What do you mean by BBS?rasetsu wrote:Actually, I think games and the Apple II, and event driven programming are just as important.Gawdzilla Sama wrote:Without that spreadsheet program they might still be in the University basements.
Games, much like porn for VHS tapes, sell hardware. And the Apple II was the first true home computer, thanks to the elegant and cheap engineering of Woz.
(Though not much more; things like the p-system for programmers required expensive memory card add-ons.)
And while the IBM PC's interface was clumsy and computationally inelegant and resource unfriendly, the MacIntosh was user and programmer friendly.
That all changed with the MacIntosh which was event driven and had a graphical user interface.
Event driven programming allows for the development of complex, graphical interface programs relatively simply and quickly, as opposed to traditional polling or interrupt trapping. I have one of the last (had) toolkits for doing windowed development on the IBM PC when DOS was still the standard, and it was a royal clusterfuck. IBM PC didn't see comparable interface design until Windows 3.1 in 1992 (which, IIRC, added true type fonts over 3.0 and networking in 3.11 Wfwg) and Windows NT 3.51 an 4.0 in 1995/1996.
Wikipedia states that the MacIntosh was not a descendant of the Apple Lisa, which was a similar graphical interface product. This is not strictly true. The Lisa's operating system was coded almost completely in Pascal (this was the time for Wirth's 15 minutes of fame), and the MacIntosh project borrowed heavily on the code from the Lisa project, taking what high level code it could use, and taking the most common routines and recoding them in 68000 assembler. It was likely this latter effort which meant the most for the success of the MacIntosh, as while the Motorola 68000 is and was a powerful microprocessor for the time, the rather inefficient high level code of the Lisa meant that the interface was not as snappy, nor as powerful for the programmer as that of the MacIntosh. (I considered buying a Lisa and I adored the machine. Unfortunately they wanted $8,000 for it and I couldn't get them to shave a penny off it.)
(Minor story and a favorite bit of lore. When I started BBSing in '86, there were still plenty of Apple II's still in service, and most didn't do lower case. So for Citadel, my primary BBS software, there was a filter which would recognize all caps and convert it to proper capitalization. I don't know how it got the name, but it stuck: it was the bunny filter. I imagine the code is still around and could be adapted to atheist forums for reformatting the angry posts of Theists and Creationists.)
(I mean, I think I know, but I am puzzled).
