Apple Mac (was: !Re: Nuke Redmond!)

From: Charles P. Hobbs <transit_at_lerctr.org>
Date: Mon Apr 10 23:26:24 2000

On 10 Apr 2000, Eric Smith wrote:

> > Maybe not quite as bad as TI, although that $150 "developers club" affair
> > is pretty close (at least to me, who was a starving college student at the
> > time).
>
> Apple gave the Inside Macintosh stuff to pretty much any University or
> College that wanted it.


Oh, I'm sure the university I was going to (UC Santa Barbara) had multiple
copies--locked away in some consultant's office where we mere
peons...er...students couldn't get to it.

>
> It's easy for people to insist that documentation ought to be free, and
> you can make a better case for it today (with electronic distribution)
> than back in 1984, but the fact was that the $150 would barely have
> covered Apple's costs.
>
> For comparison, how much did a DEC Orange Wall (TM) of VMS documentation
> cost in 1984? I seriously doubt that DEC gave it away, and suspect that
> the complete set was *much* more than $150, but I don't recall hearing
> the same degree of grumbling about it.

Yeah, but DEC's were hardly "personal" computers at the time. In that
arena, one expected to pay substantially more than a PC owner for software
and docs...and DEC's customers (large organizations of one type or
another) could afford it and gladly(?) coughed it up...

>
> IMAO, anyone who wanted to write Mac software in 1984 and didn't because
> of a supposed lack of technical documentation was simply not sufficiently
> motivated. The docs were widely available.

At the time, I was more interested in writing simple programs and such
for the Mac, rather than tearing apart the machine and having every signal
on every pin documented. But the tools just weren't there (I didn't see,
for example, Microsoft BASIC for the MAC until mid-to-late 1985...) >
Received on Mon Apr 10 2000 - 23:26:24 BST