Last night, I had a dream about programming the Mac back in the old days, before OS X. The more I think about it, the more I think I’m still dreaming. Did this stuff really happen? I remember:

• MPW, the Macintosh Programmers Workshop. The old mac didn’t have a console, or even run.exe. We had MPW, which gave us a commandline of sorts. We could access cvs using MPW. It is still being distributed by Apple.
• MacsBug. The low-level debugger. Its hard to believe this is all we had. We loved it. DebugStr() was the poor Mac Programmer’s console. My SE/30 (and all Macs) had a “Programmer’s Key” that would invoke MacsBug. If you didn’t have MacsBug installed, the built-in MicroBug would come up instead. Apple still distributes MacsBug. Fortunately, I’ll never need it again.
• Vague memories of Projector, which was Apple’s version control thing, and Jasik Debugger (The Debugger)
• MrC. This was Apple’s C compiler. We used MPW to compile our code with MrC. Even if we used Metrowerks to initially write the code, MrC was what we used to compile the engineering builds. Back in the the day, the shipping versions were actually compiled by a *third* compiler, from Motorola, which ran on an AIX box or something.
• Metrowerks CodeWarrior. I loved CodeWarrior. It was blazingly fast. It has a source-level debugger, which often ignored my breakpoints. It had a great IDE. It had a great Editor. The project files had a .µ extension, no joke. I bought my first copy of CodeWarrior in 1995, at the student rate, using the proceeds of my first real programming job (which is where I met peliom). CodeWarrior still brings back warm memories.
• BBEdit. I’ve been using BBEdit since forever. It doesn’t suck. It makes me happy, in a security blanket kind of way.
• Pascal. The Mac Toolbox interface was originally Pascal. Pascal was *the* way to write mac apps way back when. I tried to learn Pascal before I learned C, but never got anywhere.
• Think C and Think Pascal. Compilers sold by Symantec. I learned C programming using Think C on a SE/30.
• EvenBetterBusError. I don’t remember BusError, or BetterBusError, but EvenBetterBusError sticks in my mind. I don’t remember what it did, or why I needed it, but I think it was a System Extension.
• System Extensions. Marching across the screen on boot up. Little friends there to make your life better. The thing people noticed when booting OS X for the first time was that their little friends were all gone.
• Inside Macintosh. This was the Mac API documentation, originally in Pascal. A giant set of bound volumes, or available in electronic form. I think they were in HelpViewer or DocView format or something..
• Pascal strings. You still needed them for DebugStr and window titles and such. c2pstr() was often used.
• PlayMPEGInWindow(). I don’t remember if this was the exact function name, but peliom and I were trying to display MPEG video, and when we tried to see how QuickTime programmers did it, we found this function, and it cracked us up. So easy! When peliom and I both ended up working at Apple, we ended up working directly with the guy that wrote PlayMPEGInWindow(). Small world.
• System7 Pack. SpeedyFinder7. Greg’s Buttons. These were crazy programs that modified the system in crazy ways.
• Talking Moose.
• Hypercard. A programming environment that was way too easy to use. Kids could write awesome, fully-functional programs. It was obviously too powerful, and had to be killed off. One day I found out the guy who worked across the hall was the guy that wrote the HyperCard parser. I was in awe.
• MoreMasters(). You had to call this several times at app startup to allocate master pointers. Really.
• WaitNextEvent(). You had to call it in your stupid event loop. If you didn’t, no other apps would get scheduled on the CPU.
• The MultiFinder. WTF? Finder->Special->Set Startup->Start Up System with MULTIFINDER!!!
• The Chooser. Background Printing. AppleTalk. I never understood the Chooser.
• RAM Cache. Built right into the System 6 Control Panel.
• Command-I Get Info. Increase the Application memory size.
• Option+”About this Mac”. You can see the sun setting over the hills in Cupertino. When I worked at the lab with peliom, we made a video streaming app, and I rendered a 3D version of this scene using Bryce for our About Box. I wish I still had that around somewhere. When I got to Apple, I saw this same view out of my office every day.
  

Filed under: all talk, no code, old timers | 4 Comments
Tagged: codewarrior , dreams , hypercard , mac , macsbug , mpw