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Comment by bogantech | Hacker News Reader

> Love that you are linking to a piece of fiction, at literal dramatisation of events that almost likely never happened to illustrate a point that has no real foundation in fact. Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode,

Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment, in a time where every other personal computer had one built-in. As a matter of fact the only way to develop software for the Macintosh was to drop $10,000 on a Lisa

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Also a fact: Steve Jobs spent the first half of the 90's trying to sell NeXT machines specifically on their dev tools for quickly making custom applications. From the late 1980's on, whenever he spoke of his visits to Xerox PARC he would mention the GUI, networking, and object-oriented programming as the three equally world-changing technologies shown to him.

Side note: For some reason Jobs insisted it only have an optical drive instead of a hard drive. Which I'm sure many engineers advised against. Hard drive was like 2.5k extra. What a decision.

That was only the very first model. Most NeXT machines shipped with floppy and HD.

Fact: the link the OP provided was from a Hollywood movie, a know reliable source of historical accuracy. /s

That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing, certainly not the fact that programmable personal computers were so vehemently "despised by Steve Jobs."

Edit: Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...

> Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...

Right. No python. No C. No Perl. No Pascal. No Ruby. No C++. No Basic. Even the Apple IIc with it's puny 64k of ram had a decent Basic in it for the time. Talk about a feat of engineering from Microsoft!

One thing I was able to do with my AppleIIc was control the serial port through Basic (1984 ish). Hypertalk released support for doing that in 1992 -- a full 8 years (!) after the original mac was released.

I don't know what you're trying to prove. Your original point, which you laughably attempted to prove with a clip from a movie, was that Jobs "despised" programable computers. This is demonstrably false.

Well, being that I am the OP, I'm pretty confident about my point. ( and thanks for recognizing that. :)

> This is demonstrably false.

So demonstrate it.

I, and several others have done precisely that in this thread.

Next time, don't use a Hollywood dramatisation to back up your stories. They aren't real! Woz is on record as saying that the conversation never happened. Fundamentally, you're making things up to reflect your own biases and doubling down on them. It's clear that Apple, the business, doesn't see iPhone and iPad a general computing devices. That, though, is a very different point to the one you have failed to make.

Not really a surprise there was no Python (1991), Perl (1987), Ruby (1993), or C++ (public-ish in 1985) on a computer released in 1984.

Apple had a basic Pascal compiler on the Apple II/III, but it would have been an unbelievable feat to stretch that into a product with solid links to the System 1 OS, including the new GUI API, on the first few Macs.

Sample applies to BASIC. It would have been possible to squeeze the old MS Basic into the Mac but it would have had to run in some kind of Apple II emulation mode - not the point of the exercise. If you wanted BASIC you could buy an Apple II and carry right on.

Your point is clearly wrong. It took a few years to develop good tools for the original Mac because it was - you know - actually quite hard.

But when Jobs returned good, or at least adequate, free dev tools for MacOS were included almost immediately. And have been included ever since.

> the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it...

The OS was booted from a floppy disk, computers didn't use CDs back then.

Steve didn't want people mucking around with his perfect creation https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

WHAT? he was responding to your words that stated

"Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode..."

when he pointed out that the mac DIDN'T come with CD or any dev environment. you responded with "That there was no dev environment on release demonstrates precisely nothing"

can't you see how wrong your response is?

I did point out that "Every version of macOS that shipped with a CD had either PBX (Project Builder X) or Xcode...", and in the same post pointed out that "Last time I checked, the Mac that shipped in 1984 didn't have a CD drive, and the original Mac OS that shipped with the system was a ROM, so no CD was shipped with it..."

So you're annoyed that I pointed out that every version of Mac OS (including System 7.5, 8 and 9) all shipped with some kind of dev environment (and I concede that Hypercard is applying that loosely) and pointed out that the 128K Mac did not have an OS shipped on a CD or a method for reading the CDs at the time (were CD-ROMs even a thing in 1984 - I can't remember)?

I tell you what it doesn't prove either way; programable computer were "despised by Steve Jobs". That is what I was taking umbrage with.

For someone who doesn't seem to know what a floppy disk is you seem to think you know a lot about computers from the 80s

The OP point was that Jobs hated users having access to programming tools and not wanting to ship them with his computers.

The original 1984 Mac on release not having a dev environment was just an example he used to make his point.

But the example can be correct, without making the point valid (as numerous people have answered here).

Especially since the same Jobs had shipped tons of computers with development environments, including things like PBX, XCode, all kinds of scripting languages, the whole NeXT suite of dev tools (that were one of its strong points, and became the later basis for OS X dev tools), and so on.

If the parents point was "at the point of the release of the original Mac in 1984, and only then, Jobs didn't want to give users development environment" he might have a point. But Jobs of the subsequent 20+ years agreeing to ship development tools just fine, makes the point moot.

can't you see how wrong his point is and how irrelevant the example?

> Fact: When the Macintosh came out in 1984 it came with no programming environment

The programming environment for the Mac was a total shitshow in 1984, and continued to be so for a couple of versions after. You needed a 128k Mac, a Lisa, *and* an Apple II to make it work *at all*.

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