Think Pascal and C on a MacPlus were great development environments. Servant and, later, MultiFinder helped tremendously too, although it took a while before they were stable. I could finally develop apps in Consulair or Aztec or Manx C without spending half my day swapping floppies. This version also includes a 'Monkey' accessory that, when activated, randomly clicks on things in an attempt to crash the system. UMich put HyperDrives into a lot of Macs and it was a night-and-day situation. The Twiggy MacOS also includes several debugging accessories such as a memory viewer, a heap inspector, a m68k trap viewer, and a macro recorder. The 512K Mac was much better, especially when upgraded with a hard drive. Desk Accessories were useful - calculator, notepad, etc - but couldn't do much and took up precious RAM when active. Only one app could run at a time, so switching between apps meant quitting the first, reloading the Finder, and launching the second - maybe 1-2 minutes total depending on whether you had to swap disks too. Mac apps had to be written in chunks (CODE resources) so pieces could be purged from RAM when not needed. You couldn't develop software on it - you had to use a Lisa for that. With the external floppy, it was useful - MacWrite, MacPaint, etc, but still frustrating. Just copying a floppy would take a dozen or more disk swaps until someone at Apple wrote a copy app that used screen RAM as a buffer so you could do it in 4 swaps. We received our first batch at UMich before the external 400K drives were available. The 128K Macs were simultaneously brilliant and frustrating. It wasn't until the 512k Mac came out and developers had more memory to work with and more time to get familiar with writing proper Mac software that things started to get rolling. DAOpener- assists in wrapping a Desk Accessory. AutQuit7- assists in wrapping an application for System 7. AutoQuit- assists in wrapping a Macintosh Plus application. Blanks- empty disk image files of various sizes. There were some dreadful ports of PC programs (I'm looking at you PFS:File) where there was absolutely no attempt to create a Mac interface. Extra software to be used with Mini vMac: CopyRoms- save a ROM image file. If you look around the Macintosh Garden you can see what the productivity apps for the 128k Mac were like. MacPaint is truly amazing for what it can do on a 128K Mac, although he had the ability to get some capabilities (I think something about bit shifting) added to QuickDraw in the Mac's ROMs that 3rd party developers didn't have. PC programs of that era generally expected 256K or more of RAM and getting developers to work in the smaller RAM footprint, while figuring out how to write proper event-driven Mac software was a challenge. There was a great quote from someone at Apple at the time that was something to the effect of "We thought developers would be able to do more with the 128k Mac, because we thought they were as good as Bill Atkinson (author of MacPaint)"
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |