| deployed outside the Apple App store ecosystem build tree.
|
| It's hard to even parse this sentence, to be frank, but any
| possible reading of it is nuts. It's trivial to install Nix on
| macOS and have basically every package available to you. Same
| with Brew, though it's less nice that way.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| It is OK, people wouldn't know what is missing if they never
| saw the alternative.
|
| "It's hard to even parse this sentence"
|
| Try to cross-compile something on modern MacOS, and handle
| the DRM signing on another platform. For example, you are
| still going to need an active Apple Developer account to run
| https://quasar.dev for MacOS/iOS targets, or users are going
| to incur a bit of hassle running your code.
|
| It is ok, most people have trouble understanding each other
| at first. =3
| samatman wrote:
| > _DRM signing_
|
| In what world is code attestation Digital Rights
| Management?
|
| Is there even meaningful overlap between these two things?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Indeed, App stores must sign the software on their
| platform to deploy, and offline binaries now require a
| valid registered Developer Account signed code in order
| to easily run. A bodged on ecosystem like Brew doesn't
| practically count here, as a signed-check block is
| functionally also preventing most users running
| unapproved code. It is marketed as a security feature,
| which is why it sounds odd to people inside the
| ecosystem.
|
| "Is there even meaningful overlap between these two
| things?"
|
| If one wants to target every platform, than people are
| ultimately forced to use a Mac with a Developer Account
| subscription. Accordingly, there is no practical
| guarantee your project will reach market (app store
| rejections are common)... or worse... some dimwit chooses
| a platform ecosystem specific language to really double-
| down on a bad investment.
|
| Hence, my opinion on the answer to the threads question:
| "Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?"
|
| Have a nice day =3
| samatman wrote:
| > _App stores must sign the software on their platform to
| deploy_
|
| This is true, or rather "developers must sign software in
| order to sell it on the App Store" is true, and I believe
| this is what you meant.
|
| That's attestation. It isn't DRM.
|
| > _offline binaries now require a valid registered
| Developer Account signed code in order to easily run_
|
| "Easily" here means one click. "Not easily", then, is
| three clicks. The dialog boxes tell you exactly what to
| do. This is needed the first time you open a program,
| after which it just opens.
|
| > _A bodged on ecosystem like Brew doesn 't practically
| count here_
|
| Why don't Homebrew, Mac Ports, and Nix, count here?
| Practically, I mean.
|
| > _as a signed-check block is functionally also
| preventing most users running unapproved code_
|
| This just isn't true though, it isn't even in the same
| neighborhood as the truth. Most users are, in fact, able
| to: read a dialog which says "go to Privacy and
| Security", go to Privacy and Security, and click the
| button which lets them run unsigned code.
|
| > _forced to use a Mac with a Developer Account
| subscription_
|
| Yes, it's true, you do need to have a Mac (or borrow one,
| cloud code signing does exist) and pay $99 a month, to
| sign code. Or you can just release it. Weren't we talking
| about Digital Rights Management? I thought you were going
| to explain how code attestation is DRM. I haven't seen
| you do that yet, did you want to?
|
| > _there is no practical guarantee your project will
| reach market (app store rejections are common)_
|
| You can just sell software for the Mac. The App Store is
| completely optional. The checks involved in the
| attestation process are quite minimal and focus on
| whether your program is malware. Failing that, you can
| sell your mal^H^H^H software directly, and users will
| have to endure three clicks, instead of one, to open it
| for the first time.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| >That's attestation. It isn't DRM.
|
| True, but only if the validation code is vulnerable to an
| unpatchable vulnerability discovered in Apple M1, M2 and
| M3 chips. Otherwise your hardware, drivers, and or
| software likely still needs approved by Apple.
|
| "> Why don't Homebrew, Mac Ports, and Nix, count here?
| Practically, I mean."
|
| Generally, most users will never touch CLI, and the ones
| that do often know how to deal with nag-ware in the OS.
|
| "This just isn't true though, "
|
| Right, you try to publish some kernel level driver that
| touches the hardware signatures. These modern machines
| will usually brick into a lock-screen on most platforms
| now. Thus, no one will be developing 3rd party
| hardware/drivers/Software/Firmware inside that box. You
| must pay Apple to play... even to replace many broken
| components.
|
| "> The checks involved in the attestation process are
| quite minimal and focus on whether your program is
| malware"
|
| Or running something Apple doesn't want, like another
| store ecosystem (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple ).
|
| Arguably, modern Win11 and MacOS are already technically
| Malware collecting user telemetry, content, and
| metadata... in my opinion they arrive broken out of the
| box. Perhaps you are arguing some corporation is
| ethically superior to regular thieves. =3
| jen20 wrote:
| Do you realize that Borland were out of business by the
| time code signing for basically any platform became a
| thing most anyone was vaguely concerned with?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Sure, historically the draconian legal encumbrances you
| have to sign with Apple to make approved products were
| active pre OS 6.
