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The richest company in the world (Apple) makes products that are only intended for a very small percentage of even a wealthy nation's population

I'm not sure that's accurate. You're thinking MacBook and iPad, but let's think iPhone and iPod.

I only have a few minutes, but I found this: http://www.mactech.com/content/study-looks-demographics-iphone-ipod-touch-users

Most iPhone users only have an income of >25k, Since the US median is 60k, that means that the iPhone is sold to basically everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

I'm not trying to be a pedantic jerk, but I think this article and comment thread touches on a VERY important issue and I want to make sure we have all the facts right so we can analyze it.

In chronological order looking forward:

MacTech Boot Camps - http://www.mactech.com/bootcam...
Small, local, inexpensive. Check to see if there's one close to you.

MacTech Conference - http://www.mactech.com/confere...
Larger, both sysadmin and developer tracks

MacIT - http://www.macitconf.com/
Larger, multiple tracks and levels of knowledge

WWDC - https://developer.apple.com/ww...
The granddaddy of them all, but next to impossible to get into these days. Mostly developer focused. May not be useful if you don't already have a deep knowledge base.

MacAdmins - http://macadmins.psu.edu/
The most education-focused of the conferences. Very knowledgeable presenters.

FWIW, I've been a presenter at MacTech Boot Camps, MacIT, and WWDC.

--Paul

In chronological order looking forward:

MacTech Boot Camps - http://www.mactech.com/bootcam...
Small, local, inexpensive. Check to see if there's one close to you.

MacTech Conference - http://www.mactech.com/confere...
Larger, both sysadmin and developer tracks

MacIT - http://www.macitconf.com/
Larger, multiple tracks and levels of knowledge

WWDC - https://developer.apple.com/ww...
The granddaddy of them all, but next to impossible to get into these days. Mostly developer focused. May not be useful if you don't already have a deep knowledge base.

MacAdmins - http://macadmins.psu.edu/
The most education-focused of the conferences. Very knowledgeable presenters.

FWIW, I've been a presenter at MacTech Boot Camps, MacIT, and WWDC.

--Paul

Online copy of the article: http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_05/6-30_Chesley_Docv9_CHG.html.

You're wrong.

The code is written in pure JavaScript. So it's not a Java applet.

Don't feel too bad, though: It's a common error.

"Netscape originally invented a simple scripting language called LiveScript, which was to be a proprietary add-on to HTML. When Sun's new language Java became unexpectedly popular, Netscape was quick to jump on the Java bandwagon, and re-christened their scripting language JavaScript. Outside of the first four letters, there are almost no other similarities between the two."

You're comparing "applets" and oranges.

Apple did add support via InputSprocket, which enabled games to use multiple buttons (among other things), but InputSprocket was generally used only by games. Right-click support wasn't available in the Finder or most other applications without the use of third-party drivers prior to Mac OS X. Mouse manufacturers usually either provided their own Mac drivers (Logitech did this), or simply offered USB Overdrive (Microsoft did this).

Here's a forum thread with somebody asking about it.

MacTech is Apple-oriented, obviously, and has been around since 1984 as either MacTech or MacTutor magazine. I believe they still sell a compendium DVD that reaches back into the mists of time, handy if you end up with an old Mac you'd like to hack on.

As someone else pointed out, the classic Circuit Cellar is still around.

As someone who read the legendary Inside Macintosh (1983 draft; I still have it) cover to cover before even touching a Mac (some time around 1985), I don't understand this contention that the original Mac was "closed" to developers. The *case* was not easy to open, but the programmer model was not locked up in any real way. Almost from the beginning, Apple offered assembler- and compiler-level toolsets. Initially these were Lisa-hosted, simply because the Mac porting hadn't been done yet. I personally used Macintosh Development System (1984) and Whitesmiths C in the very beginning, before reverting to Pascal for a while, using powerful toolchains such as TML and Lightspeed Pascal. Consulair C was available in 1985.

