How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people

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      for note in folder.notes():
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But: Object Pascal/Delphi is a quite powerful language and you can write really complicated stuff with it, compiled into a relatively small statically linked executable that worked just about everywhere without the need to install anything. (300-400 KB binaries seemed large at the time, little I knew what awaited us 20 years down the line.)

The need to dig and learn everything yourself definitely had some impact and provided some lower level knowledge of things many newer developers don't seem to know or care about, but I very much prefer what we have today where you're not expected to learn to read what looks like ancient Egyptian from scratch to write a basic calculator. Good riddance to those times.

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.

I don’t know who thinks about computers in that way. It makes zero sense to me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I mostly disagree with this, so long as the low quality software isn't pushed by the platform then it's not that much danger to the reputation. Lack of quality software is a much larger danger, and it's not easy to tell ahead of time where the quality will come from. The big problem is when you are running your own app store and it becomes packed with garbage.

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.

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.

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).

[1] at that time, electronics used a lot of lead, cadmium and mercury. It's less of an issue now.

Jobs wanted to make an appliance for the masses . That’s why the Apple II had a case and wasn’t just a bare circuit board like the Apple I.

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.

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.

Microcomputers greatly expanded private access to computers, and Microsoft brought programming to microcomputers.

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.

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 true, but it may be a little unclear if people are reading it as suggesting something other than the profit motive. However, for a long time, Microsoft really did view its own success as dependent on providing customers ways to write and sell their own software. That is in fact empowering to the customer. I'm pretty sure Gates did care about this because it was what was driving sales of his products.

> Gates and others at Microsoft had gone on the record repeatedly saying they intended for Windows and the Macintosh to be sufficiently similar that they and other software developers would be able to port applications in short order between the two. Few prospects could have sounded less appealing to Sculley. Apple, whose products then as now enjoyed the highest profit margins in the industry thanks to their allure as computing's hippest luxury brand, could see their whole business model undone by the appearance of cheap commodity clones that had been transformed by the addition of Windows into Mac-alikes. Of course, one look at Windows as it actually existed in 1985 could have disabused Sculley of the notion that it was likely to win any converts among people who had so much as glanced at MacOS. Still, he wasn't happy about the idea of the Macintosh losing its status, now or in the future, as the only GUI environment that could serve as a true, comprehensive solution to all of one's computing needs. So, within weeks of Jobs's departure, feeling his oats after having so thoroughly cowed Digital Research, he threatened to sue Microsoft as well for copying the "look and feel" of the Macintosh in Windows.

> He really ought to have thought things through a bit more before doing so. Threatening Bill Gates was always a dangerous game to play, and it was sheer folly when Gates had the upper hand, as he largely did now. Apple was at their lowest ebb of the 1980s when they tried to tell Microsoft that Windows would have to be cancelled or radically redesigned to excise any and all similarities to the Macintosh. Sales of the Mac had fallen to some 20,000 units per month, about one-fifth of Apple's pre-launch projections for this point. The stream of early adopters with sufficient disposable income to afford the pricey gadget had ebbed away, and other potential buyers had started asking what you could really do with a Macintosh that justified paying two or three times as much for it as for an equivalent MS-DOS-based computer. Aldus PageMaker, the first desktop-publishing package for the Mac, had been released the previous summer, and would eventually go down in history as the product that, when combined with the Apple LaserWriter printer, saved the platform by providing a usage scenario that ugly old MS-DOS clearly, obviously couldn't duplicate. But the desktop-publishing revolution would take time to show its full import. In the meantime, Apple was hard-pressed, and needed Microsoft -- one of the few major publishers of business software actively supporting the Mac -- far too badly to go around issuing threats to them.

> Gates responded to Sculley's threat with several of his own. If Sculley followed through with a lawsuit, Gates said, he'd stop all work at Microsoft on applications for the Macintosh and withdraw those that were already on store shelves, treating business computing henceforward as exactly the zero-sum game which he had never believed it to be in the past. This was a particularly potent threat in light of Microsoft's new Excel spreadsheet, which had just been released to rave reviews and already looked likely to join PageMaker as the leading light among the second generation of Mac applications. In light of the machine's marketplace travails, Apple was in no position to toss aside a sales driver like that one, the first piece of everyday Mac business software that was not just as good as but in many ways quite clearly better than equivalent offerings for MS-DOS. Yet Gates wouldn't stop there. He would also, he said, refuse to renew Apple's license to use Microsoft's BASIC on their Apple II line of computers. This was a serious threat indeed, given that the aged Apple II line was the only thing keeping Apple as a whole afloat as the newer, sexier Macintosh foundered. Duly chastised, Apple backed down quickly -- whereupon Gates, smelling blood in the water, pressed his advantage relentlessly, determined to see what else he could get out of finishing the fight Sculley had so foolishly begun.

