Though applications rarely are, I don't know if that was all that different back then either for most people.
It was. Another commenter mentioned ResEdit and being able to tinker with classic Mac applications. Two things were universally true back then:
1. In a pre-internet world, the entire application had to be hackable in some fashion, even if the application's creator tried to make that difficult.
2. Most parts of an application boiled down to simple text files, simple binary layouts or compiled source code. Obfuscation, encryption or even compression all cost CPU cycles which were often too previous of a resource.
As an example, Civilization stored much of its data in *.txt files you could edit in notepad to change the strength of units, etc...
The author's piece refers to the ability to inspect web documents to see how markup works. This is an order of magnitude harder to do in mobile apps often providing the same functionality.
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It was. Another commenter mentioned ResEdit and being able to tinker with classic Mac applications. Two things were universally true back then:
1. In a pre-internet world, the entire application had to be hackable in some fashion, even if the application's creator tried to make that difficult.
2. Most parts of an application boiled down to simple text files, simple binary layouts or compiled source code. Obfuscation, encryption or even compression all cost CPU cycles which were often too previous of a resource.
As an example, Civilization stored much of its data in *.txt files you could edit in notepad to change the strength of units, etc...
The author's piece refers to the ability to inspect web documents to see how markup works. This is an order of magnitude harder to do in mobile apps often providing the same functionality.