How the Mac was born... supposedly...

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Wed Jan 12 16:41:35 2005

Peter wrote:
> One thing that doesn't ring true for me is when he says the not one line
> of code was taken from Xerox. I was involved in a project to make a LAB
> interface (A-D/D-A I/O bits) for the first (128K) MAC. The earliest
> development software was full of Xerox copyright notices...

I was also an early Mac developer, back when you had to use a Lisa to
develop for the Mac. I don't recall seeing any Xerox copyright notices.
If there were only a few I could believe I might have overlooked some,
but I don't think it could have been "full of" such notices.

The Pascal compiler had a copyright notice from the company that wrote
it, but other than that most of the notices said "Apple Computer".

The only thing I remember with Xerox notices was the Smalltalk-80
port.

It would have been really difficult for Apple's engineers to use any
code from Xerox even if they'd wanted to do so. The Xerox code was
mostly written in BCPL, Mesa, and Smalltalk, and Apple didn't have
compilers for those (though they did port Smalltalk, which was
incredibly slow on the Mac). The Mac code was written in a little bit
of Pascal and a whole lot of 68K assembly.

Eric
Received on Wed Jan 12 2005 - 16:41:35 GMT