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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

- It's so funny to see "developer's advocate" being used...I would've sworn that that was a term that has only recently been coined but there it is, in a 20 year old email.

- the connectivity of today's Internet is cool in its ubiquity, but emails were so much more engaging back then, even through text terminals...today emails have become such a mental burden, what with its connotation with spam and the implied demand of instant reply...that I can't imagine ever again writing the kind of thorough email as in the OP.

- too bad Woz's biggest hacker years were a little bit before email. Given his willingness and generosity in responding to just about anyone today, you could imagine him sending the Apple BASIC source and his chip layouts all over the Net if it had existed back then

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I learned to program by reading Woz's assembly code for the Apple //e. They used to give you books of "source" code when you bought the machine. Crazy times.

A few years ago my old business partner Mike Matas was at a party and he called me and was all, "Woz is here!" I asked if I could talk to him, and so I chatted with Woz for about 10 minutes. He was the nicest guy you could imagine. He was so incredibly happy to hear that I'd learned to code from his stuff.

When we first launched OmniWeb Woz bought ten or fifteen copies. He was always a huge supporter of the little guys. A real mensch.

Thanks for the inspirational post Wil. Always a pleasure reading your stories.

Thanks! I really hated this entry—it feels like I'm sitting on a porch on my rocking chair with my shotgun and going, "In the old days, we didn't have these fancy MOTORcars! We used horses, and we liked it! And I wore an onion on my belt, as was the fashion at the time."

    [lawn evictKidsFromUsing: shotgun]

I was thinking lately of porting the original DoomEd from id to Mac OS X. I reasoned that it shouldn't be too difficult since it was written on NeXTSTEP (minus all the api deprecation that happened over the years I guess). Sadly, id never released the source for that. Out of curiosity, do you remember whether the DoomEd source was ever part of any Doom Source package?

I used to do a lot of Doom Level editing on DOS back in '95, but most serious Map Editors seem to be for Windows. It would also be a great learning exercise, I guess, to try to port it so that it all the new technologies that we have nowadays...

We never saw "DoomEd." In fact, I have no idea what it is. I assume it's a level editor?

Yeah, it is the original level editor for doom. It ran on NeXT. Many people built separate implementations, based on the reverse engineered wad format. Doombuilder, Slade, etc are examples. There's even one named 'DoomEd', it is, however, not related to the original, never-released one from id.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/DoomEd

Thanks for your answer, so it really seems the sources never made it out of id. :(

I'd never known of you before this; now I've got you bookmarked. Thanks for that great post.

Thank you for the kind words!

Not just source code either. The Apple ][ came with a hardware manual containing schematics of the machine.

Even up to the original Mac they had volumes and volumes on the hardware—friend of mine (Sean O'Brien) just made a tiny circuit board that lets you hook up an original mouse and keyboard to modern Macs, based on Inside Mac specs.

It's so funny to see "developer's advocate" being used...I would've sworn that that was a term that has only recently been coined but there it is, in a 20 year old email.

It's interesting - in those days it was a person who advocated for external developers within the company. Now days all too often that side is missed.

We had amazing developer advocates back then. Jim Black (he's now at Nvidia), for instance, used to actually pick us up at the airport when we'd fly into town.

Nowadays I don't actually have an official developer's advocate at Apple. The last two people I had quit and they weren't replaced. Luckily I still have people from the old days I can e-mail if needed, but I wish there were official channels.

On the other hand, the number of Cocoa developers has gone from about 80 to like 80,000, so I can see why Apple can't assign each one a person.

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