I can confirm this regarding Mac development. I was part of the team that built FullPaint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FullPaint) back in 1985. We had just a few Lisas to work with, and they were considered sacred.
Testing code required copying it onto a floppy disk and popping it into a Mac. We probably would have been a lot more productive if any of us had ever heard the words "unit test". (We were a young team, everyone in their early 20s or even late teens.)
Oh, how I wish I could've been involved in the halcyon days of the computer industry. I'm sure it's all rosey looking from the perspective of someone who wasn't there, but the scrappy young development teams, humble small organizations, mail-order software, and general naive optimism of the preceding era seems like it was so much fun. Probably very challenging, and I'm sure frustrating, but I can only imagine the satisfaction of having worked on the Macintosh and breaking so much new ground.
I was born in time to experience the internet when it was a lot more fun and experimental, which I definitely am grateful for. I hope there are more "moments" like this in the future, though I can't help but feel they're mostly over when it comes to computers and technology. Things just can't stay scrappy and experimental forever.
It was pretty rosey for me, even with all the challenges, emotions and anxiety. I have experienced similar challenges, emotions and anxiety in jobs that were much less satisfying.
I think the moments are out there still; you just have to seek them out. I wouldn't say working on Apple ][, Lisa, early Mac or other early PC efforts were as obvious and groundbreaking as they seem now. I think about a lot of parallel efforts going on at the time that I wish I could go back in a time machine to work on: Symbolics Workstations, early Wavefront/Alias software, Self, Smalltalk, Dylan and other languages that didn't become mainstream.
There is so much out there that isn't over in computers and technology. It might be helpful to think about things that seem impossible, crazy and totally economically unviable. Sometimes we can let finding markets, solving scaleable problems and generating 10x returns for our investors cloud our vision.
How did you all at Ann Arbor (I assume) get into Mac development? Did you have Lisa versions of software and decided to move to Mac? Did Mike Boich or Guy Kawasaki convince you to start developing? I am always interested at what makes someone decided to pour resources into a new platform. I have done it more than once myself and it is usually very high risk.
I don't think we ever developed any software targeted at the Lisa (or if we did, it was in the brief period before I joined). We were always developing for the Mac, initially cross-compiling from Lisa.
We did move to Mac-based development after not too long. I have zero memory of why/how that happened, but I'm sure it was clear even at the time that the Mac was the more sustainable long-term platform (also the Lisas were insanely expensive). Still, for a while there it was a real stretch to squeeze a reasonable dev environment into Mac hardware. I remember – and this feels insane as I'm typing it, but it happened – at some point we actually paid someone to fab an add-on circuit board that we somehow glommed into our Macs (these were probably 512KB or 1MB models, I can't remember) that doubled the RAM size. The additional RAM couldn't be used for normal applications, it somehow manifested as a RAM drive. We had one RAM drive in the add-on memory, a second RAM drive partitioned from the standard motherboard memory, and the rest of the standard memory was used to run dev tools and/or the application under test. Putting all of the source code into a RAM drive was necessary to make the development experience tolerable (I can't remember whether the concern was source code navigation, build times, or both... EDIT now that I think about it, it might have been the object code rather than the source code that needed to be on the RAM drive; or perhaps both).
In the mid-late 1980s we compiled and tested Amiga software on the Amiga entirely from RAM drives using rather expensive 2 MB RAM add ons, and then stored the updated source code on 3.5" floppy disks that had to be rotated out regularly because they regularly went bad.
Only towards the end of the 1980s were hard drives inexpensive enough to become commonplace. My first 65 MB drive cost $949 (ca 1989), and that is why we were using floppies and RAM drives instead. The RAM drives did survive reboots and crashes most of the time, which helped quite a bit as you may imagine.
Fun story, development of Digital Research's CP/M68k and GEMDOS/GEM GUI on the 68k was also done on the Apple Lisa (and I think some VME 68k boxes from Motorola?). So, a competitor to the Mac (albeit not a successful one) developed on the Lisa, too.
And in fact, fun people have gotten GEM/GEMDOS to boot and run again on Lisa emulators and real Lisas.
Comments
I see assembly and pascal files. According to this[0] article, the development was done on Apple II's and Mac development was done on Lisa!