|
| It is not just a software issue that scares away partners
| from Apple. =3
|
| Commercially, the original compiler was superseded by
| other products.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2BBuilder
| pjmlp wrote:
| Object Pascal and MPW had something, but Metrowerks was
| clearly much better.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| CodeWarrior was mainly popular for PalmOS, but had numerous
| targets.
|
| It was a standard prior to the gcc getting mainstream
| recognition. =3
| pjmlp wrote:
| Not much of a standard on PC, other than being the way to
| produce Palm, Epoch and Symbian apps, until Nokia
| replaced it with Eclipse based tooling, Carbide.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Metrowerks stuck around a long time in the embedded
| space.
|
| Eclipse was more of a phenomena in the Java/OO paradigm,
| but was often slow on older platforms. Still, many folks
| embraced the open ecosystem when it became popular.
|
| Symbian was 10 years ahead of their time, and brought a
| lot of new paradigms to mobile. Leaving the master
| signing key on a reset device was a teachable moment for
| most folks. =3
| samatman wrote:
| > _Eventually the MacOS application /compiler options users had
| would slowly diversify under OSX/intel-cpu, but the M1/M2
| architecture shift would drop again to burn down any progress
| people made opening the platform. The easy to cross-port GNU
| applications still cling to the underbelly of modern posix
| based MacOS, but you can guarantee it is an uphill battle to
| get anything deployed outside the Apple App store ecosystem
| build tree._
|
| This entire paragraph is completely mystifying to me. What are
| you trying to say here? What uphill battle? What burned down
| progress?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| "What are you trying to say here?"
|
| Any CTO foolish enough to rely on Apples partner offerings,
| had better plan on mitigating chaotic shifts in their
| architecture/legal/DRM policies... often primarily focused on
| locking out general purpose small firm software/hardware.
| i.e. The thread asks "Why borland" (or any sane company)
| would avoid Apple's walled garden ecosystem over the years.
|
| "What uphill battle?"
|
| Try to publish anything on their platform without signed
| software DRM, or integrated 3rd party hardware. Essentially
| your group will end up paying Apple with a tithe and legal
| encumbrances, as it is essentially a closed ecosystem from
| the users perspective.
|
| "What burned down progress?"
|
| The generic hardware around Intel cpus meant better support
| for standardized game engine GPU drivers, easier compiler
| ports, and alternate software sourcing ecosystems. The M2 was
| nice silicon... but few folks are going to invest years
| porting to Apples whimsical unicorn product trajectory for
| lower market share. lol
|
| "This entire paragraph is completely mystifying to me"
|
| That is because you don't yet understand most successful
| commercial software companies make money by reselling the
| same software, and not mired in the perpetual cost/liability
| of software porting to product-run specific chips.
|
| I was not specifically picking on Apple here if that was your
| concern. You would likely have needed to experience the OS8
| and Desktop PowerPC deprecation to understand why people
| avoided Apple for years after. =3
| layer8 wrote:
| Imagine if we had a Turbo Swift now.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Delphi, and Rem Objects has a Swift compiler.
|
| https://www.remobjects.com/elements/
| analog31 wrote:
| I think the hurdle from a programming language to actually
| creating mac-like software was too great for Borland and for
| casual programmers. MS-DOS became where you could write and share
| ugly but useful programs.
|
| Hypercard changed that but it was too little too late and Apple
| didn't have its heart in supporting casual programming.
| Professional devs don't realize what a big deal Visual Basic was.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Professional devs at the time certainly did. Some thoroughly
| eye-watering percentage of business applications were written
| in VB. I'm still not sure that any modern tech has replaced the
| sheer "it doesn't need to be beautiful it just needs to be
| functional and inexpensive to build and maintain" power that we
| had with tools like Visual Basic.
|
| Nowadays I'm accustomed to multi-person teams needing months to
| build what a single skilled VB6 developer could bodge together
| in a couple weeks, but I still sometimes marvel at how we got
| from there to here without enterprise and B2B development shops
| calling foul along the way. Perhaps it's because they know they
| can cover any increase in development cost with the larger
| amount of money they can squeeze out of customers using modern
| SaaS subscription pricing schemes.
| anticorporate wrote:
| As many people have said, it's only an interesting question if
| you don't have the context of Apple market share in the PC
| market, which spent over two decades between 1980 and the early
| 2000s in a state of almost constant decline.
