Writing and running a BBS on a Macintosh Plus | Hacker News Reader

Writing and running a BBS on a Macintosh Plus

jcs.org

94 pointstodsacerdoti18 comments

Congratulations on a truly neat project! I'm particularly impressed by the revision control system. Since acquiring a Mac Plus and an SE/30 I've wanted to try a bit of programming, but have not really known where to start. It sure looks like Think C + Amend might be a good place to begin!

Edit: have we hugged it to death? I can initiate a connection but never get a login prompt.

You'll want inside macintosh 1-5 and a decent starter book. If you want system 7 then you need the newer inside macintosh volumes or volume 6 at least.

Think Pascal was the easiest way for me to get started. It fits well on the screen. I use resedit to do resources and then you just link the resedit file in the project preferences. The book Macintosh Pascal Programming Primer is pretty good for learning how to start.

Think Reference is useful too, or ObiWan for an online reference.

If you prefer C, it's a little idiosyncratic on the Mac. Code warrior, older versions, will run, and so will Think C. There was also Symantec C++ for the Mac that I never tried.

If you want the apple tools, they were released on CDs called ETO in the latter years. MPW is ... well it gives you a shell but it's got a learning curve.

You can also cross compile to the Mac with Free Pascal. There's also a Modula-2 system called MacMETH. Microsoft had a version of Visual C++ that had a Mac compiler too. Sometimes the easiest thing is to set up an appletalk share and do your coding on a familiar machine with a large monitor.

Do you have any links for these old Mac development resources? Inside Mac? HIG? MPW? MacApp?

The VintageApple website has tons of pdf scans of old Apple-related books. Check this page out: https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/

I have paper copies... I'm that old.

The ETO and CodeWarrior CDs had Inside Macintosh in electronic format.

A lot of stuff is available on the Macintosh Garden.

https://macintoshgarden.org/

Strongly recommend checking out Retro68 and cross compiling from a newer machine: https://github.com/autc04/Retro68

There are some really good Retro68 code examples out there as well. I started compiling a list here, including a couple of my own: https://henlin.net/2021/12/21/Cool-Retro68-projects/

As a few other folks have said, the inside Macintosh books are extremely valuable references for Mac-specific code. I keep pdfs of them open the whole time I’m working on my Macintosh projects.

This made my day, and thank you for documenting everything so well.

The visible latency brings back warm, early childhood memories.

So cool.

I recapped my original Mac Plus but the floppy drive is toast. I picked up a BlueSCSI kit that I have yet to assemble — it ought to allow me to boot from a "hard drive" (SD card on the BlueSCSI, I think) and so bypass the floppy drive entirely.

I think I would like to get a THINK C up and running again and write a game using the old Mac Toolbox.

I built a decent Mac look-alike (under emulation, Raspberry Pi + miniVmac) that might actually make for a better environment.

There some irony that jcs blog post is making the front page of HN, given that he claims to have been permanently banned from HN (pg says otherwise) and created lobste.rs about 10 years ago as an alternative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452568

what the hell do you have to do to get permanently banned from HN?

the person was banned or outbound links to their webserver?

Before dang took over being banned was much more common, and not always for an obvious reason.

Oh, how I long for the excitement I would feel modifying Renegade boards as a young teenager.

Neat. I miss the BBS days. I wrote a BBS for the Amiga, back when I was in high school.

Logging into a BBS as a kid was so cool. It felt illegal to get a phone number, dial it up, poke around, download whatever games they had, sometimes they had MUDs too. Then you'd look for new numbers to other BBSs.

I ran one on a IIe in 1982, but couldn't reproduce it if you gave me all year.

i miss BBS days--i kinda want to make this happen on a decentralized network (something Ethereum-based)

i briefly ran a Telnet BBS in high school just so that my friends and i could play Legend of the Red Dragon together

Very cool! I miss bbs days!

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