From the first moment, third party developer tools sprang up like kudzu around the original Mac, most of them cutting edge in some way. Many innovative development technologies were pioneered on the Mac: interpreted Pascal with a sophisticated GUI (Mac Pascal), Object Pascal and MVC systems (MacApp), Neon, 4GLs, incremental compilers (Lightspeed/THINK/Symantec C), etc. Does anyone even remember that in the 80s, Apple pushed out several full releases of their own Mac Smalltalk-80 system, which Squeak is now based on? (Harvey Alcabes, I remember you.)

And few now remember that the Lisa itself, despite appearances better described as a "minicomputer" than micro, ran about six different operating systems, including UCSD P-system and XENIX, and had several full-fledged language systems from Object Pascal through COBOL and Fortran.

As someone who read the legendary Inside Macintosh (1983 draft; I still have it) cover to cover before even touching a Mac (some time around 1985), I don't understand this contention that the original Mac was "closed" to developers. The *case* was not easy to open, but the programmer model was not locked up in any real way. Almost from the beginning, Apple offered assembler- and compiler-level toolsets. Initially these were Lisa-hosted, simply because the Mac porting hadn't been done yet. I personally used Macintosh Development System (1984) and Whitesmiths C in the very beginning, before reverting to Pascal for a while, using powerful toolchains such as TML and Lightspeed Pascal. Consulair C was available in 1985.

From the first moment, third party developer tools sprang up like kudzu around the original Mac, most of them cutting edge in some way. Many innovative development technologies were pioneered on the Mac: interpreted Pascal with a sophisticated GUI (Mac Pascal), Object Pascal and MVC systems (MacApp), Neon, 4GLs, incremental compilers (Lightspeed/THINK/Symantec C), etc. Does anyone even remember that in the 80s, Apple pushed out several full releases of their own Mac Smalltalk-80 system, which Squeak is now based on? (Harvey Alcabes, I remember you.)

And few now remember that the Lisa itself, despite appearances better described as a "minicomputer" than micro, ran about six different operating systems, including UCSD P-system and XENIX, and had several full-fledged language systems from Object Pascal through COBOL and Fortran.

Lots of links about it here.

They even had a contest for the best modern program that could run on the "Baby" Mark 1. The computer had 32 words of 32 bits each and had only 6 instructions stored in 3 bits: STOre, SUBtract, LoaDNegative, JuMP, Jump Relative/JRP, CoMPare/conditional branch, and SToP.

The contest winner was nothing more than a countdown timer. I'd guess that it won for out-of-the-box thinking in the presentation: The instructions were: Load program into memory. Pour hot water into pot noodles. Press start button. Wait for end-of-program light to light up. Enjoy noodles. Ignore output.

Damn ... you caught us! (Love the IIS comment). Actually, the banner ad system got crushed by SlashDot. Once we took OpenAds out of the picture, all went well. Try it again now. http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.04/VMBenchmarks/

Unfortunately, the problem was the banner server. OpenAds got crushed by SlashDot. Once we figured that out ... all was fine. Try the article again now. http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.25/25.04/VMBenchmarks/

Just get the result spreadsheet from ftp://ftp.mactech.com/src/mactech/volume25_2009/25.04-VM_Benchmarks-Best_Results.zip

"I think the first paragraph of Section 10, if thus paraphrased, would be an excellent introduction to the GPLv3. However unfortunately it is not worded quite how you worded it"

Well, that's lawyers for you, always use ten words where the one would suffice. Maybe someone should write an app to perform Lexical Analysis on it ...

