12 Oct
2019
12 Oct
'19
4:42 a.m.
For a contrast in aha moments, consider this introduction to
an early Apple (Apple II, I think).
When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to
make "Hello world".
I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends
on what you're editing.
So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program
is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking.
I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than
the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor
produced files of some type other than C program.
After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded.
Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual.
The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that
set up their own windows.
Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers.
And that didn't change until OS X.
Doug
12 Oct
12 Oct
6:12 a.m.
New subject: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?
On Oct 11, 2019, at 9:42 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers.
And that didn't change until OS X.
Well, the II kinda was. Not by the time of the //gs, which, if you were writing C, was
probably the one you were using. By then it had a windowing system and complications.
And then the Mac, prior to OS X, yeah, not intended for the end user to be a software
developer.
But the II/II+/IIe were all straightforward machines. As long as you wanted to write
BASIC or 6502 assembly they were reasonably programmer-friendly (I say, as someone who
couldn’t afford Merlin, the real assembler of the day, at that point, and did his assembly
by hand, so, yeah, maybe not THAT friendly). Once you learned what the zero page
addresses were for in the particular OS/ROM BASIC you were running, it was a pretty
intelligible system.
….and now having done a little googling, there was indeed an Aztec C for Apple II DOS 3.3
in 1982. If that was what you were using, well, yep, looks like you had to use its
editor, but the sample program (slightly more complex than “Hello world") looks
pretty much like it would have in any other C (interestingly, no #include <stdio.h>
needed):
main(argc, argv)
int argc;
char *argv[];
{
register int i = 1;
printf("Program <%s> has %d arguments\n", argv[0], argc-l);
while (--argc) {
printf("Arg %d = <%s>\n", i, argv[i]);
i++;
}
}
So I’m guessing you were using something for the //gs plus GS/OS.
Adam
10:05 a.m.
New subject: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Doug McIlroy wrote:
For a contrast in aha moments, consider this
introduction to
an early Apple (Apple II, I think).
When my wife got one, my natural curiosity led me to try to
make "Hello world".
I asked her what to use as an editor and learned it all depends
on what you're editing.
So I looked in the manual. First thing you do to make a C program
is to set up a "project", as if it was a corporate undertaking.
I found it easier to write a program in some other editor than
the one for C. Bad idea. Every file had a type and that editor
produced files of some type other than C program.
After succumbing to the Apple straitjacket, I succeeded.
Then I found "Hello world" given as an example in the manual.
The code took up almost a page; real men make programs that
set up their own windows.
Aha, Apple! Not intended for programmers.
And that didn't change until OS X.
Doug
That sounds like Macintosh rather than Apple ][.
-uso.
2:26 p.m.
New subject: What was your "Aha, Unix!" moment?
On Sat, 12 Oct 2019, Doug McIlroy wrote:
For me Unix felt like something that took the best parts of MS-DOS (which
I was very familiar with) and improved on them - plus I knew / as a path
separator from ProDOS on the Apple ][ (you can probably see where I'm
going) ;p.
I later learned that this was because MS-DOS, while it was growing out of
its "CP/M clone" phase, had pinched a lot of things from Unix and so this
similarity was not a coincidence. But what MS-DOS has to fumble around
with and pretend to do, Unix actually *did*.
Not to mention, it had, like the Apple ][ and unlike MS-DOS, a single
environment that combined a command shell and a programming language.
Plus the network transparency.
It was the best of both worlds.
-uso.
Random: One of my laptops' Windows 10 install ate itself due to a bum
update a couple days ago. I had left Windows on it when I got it because
I'd heard that the company's laptops that were not in a specific product
line would not run Linux properly. Actually, it was no problem at all, so
it's running Debian now. I also have a broken laptop that runs Debian
headless. I know it's not the real thing, but it'll suffice me. ;p
That sounds
like Macintosh rather than Apple ][.
You are right. My error. I might add that OS X was
afforded a different kind of "Aha, Unix!" moment.
Doug
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