|
| To me, that's the more interesting part here. Yes, everyone knows
| Apple is huge today, but many people apparently don't know how
| far from inevitable that was. If you had asked me in 2000 who
| would be the bigger company in 2024: Apple, Blockbuster, Toys "R"
| Us, or Enron, I'm not sure how I would have answered except that
| I'm positive I wouldn't have said Apple.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> Apple, Blockbuster, Toys "R" Us, or Enron
|
| This is such a great point. Blockbuster stores were so
| ubiquitous, and I never thought streaming would be a thing
| considering the state of the internet back in the late 90's,
| early aughts. Toys? Who thought a toy store would ever go
| bankrupt? And Enron were heralded as pioneers in the idea of
| buying commodities on demand and how this was going to change
| all kinds of different industries with their business model of
| how they sold their wares. Enron was considered light years
| ahead of companies in the energy sector.
|
| At the same point, Apple seemed to be, like you said,
| constantly failing, moving backwards, and essentially looked
| like it already had one foot in the grave when every other
| company was seemingly destined for a lifetime of success.
|
| Having experienced the rise and fall of all the companies you
| listed; I think a lot of people are unaware of how
| destabilizing the internet has been for companies who were
| unable to grasp how seismic the changes that were coming and
| didn't move fast enough to adapt.
|
| I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs
| was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the
| companies you listed go as well?
| zaidf wrote:
| >I think the real question is if someone other than Steve
| Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the
| companies you listed go as well?
|
| John Sculley already answered this, no?
| philistine wrote:
| I think the true lesson to learn from the CEOs who weren't
| Steve Jobs was that one of them had the foresight to get
| Steve Jobs back, after he had proven he was a keen leader
| with NeXt and especially with Pixar.
| phonon wrote:
| NeXt was not doing well financially, and neither was
| Pixar until Toy Story came out. He also did not run Pixar
| in any meaningful way.
| simonh wrote:
| He was very engaged in the business side, and kept close
| contact on the creative side but knew to leave well
| alone.
|
| Pixar is a great example of Jobs understanding what he
| should NOT be doing, and not doing it. That must take
| incredible discipline.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| And Apple's success arguably isn't just a result of suddenly
| starting to execute well. It also took Microsoft giving them
| a golden opportunity by executing rather impressively poorly
| for a good long while. 1998 - 2009 was a tough time to be a
| Windows user.
|
| I switched from PC to Mac for home use in about 2003. I liked
| OS X from day 1 (I worked the help desk at my college when it
| was released, so I had to learn it fairly deeply), but that
| alone probably wouldn't have been enough to entice me to make
| the switch, especially in light of how big the Apple tax was
| back then. I had also spent several years living with Windows
| Me and Windows XP, and I was probably switching _away_ from
| them as much as I was switching _toward_ a Mac.
| mdasen wrote:
| I was a Mac user through those years and it wasn't roses
| during much of that time. In 1998, Microsoft had Windows
| 95/98 which didn't have the nice polish I loved from my
| Mac, but it was a modern OS running on much faster and
| cheaper hardware. Mac OS 8 was really good looking, but it
| wasn't a modern OS - cooperative multi-tasking and no
| separation between processes. Mac OS 9 didn't change that.
|
| At the same time, Intel was just demolishing the PowerPC.
| You could get a much faster Windows PC for a third of the
| price. Yes, Apple has a price premium today, but it's
| marginal and you're usually getting better stuff. Back then
| the price differential was huge.
|
| Things didn't get better fast. Windows XP gave home users
| Microsoft's NT OS while Mac OS X was so slow it was
| basically unusable. Windows apps would start up instantly
| while OS X would let you watch an icon keep bouncing in the
| dock. Intel kept pummeling PowerPC both on price and
| performance.
|
| You started using OS X in 2003 so you never used 10.0 and
| 10.1, but it was painful. Even in 2003, performance was
| still slow and compatibility could be hard, but it was
| getting substantially better. More apps were fitting in
| with the OS by this time. A lot of the early ports from Mac
| OS Classic weren't very good and the UI elements didn't
| always look right.
|
| OS X did give Apple a big advantage: it was a Unix with
| good laptop support. This brought a lot of techies to the
| platform. But it's hard to say that Microsoft wasn't doing
| well for most users at this time. Windows XP was so fast
| and the hardware was so cheap.
|
| Microsoft did have some fumbles. Windows Me should never
| have been released. Windows XP had a lot of security issues
| for a while. But most people weren't even looking at Apple
| - until the iPod.
|
| I think Apple's resurgence was their own doing. The iPod
| got people interested in Apple again. I think delivering a
| laptop-friendly Unix brought a ton of techies and
| developers to the platform. I think the move to Intel
| processors closed a huge performance gap that had been
| plaguing Apple.
|
| Even today, while Apple's Mac business is doing great, how
| much of that is attributable to the impact that iOS had?
| Even then, Windows is still the vast majority of the market
| (85-90%). Most people never saw a reason to leave Windows.
|
| If Apple hadn't gotten hit products like the iPod and
| iPhone, would we have seen the same huge resurgence in the
| Mac? Or would people continue buying faster Windows
| machines at a third of the price?
