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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

I remember when I got THINK C I was just blown away by it. I think I was actually grabbing people in the hallway and babbling to them about how great it was. It was a huge improvement over the pseudo command line Mac compilers that came before (Megamax?).

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Good memory, there was a Megamax C, but I never used it.

When Lightspeed C (renamed to Think C) came out most of the Mac developers I knew that used C switched to it. I was still writing in MPW Pascal, and would continue to use it for professional Mac development until '91.

The C compiler that I remember working with was Aztec C, but for early Mac side projects. Later I switched to Think C for my side projects.

An aside: My first C compiler was for CPM and was named BDS C.

https://www.bdsoft.com/resources/bdsc.html

MPW was my favorite environment to work it. It was like as editor and a CLI all in one. I wasn't going C or Pascal with it, just using it to manipulate files and the like. I have long wanted to write a terminal that emulated some of it's intuitive behaviors.

MPW was pretty neat, and I've not seen its equal since I left Apple. It's a simple concept, a shell-plus-screen-editor that lets you have both source code and commands in the same window, and the combination let you do things like put context-sensitive commands in project directories. A little like Jupyter, I suppose.

The NIH attitude of the team didn't help the toolset make inroads anywhere. MPW had its own take on Make and a bunch of other Unix-y tools. Basically it was a license to revisit a bunch of hoary, old (even then) utilities, sometimes improving them, sometimes striking out.

My lord, it was slow. It didn't help that the fastest I/O on a Mac back then was a 5Mhz SCSI bus hooked to spinning rust. Builds could take hours. The symbolic debugger was . . . interesting (okay, it was awful).

[I worked on a bunch of its tools, including the linker and some runtime stuff.]

You’d have to write not only a terminal, but a FUSE layer or something, because when an MPW tool opens a file, it’s actually opening the live editor buffer for the file (if there is one). You can even give a filename to a tool that represents the editor selection in the file. Which was all awesome, and I have also thought of trying to figure out how to do it in newer MacOS or Linux.

I always figured this was inspired by Smalltalk, with its “DoIt” command, but never asked the MPW folks.

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