"nobody now remembers who introduced the small waved underlines .. tutorialized tasks .. the ribbon"

WordPerfect highlights poor grammar or incorrect word usage with a wavy blue underline

Apple Guide Isn't Help

tabbed toolbars or the Component palette as it was called in Delphi

MacTech Labs (part of MacTech Magazine) has done a number of benchmarks that were very mainstream in the past year -- including most recently Parallels vs. Boot Camp vs. VMware Fusion, and Office 2008. In designing each of these, we went out of our way to figure out how to make them "real world". In other words, not only to only test the things that most users would do ... but also to measure them in a way that users perceive. One way that we do that is to do the testing with stopwatches. Because, if it's not long enough to see with a stopwatch, it's certainly not long enough for a user to perceive. This has worked well ... and avoids the issue of getting erroneous timings as mentioned in other posts here.

MacTech Labs (part of MacTech Magazine) has done a number of benchmarks that were very mainstream in the past year -- including most recently Parallels vs. Boot Camp vs. VMware Fusion, and Office 2008. In designing each of these, we went out of our way to figure out how to make them "real world". In other words, not only to only test the things that most users would do ... but also to measure them in a way that users perceive. One way that we do that is to do the testing with stopwatches. Because, if it's not long enough to see with a stopwatch, it's certainly not long enough for a user to perceive. This has worked well ... and avoids the issue of getting erroneous timings as mentioned in other posts here.

MacTech Labs (part of MacTech Magazine) has done a number of benchmarks that were very mainstream in the past year -- including most recently Parallels vs. Boot Camp vs. VMware Fusion, and Office 2008. In designing each of these, we went out of our way to figure out how to make them "real world". In other words, not only to only test the things that most users would do ... but also to measure them in a way that users perceive. One way that we do that is to do the testing with stopwatches. Because, if it's not long enough to see with a stopwatch, it's certainly not long enough for a user to perceive. This has worked well ... and avoids the issue of getting erroneous timings as mentioned in other posts here.

I saw it in lots of reviews - the charging stick: http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.19/19.11/Toys/index.html

"A recent product has been the AIBO Recognition stick which will allow AIBO to recharge itself when it needs power by going over to the charging station (sold separately) and sit down to charge. When AIBO is charged, it will get up and wander around as normal. The new ERS-7 robots are taking the AIBO concept further and include extra sensors (electro-static sensors that do not require pushing in), more LEDs, pattern recognition and the ability to pick up a small bone with its mouth."

Basically, BootCamp doesn't do anything special -- it just makes it easier. The CD of drivers is useful, but the drive partitioning can be done in a variety of ways. We wrote an article in MacTech Magazine over a year ago about how to set up your computer to triple boot that would useful for those recovering here as well (e.g., needing to recreate the volumes). http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.22/22.11/TripleBoot/index.html Hope that helps, Neil

"Borland's Pascal is the only one of these with delegates and built in OOP support."

It is far from being the only, or indeed the first one with built in OOP support. Apple were the pioneers here with Clascal for the Lisa, which they developed into Object Pascal in consultation with Niklaus Wirth. The language was used to write MacApp, Apple's OO application framework for the Macintosh, which shipped with Object Pascal in 1986 as part of the Macinstosh Programmer's Workbench; Borland's Mac Turbo Pascal included a similar but less elegant set of OO extensions that were subsequently added to their DOS compiler in 1989. This old (1985) article in MacTech discusses Object Pascal:

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/ObjectPascal/

Note the alleged output of ls -af (= ls --april --fool...):

-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 744576 Apr 1 15:21 mach_krn

Eran cheerfully edited Apr to Jul -- buying this hook, line and sinker, and now he whines that he was joking and misunderstood...

Some people are saying that this article is from April Fool's day, but the exact date isn't in the article anywhere.

However, one thing you can determine is that the article was written in 2004! See http://www.mactech.com/articles/, and look at 'volume 20 - 2004'. That, plus 'copyright 2004' in the source code clips kind of give it away...

And it's volume 20, issue 4, which hints at April, but doesn't prove it.

Someone else pointed out the 'ls -af' command has got to be an 'April Fool' clue too. All I know is that I've reformatted my FAT partition enough times that any hidden files have long been destroyed, but my ipod keeps on working.