|
| I'm a big Mac fan, but there were some painful days in
| there and 1998-2005 could be pretty painful. It wasn't all
| bad. Mac OS X was getting better by 2003-2004. But there
| was a lot that wasn't so great. Still, I know people who
| did switch then. Windows could be annoying as hell - but it
| didn't start being annoying in 1998. Windows 3.1 was very
| basic and Windows 95 would have all the same complaints as
| Windows 98. But Windows 95 was so much better than the
| Classic Mac OS. Windows XP was more usable than the early
| Mac OS versions. But OS X started showing promise and it
| was getting fans - and many were pissed off with Windows.
|
| But I don't think that's what gave the Mac its resurgence.
| The iPod and iPhone brought users who wanted Apple's
| experience on their computer.
| jordanb wrote:
| > Blockbuster stores were so ubiquitous and I never thought
| streaming would be a thing considering the state of the
| internet
|
| Netflix started drinking Blockbuster's milkshake in the DVDs-
| by-mail day, because you didn't have to worry about late
| fees.
|
| Blockbuster should have eliminated late fees and offered DVDs
| by subscription in-store, but they made too much money off
| the late fees.
| lux_scintilla wrote:
| >Blockbuster should have eliminated late fees and offered
| DVDs by subscription in-store, but they made too much money
| off the late fees.
|
| FWIW they did do exactly that. It was a monthly
| subscription fee, you could have three movies or games out
| at a time, no late fees. I don't remember what the plan was
| named but I think it was movie pass, to start a new
| membership you typed "pass" into the terminal. It was
| pushed somewhat strongly in store I remember having a new
| sign ups quota per shift.
|
| So strange that this somehow became a relevant tidbit in a
| post about Borland ignoring Macs.
| kemiller wrote:
| Warning, rambling old man story ahead.
|
| I've been a Mac fan since it was released. I was 8. My dad
| wouldn't let me get one because he disliked them pretty
| intensely, said you couldn't tell what they were doing and
| couldn't fix them, and they were overpriced. And I mean, he
| wasn't wrong. I remember once, probably 1985 or 1986, we were
| at a computer show where they were raffling off, I think, a Mac
| 128k or Plus. My dad told me if either of us won we would sell
| it and get an Amiga. In retrospect that would have been cool,
| TBH.
|
| The only thing that ever got my attention instead was when NeXT
| came out. It was just so badass, this ominous black cube with
| the cool 3d grayscale UI. But even more out of reach
| financially, so I just hung out at the local university
| computer base that had a bunch. I think the guys in the store
| viewed me as a kind of mascot. But TBH NeXT struggled just as
| hard as Apple and didn't even have their legacy brand equity.
|
| Those of us who suffered through the bad years are still the
| most loyal, I find, even though they are stagnating, and even
| though the modern OS and hardware, though unquestionably vastly
| better in functional terms, are just not quite as interesting
| and unique.* In the late 90s, when Apple was at its nadir, I
| had to reluctantly mostly abandon the Mac. I still had one but
| most of my time was in the unix/Linux/FreeBSD world. So when
| NeXT reverse-acquired Apple, and the classic look and some of
| the classic feel of the Mac married the unix foundations of
| NeXTStep, it was game over, and the first chance I got I
| convinced my boss to let switch and I've never looked back.
|
| * John Siracusa's excellent explanation of what I mean:
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
| macintux wrote:
| Similar story for me. After using Macs for years, I drifted
| into Linux-land, and it took me a while to realize "Oh, wait,
| Macs are UNIX now" and jump back in. Been very happy since.
| nyrikki wrote:
| People forgot the Ashton-Tate merger, which destroyed Borland's
| internal culture and saddled it with products that were almost
| impossible to move to a WYSIWYG model.
|
| They were targeting both Windows and OS/2 for the GUI
| implementations they did deliver with much reduced budgets.
|
| Microsoft buying FoxPro and introducing preditory pricing also
| didn't help.
|
| Neither did MS sniping the Quattero team.
|
| Add in Philippe Kahn and the Borland board fighting on direction
| didn't help.
|
| The company simply was troubled and didn't have the resources to
| port anything besides Pascal, which as one of the teaching
| languages of the day, was easier to justify.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I like to imagine they couldn't make a dent in the Mac market
| because their products were too ugly to appeal to Mac users.
|
| Sometimes I think I'm only half joking on that.
|
| Back then, making software run on more than one platform was much
| more painful than it is now. Not only were the range of features
| provided by the OS vastly different, it was common to write
| performance critical parts in assembly - which made them need to
| be almost completely rewritten (there were macro assemblers that
| made that slightly easier). Unix was heralded as "open" (not to
| be confused with open source) because it was less painful to port
| stuff and make it interoperate with other Unixes.
| isodev wrote:
| Maybe they could see the future and didn't want to pay 30% of
| their revenue for nothing /s.
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