!Re: Nuke Redmond!

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Mon Apr 10 15:23:22 2000

It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated:
>
> >
> > "Charles P. Hobbs (SoCalTip)" <transit_at_lerctr.org> wrote:
> > > Or, in the early days of the Macintosh, the
> > > difficulty in getting technical manuals for the machine (indeed, at first,
> > > to find *any* books much more technical than "How to hold the mouse")...
> >
> > I strongly disagree. Apple did everything they could to court
> > developers for the Macintosh. If there wasn't a cheap book on
> > programming the Macintosh in the stores then, it was only because there
> > was such a large amount of technical information needed, and it wasn't
> > yet edited into a book suited for mass-market publication. It was *NOT*
> > because Apple was trying to restrict software development to an
> > annointed few; they'd tried that route on the Apple /// and failed
> > horribly.
>
> Admittedly I'm a hardware person, but IMHO the information that was
> printed in 'Inside Macintosh' is totally inadequate. At least compared to
> the information in the IBM Technical Reference manuals, and the
> information in DEC's manuals and ...

  That's the point, actually. They gave you enough information about the
software, but not the hardware. Reasoning behind that is so the programmer
only programs to the given API, not the hardware, so that Apple can change
the hardware.

  That's a major problem with the PC and one of the reasons why we were
stuck with legacy PC hardware for so long---programmers hit the hardware for
nearly every program written prior to Windows 3.0 coming out.

  It really depends upon what you want for information. Inside Macintosh is
a programmers manual, not an engineers manual.

  -spc (Which is probably why you don't like it)
Received on Mon Apr 10 2000 - 15:23:22 BST

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