I think they're confused, anyway -- they're writers, not programmers. I bet I can even guess how they did their research: they called up all the recruiters they could find and asked each one to list the languages he/she thought were dead or dying. Then they compared notes on all the responses they got, and built their final list.

I think the list should be called "top 10 languages recruiters don't want to hear about" because that would be more accurate.

Realistically, as far as C goes I think the following factors should be considered before declaring it a dead language:

1. Most of the more popular object oriented languages (Java, C#, C++) use C syntax. C++ is a superset of C.

2. Java can use compiled C modules as an analog to C's old "escape to assembler" technique. In other words, you can call C code from Java when you have something you want to get "close to the metal" on. Thus, a "Java Programmer" may very well ALSO be a C programmer, even if technically that isn't on his resume or job description. I can do this; I imagine most other Java programmers can as well. What's funny is that, once you're calling C code, you can turn around and use the C code to call assembler, Fortran, or whatever else you like! What a weird world this is!

(Links for the skeptical):
http://www.csharp.com/javacfort.html (Ironic that it's on a CSharp site, no?)
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13. 09/CallingCCodefromJava/index.html
http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/Progr amming/JDCBook/jniexamp.html

3. Linux is still written in C, I believe. As are its drivers, KDE-related programs, Gnome-related programs, and whatnot.

4. C is the modern version of assembler, isn't it?

ANYway, I don't think C's going anywhere. You might not be able to get PAID for doing it, as your main speciality will probably be something more buzzword-heavy, but you'll probably be doing some of it as a part of whatever other weird and mysterious things you do in the ITU.

Poor journalists... One suspects they're rather easily confused these days.

The parent post very nicely explains things, and contributes to more sleepless nights for me. As described by the parent post, software patents are indeed a hopeless situation.

The parent notes that prior art may be irrelevant, but here are some possibilities anyway.
ARINC Specification 661-2 Cockpit Display System Interfaces to User Systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARINC_661
NeXT/Apple Web Objects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13. 05/WebObjectsOverview/index.html
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-05-199 6/swol-05-cs.html
http://www.byte.com/art/9609/sec9/art1.htm
NexT/Apple Interface Builder

> Apple has had this for years with Interface Builder

Apple has had many interface builders over the years. The MacApp framework (originally created for Lisa application development) has used a binary view format since 1986. There have been at least three view editors used for editing MacApp view resources; ViewEdit, AdLib and IcePick. ViewEdit was released with MacApp 2.0 in 1986. IcePick was first released in Nov 1991. AdLib was first released in Nov 1992 .

--
Author of IcePick

> Apple has had this for years with Interface Builder

Apple has had many interface builders over the years. The MacApp framework (originally created for Lisa application development) has used a binary view format since 1986. There have been at least three view editors used for editing MacApp view resources; ViewEdit, AdLib and IcePick. ViewEdit was released with MacApp 2.0 in 1986. IcePick was first released in Nov 1991. AdLib was first released in Nov 1992 .

--
Author of IcePick

> Apple has had this for years with Interface Builder

Apple has had many interface builders over the years. The MacApp framework (originally created for Lisa application development) has used a binary view format since 1986. There have been at least three view editors used for editing MacApp view resources; ViewEdit, AdLib and IcePick. ViewEdit was released with MacApp 2.0 in 1986. IcePick was first released in Nov 1991. AdLib was first released in Nov 1992 .

