The Register - There are still crypto reg's...

[Marshall Clow]

At 8:17 PM -0500 2/1/01, Phillip H. Zakas wrote:
>I completely concur there's a feedback loop problem, but its Apple's fault I
>think.  I remember when the first MACs came out you had to pay $5K just for
>the privilege of programming for it.  What numbskulls! 

This was (partially) true, but only for a few months
(most of which were before the Mac was released).

You didn't have to pay for the privilege of programming the Mac, but
you did have to pay for the Lisa that the development tools ran on.

I bought my first C compiler for the Mac in June of 1984,
and it didn't cost $5K.

If Apple had made efforts to keep their development tools from running
on the Mac, and/or had prevented others from making tools for the Mac,
that might be different.

As it is, I find it hard to blame the shortcomings of MacOS today on
a short-term policy from late 1983 and early 1984.


>The intel platforms
>were the first to encourage development because bios ref. guides were cheap
>and most could afford the $100 of a pascal, c or asm compiler.  Plus the
>intel-platform hw (ibm, compaq, etc.) was really designed to handle
>multitasking and simultaneous networking/communications.  Apple only
>recently started to get the hint and improve the hardware.

The BIOS ref guides were cheap (only about $40), and the compilers
were $2-300, as I remember. MASM was less. Not really cheap.

As for being designed for multitasking and simultaneous networking/communications,
I think that you are confusing your decades. The intel-based products from 1982-86
didn't, in general, do _any_ multitasking (remember TSRs?) and as for communications,
well, they did ok talking to most anything at the other end of an RS-232 line.

-- 
-- Marshall

Marshall Clow     Idio Software   <mailto:mclow at mailhost2.csusm.edu>

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning.
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.