"Inside Macintosh" in electronic format | Hacker News Reader

"Inside Macintosh" in electronic format

spinsidemacintosh.neocities.org

46 pointsrcarmo11 comments

Never since has there been such a thoughtfully designed ecosystem. NeXT maybe, but in the original it was not accessible.

I don't think my young self will ever forgive Microsoft for forcing Apple into burying MacBasic. I had come into the Mac via the TI99 4/a and self taught myself via Basic/Extended Basic and was very excited when I got my Mac- but despite hearing about the mythical MacBasic I ended up with the excremental Microsoft Basic with no compiling and no Toolbox access.

It killed a budding programming career other than a bit of HyperTalk.

Ended up in network engineering, but I often think of the path I started but was aborted by Microsoft's power plays...

From a UX perspective? Yes.

From a system design perspective? https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

I think there are meaningful lessons from Macintosh for any budding system designer, without ending up all the way at Second System Effect.

You can find original Inside Macintosh PDFs on Apple’s website if you know where to look.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...

…

Those are the new Inside Macintosh series, published starting in 1992. SpInside Macintosh, the HyperCard stack from which the web page linked in this item was created, was produced from the first five volumes of the original Inside Macintosh series, published from 1985 to 1991.

As the Preface to Inside Macintosh: Overview (1992) explains:

  The original Inside Macintosh library of books appeared in six volumes from
  1985 to 1991. Those volumes each focused on a particular version of the
  system software, sometimes prompted by the release of new hardware
  configurations. Often, the later volumes of the original Inside Macintosh
  described only new system software components or changes to existing
  system software components.

  The new Inside Macintosh books are intended to replace the original Inside
  Macintosh books and to provide a more complete and more useful reference to
  the Macintosh system software. The most obvious improvement in the new
  books is that they are organized principally by topic. For example, the book
  Inside Macintosh: Files contains virtually all the available information related to
  files, including complete descriptions of the File Manager, the Standard File
  Package, the Alias Manager, and the Disk Initialization Manager. Similarly,
  the book Inside Macintosh: Text contains all information about handling text.
  This topic-oriented organization of books makes it easier for you to find the
  information you need. It also makes it easier for Apple to add books to the
  Inside Macintosh suite as new technologies emerge in the years ahead.

If only they’d kept that up...

I have my copies on the bookshelf behind me.

I used to have the 90s set with the rainbow colored covers. They got to be too much to keep moving so my last move they went to the thrift store with a lot of my other paper computer books. Some lucky Mac nerd in the South Bay struck gold at a thrift store one day. I kept my CD-ROM copy though.

jeez, yea someone got very lucky. I'd love to have the whole rainbow lineup on a bookshelf in my office. CD was all you really needed, but the books were glorious.

I somehow got a copy of the early "phone book" version. It was a mysterious and magical thing.

I bought a used copy of the single-volume edition of Inside Macintosh 1-3 a few years ago as research for a project I was tinkering with. It is a truly beautifully-made book and a delightful piece of technical documentation.

I have all 6 and a couple of the other ones. Inside quicktime should be required reading for anyone in the video business.

TL;DR if yer kid steals a computer book, look the other way.

Confession: As a teenager in the 90s, I was a klepto. I stole CDs from Musicland. I stole Zip/Jazz disks/drives from Best Buy. Heck, I stole padlocks from Ace Hardware with no use for them and a LOT more.

BUT, the main thing I really had my eye on was the shelf in bookstore that had all the Inside Macintosh series of books lined up nicely.

No one seemed to ever buy one (suburban Minnesota malls/bookstores), all of them always seemed to be there collecting dust, just waiting for the right person who would never arrive to buy them. I would have noticed if suddenly the Macintosh Toolbox Essentials book had been sold. It never was. The relative physical qualities of the books was obvious. Someone had clearly made an effort to make them appealing compared the other books in the computer section like FoxPro, CompTIA, Word, HTML in 3 Minutes, etc. But apparently no one besides me (a 15 year old kid) existed within 60 miles of Minneapolis who needed or wanted them.

They were very expensive, and they had like this like halo around them to me as some unattainable items that held all the details I wanted to know but were effectively secret at the time unless you worked at Apple or could gain access to these tomes.

I was a very quiet kid, but if you wanted to debate Mac vs PC... I had opinions and not afraid to share them. I was a hardcore enthusiast during what may have been the worst of times for Apple.

These books were going to be harder to steal, but I did eventually acquire some. Some came with CD that had an IDE and the API documentation as PDF or whatever it was at the time. It included the docs contained within most of the other books, so I didn't actually have to acquire them all and that was a relief. I read the docs, and I installed the software. I joined Warez groups on AOL (using generated or phished CC numbers of course, I needed way more than 40 hours/month) to pirate CodeWarrior and find out the power of ResEdit etc..

I started making stuff.

In 10-11th grade my school offered a programming class. It was Pascal. It was pretty easy at that point for me. I asked my teacher if I could make some Mac programs on my own and submit the source code instead of the assignments, they said ok. They couldn't run it, but just looking the code it was probably obvious that I was doing way more than the assignments. I pretty much ended just up creating my own curriculum and learned a lot in that time.

Anyways, I don't steal anymore. That was a phase. I actually think I might have some trauma now when I shop now feeling like I need to be extra careful about appearing that I am _not_ shoplifting, 20+ years later.

Anyways, Inside Macintosh holds a very specific feeling of time and place in my life. It is cool that someone else spent the time to publish all this.

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