--
Author of IcePick

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.20/20. 02/PICMicrocontroller/index.html

http://polarfront.org/archives/000537.html

http://blog.paddlefish.net/archives/2004/12/usb_pi ckit_tool.html

http://robrohan.com/projects/PIConOSX/

http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/22/011123 8

http://www.teammojo.org/PICkit/pickit1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPUTILS

http://lawlor.cs.uaf.edu/~olawlor/projects/2003/mi crochip/

http://www.gnupic.org/

Actually, apple had a 3d graphic accelerator card (a real gpu) out in 1995 and it was all the rave at the '95 siggraph. it was based on the now defunct quickdraw 3d infactthe first all 3d no 2d sprites game was programmed for it it was called "weekend warrior" if memory serves... anyway apple axed it with the return of jobs i think ~1999-2000

also you might wanna check out quesa, it would translate highlevel qd3d instructions to opengl..

intresting history there indeed... heres a fun article for old times sake...

http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_24/t ruffles.html

-Simon

It actually looks a bit like Prograph. I was lucky enough to be able to write a few programs in Prograph when I was in school...would have been nice to have a tutorial way back then.

They forgot a few.

Remember Dylan?

Remember OpenDoc?

Apple //gs? Macintosh TV? eMate? Oh -- the KING of all Apple failures... Apple III?

I think that new sound system they introduced is a dud as well, but maybe the Cult of Mac will buy some.

I think if it would help if he read some background on these types of tools;

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14. 06/VersionControlAndTheDeveloper/

Apple wrote a great 68K emulator for the PowerPC macs. It was non JIT, and worked like a big jump table. So you took a 16bit 68k instruction, shifted it and jumped to the base of the table + the shifted offset. The code there would essentially be a PowerPC version of the 68K code.

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.10/10. 09/Emulation/

So you end up doing four instructions to decode the 68K instruction, and then whatever it takes to actually do the operation, typically 2-4.

JIT emulators would profile the code and check which bits were frequently executed. Then they would essentially copy the table entries into a buffer. So in a loop, you'd actually execute native just execute the 2-4 native instructions and skip the table dispatch.
There's another benefit too, you can skip things like condition code updates, if you know that they will be overwritten by another instruction before they are checked. Plus you can do peephole optimisations, constant folding and so on.

There's a wonderful article here -

http://www.gtoal.com/sbt/

I can easily believe that CPU intensive code like image processing can run at a very impressive speed, especially as top of the range x86 chips have better SpecInt perormance than a top of the range PPC.

Incidentally, I read about Apple's second generation 68K emulator being a "dynamic recompiler", so they've been working on this sort of thing for ages.

Apple has neglected or actively discouraged game developers over a long period of time -- starting with a refusal to produce a joystick standard (so there is still no standard joystick interface after 20 years)

Under the Classic Mac OS, Apple had I calledGame Sprockets. It wasn't perfect. Many Mac game companies used it.

While that plan was folly for Apple, it worked out pretty well for third market folks. Back in 1986, I was working at an independent Mac repair shop in La Mirada called "Computer Quick" that could upgrade a 128K to 512K or even (gasp!) 2 Megabytes.

I absolutely hated the 512K jobs. First, you would take a pair of cutters and cut the 16 64K x 1 bit RAM chips off the board, leaving the pins in place and usually making a mess of the thing. Next, you'd use a desoldering iron (we had an industrial grade one with a pump, thankfully. None of this squeeze bulb garbage, thank heavens) to remove the pins and clean out the holes. Inevitably, you'd wind up pulling up a trace or shorting something out here, so you had to inspect it very carefully. Finally, you'd solder the new chips (128K x 1 bit) in and solder in a thumb sized daughter board that would handle all the address line magic. Then power it up and keep your fingers crossed for "Happy Mac" to show his face.

In comparison, the 2 Meg upgrades were a piece of cake. We used daughter boards called "Monster Macs" from a San Diego company named Levco. Since there was no expansion slot, you'd cut the 68000 out and add a socket. Then the daughter board (which had its own 68000) clipped right on top, neat as can be. Levco also had a controller board that could clip on top of that for SCSI hard drives - a "grandaughter" board.

When we had accumlated a stack of clipped 68000 chips, we'd file off the edges and drill a couple of holes to make keychains. Very cool. I had mine for a decade before it got stolen. Only worked on the plastic cased chips, though. The ceramics would crack.

