The Long View
The Long View
Computer versus Information Appliance
We weren’t originally supposed to program the Macintosh. Apple’s idea was that serious computer professionals were supposed to buy a Lisa, and that all Macintosh software would be created on that machine. The Mac was for your mom. It should run software you create using a Lisa. This vision was the correct one, it was just ahead of its time. We see it happening now. Most computer users today wouldn’t dream of programming their machines, and don’t care whether programming tools are available for it. Mac programming tools are great but most users never install them. The iPhone and iPad are execute-only devices. They are truly information appliances. Programs are created on more expensive machines, designed for programming. But at the time the Mac was released this hadn’t happened yet. Yes, there was an army of business users running Lotus 1,2,3 on their PCs under DOS, fearful that something might happen that would take them out of 1,2,3 and make them see their computer as a computer. But most users weren’t like that yet, and this was especially true for Apple customers.
There was a great (for the times) Lisa programming environment, and tools for writing a compiled program along with a copy of the Mac operating system on a Mac-compatible disk were provided. There was also a very cool debugging system, in which a program running on a Mac could be debugged on a Lisa over a serial line. This worked for Apple, and for other big software houses of the period who could afford it. But lots of other people wanted to write software for the Mac. Many of them could barely afford to buy a mac (about $2500 in 1984), much less a Lisa (about $5,500 with hard disk). And ironically, the Lisa was not really a user-programmable machine itself. Apple intended to ultimately make their full suite of Lisa programming tools available to outside programmers, but for some reason it was delayed. You could program a Mac on a Lisa, but you didn’t have the tools to make a real Lisa 7/7 style program on a Lisa. I think that Apple wanted to dominate the software business on the Lisa, not for profit, but to insure (and control) the quality of the user experience (sound familiar?).
But to hell with that. The software explosion that followed the Mac’s introduction wasn’t powered by Apple, or even by the big software houses like Microsoft or Lotus. Most of the great programs created during that time were written by individuals, often high school or college students writing code in their spare time. The now-powerful giant application Photoshop was was written by Thomas Knoll, a University of Michigan PhD student in his spare time, and this was the norm, not the exception. The groundbreaking debugger TMON was written by Waldemar Horwat when he was just 15 years old. The programs that made the Mac successful didn’t come from the big corporate developers wearing Mac t-shirts that Steve lined up for a photo-op at the announcement. They came from amateur developers and were published on a shoestring by startup publishing companies, most of which did not survive. The Lisa Workshop could never have been the development system for that. And a lot of the best stuff was done when people creatively deviated from Apple’s view of good software design. Apple is a tasteful company that puts a premium on the user experience. We respect them for that, but they don’t always know what is best, and they don’t have a monopoly on good design.
But in this case Apple’s response was exactly right. They quickly released an assembly language development system that could make programs on the mac. To do this they reached out to a third party, William S. Duvall. Duvall was already experienced at making programming tools for the 68000 processor, and he put together a simple but elegant system consisting of an Editor, Assembler, Linker, a batch processor to automate builds, and object level debugger. Of course, most of the famous programs that made the mac were not created this way, but this proved that Apple would not dogmatically stick to their information appliance view of the Macintosh. All kinds of programmers would be able to contribute to the Mac phenomenon. It energized everyone.
I think there was a similar, and similarly delayed, recognition that programming the iPhone should not be solely a corporate activity. Jailbreaking convinced Apple that they could not suppress the creativity of programmers, and they would have to settle for less control. And again they benefited by this wise decision. Although iPhone programming remains very controlled by Apple (and there’s a lot of complaining), the App Store phenomenon is in some ways a replay of the software explosion that occurred on the Mac in the 1980’s. Most people may be content to just use the information appliance, but there are also a lot who still think it is a computer and want to create something wonderful with it.
-- BG (basalgangster@macGUI.com)
Saturday, February 6, 2010