> One ongoing source of frustration between the two companies, dating back well into the days of Steve Jobs's power and glory, was the version of BASIC for the Mac which Microsoft had made available for purchase on the day the machine first shipped. In the eyes of Apple and most of their customers, the mere fact of its existence on a platform that wasn't replete with accessible programming environments was its only virtue. In practice, it didn't work all that differently from Microsoft's Apple II BASIC, offering almost no access to the very things which made the Macintosh the Macintosh, like menus, windows, and dialogs. A second release a year later had improved matters somewhat, but nowhere near enough in most people's view. So, Apple had started work on a BASIC of their own, to be called simply MacBASIC, to supersede Microsoft's. Microsoft BASIC for the Macintosh was hardly a major pillar of his company's finances, but Bill Gates was nevertheless bothered inordinately by the prospect of it being cast aside. "Essentially, since Microsoft started their company with BASIC, they felt proprietary towards it," speculates Andy Hertzfeld, one of the most important of the Macintosh software engineers. "They felt threatened by Apple's BASIC, which was a considerably better implementation than theirs." Gates said that Apple would have to kill their own version of BASIC and -- just to add salt to the wound -- sign over the name "MacBASIC" to Microsoft if they wished to retain the latter's services as a Mac application developer and retain Microsoft BASIC on the Apple II.

> And that wasn't even the worst form taken by Gates's escalation. Apple would also have to sign what amounted to a surrender document, granting Microsoft the right to create "derivative works of the visual displays generated by Apple's Lisa and Macintosh graphic-user-interface programs." The specific "derivative works" covered by the agreement were the user interfaces already found in Microsoft Windows for MS-DOS and five Microsoft applications for the Macintosh, including Word and Excel. The agreement provided Microsoft with nothing less than a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-transferable license to use those derivative works in present and future software programs, and to license them to and through third parties for use in their software programs." In return, Microsoft would promise only to support Word and Excel on the Mac until October 1, 1986 -- something they would certainly have done anyway. Gates was making another of those deviously brilliant tactical moves that were already establishing his reputation as the computer industry's most infamous villain. Rather than denying that a "visual display" could fall under the domain of copyright, as many might have been tempted to do, he would rather affirm the possibility while getting Apple to grant Microsoft an explicit exception to being bound by it. Thus Apple -- or, for that matter, Microsoft -- could continue to sue MacOS's -- and potentially Windows's -- competitors out of existence while Windows trundled on unmolested.

> Sculley called together his management team to discuss what to do about this Apple threat against Microsoft that had suddenly boomeranged into a Microsoft threat against Apple. Most at the meeting insisted that Gates had to be bluffing, that he would never cut off several extant revenue streams just to spite Apple and support this long-overdue Windows product of his which had been an industry laughingstock for so long. But Sculley wasn't sure; he kept coming back to the fact that Microsoft could undoubtedly survive without Apple, but Apple might not be able to survive without Microsoft -- at least not right now, given the Mac's current travails.

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.

I agree about the portability of VB, HC, and Excel code, including spreadsheets. At least, VB6. ;-) But people are managing with the more fragmented ecosystems of open source tools such as Python toolchains.

The only computer that I'd used up until then was an Apple II that had been donated to our school. I managed to talk my parents into buying one, and they took me to the store but I couldn't find one. Asked the salesman and he said they didn't sell them anymore but now they had these new Macintosh computers.

I looked at the rinkydink black and white screen with a mostly-blank desktop with just a few icons you could drag around or click on it. Couldn't even figure out how to get to the command line, let alone into BASIC. When I asked the salesman he said that you couldn't and seemed utterly baffled that someone would actually want to use their computer.

So I left and went and bought a PC clone instead. Plugged it in and booted it up and I was coding immediately. PCs just worked, and let you do whatever you wanted. Macs were kind of toy computers at the time.

That philosophy still kind of holds to this day, though less so now. I use a Mac for work, and luckily they did finally make it possible to get to a command line and to program on it. At some point, they realized they had to give some power to it or else become utterly irrelevant. But you can tell that it's still not intended for power users. It still can't run most software, and what it does have is limited and simplified, from the OS on up, and still defaults to making things difficult except for the simplest use cases.

During this time using UNIX was a pain, only lessen by an heavily customized version of XEmacs.

On Amiga, Windows, Mac OS and OS/2, no biggie, there were good IDE experiences already.

It lives on a Clozure Common Lisp, though there is no version for Apple M processors. Kind of a shame.

Just in case someone hasn't read it yet, I have to post a link to this classic short story: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html (The Right to Read, by Richard Stallman).

(The bogeyman back then was copyright infringement, nowadays it's as you mentioned security and/or privacy.)

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.

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.

Excel is like Factorio or Minecraft, you end up "automating" things you were doing by hand and it doesn't "feel" programatic, and you can very easily "peek and poke" the memory of the "program" as you go along.

Hypercard (and maybe Flash, I never used either) might be somewhere in-between, but closer to Excel.

Powerpoint is almost programmable, but nobody uses it that way.

(There's a similar disjuncture amongst the Linux/Mac users where they will write bash/zsh scripts but not count it as programming.)

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.

Apple kept denying this was their plan, but kept moving closer and closer to doing this. However, they then appeared to stop around 2020 and haven't renewed those efforts, so I guess we are safe?