Levco was known for a pretty cool sense of humor. When you powered the thing up, "Happy Mac" had fangs (since they'd had to hack the Mac ROMS to make it work anyways). Also, there were four PALs on the board labeled Harpo, Chico, Groucho, and Zeppo. My boss told me some of the Levco engineers had wanted to name "Zeppo" "Karl" but he'd warned their management about the fallout this might've caused. Remember, the Berlin Wall was still up and Reagan was in office.

I know that these days a megabyte seems absolutely trivial, but back then it was an absolute phenomenon. You simply never heard the term "Megabyte" except with hard drives and even that was a pretty new thing. Kind of like gigabyte drives a few years back. And its utility was beyond question - Levco let slip that Apple's finance department in Cuppertino used Monster Macs for their accounting.

Alas, all good things come to an end. Computer Quick's was surface mount technology in the Mac Plus. I was ecstatic the first time I saw SIM memory - no more soldering! Our chief tech tried to fix a trace on the logic board and it took him twelve hours once he got done repairing the damage he'd caused. He handed it over to our boss and told him, "That's it. We're out of business."

I enrolled in a four year school and decided to go into software instead of continuing as a tech as I'd originally planned. Computer Quick was out of business by my sophmore year. The era of garage based computer businesses was over.

you have to write them in C/C++ theres a realbasic plug in sdk avaliable to download here

theres a dated plug in writing example here which'll give you a rough idea of how it all works, RB plug-ins are only platform specific if you use platform specific code, if you use active x for example, it becomes a windows specific plug-in.

Adobe used the Quorum Latitude Macintosh application porting libraries to port Photoshop to Unix and X-Windows.

The result of using a complex Mac emulation library that mapped quirky Mac toolbox calls onto the byzantine X-Windows graphics model and shoddy Motif/X Toolkit API was an absolutely horrible, ugly, buggy, unusable version of Photoshop. I could quickly cause it to core dump with three clicks of the magnifying glass tool.

Here is a case study of porting Adobe Photoshop to Windows and Unix. It describes some of the reasons Adobe decided to use the Macapp emulation approach for Unix, instead of properly rewriting their code to be platform independent.

Quorum had been around for a while. When I started porting SimCity to Unix in 1991, I evaluated Quarum Latitude, and decided that it was not worth using because my goal was to make a better version of SimCity than the one that ran on the Mac, not a crippled one. For example, I implemented multi-player support via multiple X11 connections to different servers at once, which would have been impossible if the program though it was running on a Macintosh.

-Don

I guess thats just Apple marketing crap then?

What as opposed to any other companies marketing crap .. hmm.

All G4/G5 processors have something called Altivec aka Velocity Engine which is a 128-bit vector processing unit. Photoshop filters being composed of matrix calculations are ideally suited to being computed using the Altivec unit on Macs and the equivalent SSE/SSE2 on x86.

Its just that Altivec spanks SSE/SSE2 quite a bit that Macs have a supposed performance advantage.

Delta Tao has a game "Clan Lord" in which they try to solve this problem with digital karma. Basically, every character has karma points that they can spend on others, marking them with good or bad karma.

http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_29/v etneo.html

I don't play that game, so I don't know the consequences of having a lot of bad karma. I do know, at least, that you're marked in others' user lists.

Wiebetech had a Firewire Keychain flash firewire drive back in 2002.

Check it out:

• Firewire Keychain Review
• Firewire Keychain
• Wiebetech Announced Firewire Keychain
• WiebeTECH 1GB FireWire KeyChain review

This took me back to 1994, when SGI and MS ponied up for full page Wintel spreads in all the Mac-oriented trade rags, MacWeek in particular. Now, for the publishers of MacWeek/World/User, etc, ad dollars are ad dollars, and it didn't really matter if the net result is that a percentage of readers end up on Wintel systems. After all, the motherships all published Wintel (and other) rags in the same offices.