[0] https://macgui.com/news/article.php?t=518
I can confirm this regarding Mac development. I was part of the team that built FullPaint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FullPaint) back in 1985. We had just a few Lisas to work with, and they were considered sacred.
Testing code required copying it onto a floppy disk and popping it into a Mac. We probably would have been a lot more productive if any of us had ever heard the words "unit test". (We were a young team, everyone in their early 20s or even late teens.)
Oh, how I wish I could've been involved in the halcyon days of the computer industry. I'm sure it's all rosey looking from the perspective of someone who wasn't there, but the scrappy young development teams, humble small organizations, mail-order software, and general naive optimism of the preceding era seems like it was so much fun. Probably very challenging, and I'm sure frustrating, but I can only imagine the satisfaction of having worked on the Macintosh and breaking so much new ground.
I was born in time to experience the internet when it was a lot more fun and experimental, which I definitely am grateful for. I hope there are more "moments" like this in the future, though I can't help but feel they're mostly over when it comes to computers and technology. Things just can't stay scrappy and experimental forever.
It was pretty rosey for me, even with all the challenges, emotions and anxiety. I have experienced similar challenges, emotions and anxiety in jobs that were much less satisfying.
I think the moments are out there still; you just have to seek them out. I wouldn't say working on Apple ][, Lisa, early Mac or other early PC efforts were as obvious and groundbreaking as they seem now. I think about a lot of parallel efforts going on at the time that I wish I could go back in a time machine to work on: Symbolics Workstations, early Wavefront/Alias software, Self, Smalltalk, Dylan and other languages that didn't become mainstream.
There is so much out there that isn't over in computers and technology. It might be helpful to think about things that seem impossible, crazy and totally economically unviable. Sometimes we can let finding markets, solving scaleable problems and generating 10x returns for our investors cloud our vision.
If you haven't read Masters of Doom before, I highly recommend it! Your comment reminded me of it.
How did you all at Ann Arbor (I assume) get into Mac development? Did you have Lisa versions of software and decided to move to Mac? Did Mike Boich or Guy Kawasaki convince you to start developing? I am always interested at what makes someone decided to pour resources into a new platform. I have done it more than once myself and it is usually very high risk.
I don't think we ever developed any software targeted at the Lisa (or if we did, it was in the brief period before I joined). We were always developing for the Mac, initially cross-compiling from Lisa.
We did move to Mac-based development after not too long. I have zero memory of why/how that happened, but I'm sure it was clear even at the time that the Mac was the more sustainable long-term platform (also the Lisas were insanely expensive). Still, for a while there it was a real stretch to squeeze a reasonable dev environment into Mac hardware. I remember – and this feels insane as I'm typing it, but it happened – at some point we actually paid someone to fab an add-on circuit board that we somehow glommed into our Macs (these were probably 512KB or 1MB models, I can't remember) that doubled the RAM size. The additional RAM couldn't be used for normal applications, it somehow manifested as a RAM drive. We had one RAM drive in the add-on memory, a second RAM drive partitioned from the standard motherboard memory, and the rest of the standard memory was used to run dev tools and/or the application under test. Putting all of the source code into a RAM drive was necessary to make the development experience tolerable (I can't remember whether the concern was source code navigation, build times, or both... EDIT now that I think about it, it might have been the object code rather than the source code that needed to be on the RAM drive; or perhaps both).
Different times...
In the mid-late 1980s we compiled and tested Amiga software on the Amiga entirely from RAM drives using rather expensive 2 MB RAM add ons, and then stored the updated source code on 3.5" floppy disks that had to be rotated out regularly because they regularly went bad.
Only towards the end of the 1980s were hard drives inexpensive enough to become commonplace. My first 65 MB drive cost $949 (ca 1989), and that is why we were using floppies and RAM drives instead. The RAM drives did survive reboots and crashes most of the time, which helped quite a bit as you may imagine.
Fun story, development of Digital Research's CP/M68k and GEMDOS/GEM GUI on the 68k was also done on the Apple Lisa (and I think some VME 68k boxes from Motorola?). So, a competitor to the Mac (albeit not a successful one) developed on the Lisa, too.
And in fact, fun people have gotten GEM/GEMDOS to boot and run again on Lisa emulators and real Lisas.
Computer archeology.