An exception was MacTutor (now MacTech), a Dr. Dobbs-like magazine for developers on the MacOS, and the sole product of the then publisher. Around about 1995, Microsoft placed a number of two page spreads advertising seminars, workshops, and tool kits for developers to migrate to Windows. One could argue that Mac developers were headed that way in any case, and MacTutor might as well suck up ad dollars what ever the source on their way down the toliet. However, that the premier - hell, only - Mac technical journal would host a series of such ads couldn't help but speed MacTutor's only customers out the door.

In the end, ads are propaganda, and if the message they contain doesn't jibe with the editorial goals of the publication, then the owner that runs them is exposed as strictly a whore to Mammon, and their "editorial stance" a sham. At least when I flip through Harper's Bazaar in a waiting room, I already know that their sole purpose is to shill for the ad clients. Giving me wood is just a side effect.

Well, there are two binary formats in Mac OS X: Mach-O (from NeXTSTEP) and CFM (Carbon). Mac OS 9, released in '99, ended support for 68K processors. The only way 68K code is handled now is emulation in the Classic Environment. According to this article CFM was designed specifically for PPC, so I would doubt that there is anything specific to 68K registers in CFM binaries. There was a CFM-68K backport to allow compatibility with 68K Macs, but that is also long-gone.

You might find some more useful info in this article as well.

It was expensive, didn't have the simplicity of HTML as a starting point and, perhaps, was a little ahead of its time. (Client/Server was still catching on.) The fact that few mainframe guys liked Macs may have been a factor, too.

Links:

"The only problem with the MacworkStation [a software program] is that instead of making it a public domain standard, Apple is licensing the source code for $1500 to 'interested' parties" - MacTech Magazine archived article

Apple Computer History Weblog

Apple had someone working for them who went by Bo3b Johnson, although the 3 was silent. He wrote for develop magazine, as I recall. For example, see here and here.

I know Jaguar is wonderful, but darn it, I was just getting good at PowerPlant. Oh well.

i seem to recall something about logic gates or some sort of logic being built out of matchboxes and beans. it played tictactoe, deciding the best move by plopping out a bean of a certain colour? i can remember neither the details nor the source.

I've seen it in a book by Martin Gardner, the game was called Hexapawn. A quick search on google should turn up more details.

Here's their explanation of the matchbox version of the game:

Gardner's machine is implemented as a set of 24 matchboxes, one for each possible board position when it is Black's move. Each matchbox has pasted on it a drawing showing this board position, as well as all possible moves from that position, drawn in different colors. Inside each matchbox are several colored beads, one for each move on the top. When it is the machine's turn to move, the human operator finds the matchbox showing the current position, draws a bead at random from the matchbox, replaces it, and makes the move thus chosen. The machine learns from its losses: when it loses, the operator removes and discards the last bead drawn. This ensures that the machine will never lose in this way again.

To keep this on topic: this game could be implemented with a water computer, too. Replace the matchboxes with different colored buckets of water. Instead of removing a bead for a loss, dump out the corresponding bucket.

For a more enjoyable game, replace the buckets of water with shots of beer. =)

Technically, Clarus is a she, not a he. In an interview, the author of Apple's Technote 31 said, "She's a female, as are all cows; males would be referred to as dogbulls, but none exist because there are already bulldogs, and God doesn't like to have naming problems." (Interview here)

Not to be too flamey, but crap, themes deserve to be dead. What a waste of resources having to keep all that stuff working. I used Gizmo and HiTech themes that were to come with Copland. They were fun for five minutes, then I happily went back to Platinum. Why? Because it was better. It was well-designed. I don't use my computer because of UI gee-whizzness. I use it because it works in a logical, sensible fashion. I trust the well-paid UI and industrial designers a lot more than I trust Marvin in his parents' basement.