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Andy Hertzfeld

Personal blog · basalgangster.macgui.comhistoryprogramming

Andy Hertzfeld's personal blog at basalgangster.macgui.com covers history and programming. Since 2012, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 58 times, most often “Building Photoshop 1.0”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.

No feed foundVisit the blog
58mentions?
34HN people?
2012–2025first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 8 in 2018

Most-linked posts?

  1. Building Photoshop 1.0
    7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-03-31
  2. A/UX – The Long View
    5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-09-04
  3. The Long View on Macintosh Common Lisp (2013)
    3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2014-09-04
  4. The Long View: Warhol – A Brief History of Video Editing, QuickTime and Avid
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-11-05
  5. TMON (2010)
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-23
  6. /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/2/26_Copland.html
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-17
  7. /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/6_Smalltalk-80.html
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-28
  8. Retro Mac Computing: MPW: The Long View (2010)
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-22
  9. The Long View on MacApp: The Original App Framework for the Mac
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-29

What Hacker News says?

  1. araes · 2024-05-16
    Suspicion based on some of the other articles is just somebody who's really an in-depth Apple user. Listens to folklore.org, notes in a couple articles that they appear to be on the outside and need to buy stuff just like everybody else. Some of the articles mention "awe" at how tiny the old Mac binaries were. May have been Apple tech support. In "The Standard File Package" [1] from Saturday, February 27, 2010: > It…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/2/20_Name_it_Scrapbook.html

    on “Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)”
  2. nglevin · 2013-03-31

    Submitted Building Photoshop 1.0 as a story · 159 points

    HN discussion
  3. butchlugrod · 2024-05-15
    Great write-up here about what it takes to build the app from this source code: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/3/30_Building_Photoshop.html

    on “Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)”
  4. zdw · 2020-04-18

    Submitted Macintosh Y2020 as a story · 94 points

    HN discussion
  5. rayiner · 2013-04-29
    Software development basically peaked in the mid 1980's. Macintosh Common Lisp circa 1987: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... , specifically: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... Firebug circa 2013: http://getfirebug.com/logging , specifically http://getfirebug.com/img/logging/consoleDir.png

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/2/17_Macintosh_Common_Lisp_files/inspect%20and%20describe.jpg

    on “How I coded in 1985”
  6. pjmlp · 2014-09-04

    Submitted The Long View on Macintosh Common Lisp (2013) as a story · 54 points

    HN discussion
  7. pjmlp · 2018-07-23
    Borland kind of killed it, literally. Object Pascal was originally developed by Apple and adopted by Borland into Turbo Pascal 5.5, which then started to adopt ideas from C++. In the PC world, Turbo Pascal was the king of Pascal dialects, for a Pascal compiler it was more relevant to be Turbo Pascal compatible than ISO Extended Pascal (the standard revision that fixed the issues with ISO Pascal). Borland switched fo…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/4/3_MPW.html

    on “Conflating pointers with arrays: C's biggest mistake? (2009)”
  8. todsacerdoti · 2021-05-02

    Submitted TMON (2010) as a story · 13 points

    HN discussion
  9. lproven · 2020-03-21
    You have most of the details right, but not in the right order. Yes, Apple looked at buying in an OS after Copland failed. But all the stuff about Carbon, Blue Box, Yellow Box, etc. -- all those were NeXT ideas after the merger. None of it was pre-planned. So, they bought NeXTstep, a very weird UNIX with a proprietary, PostScript-based GUI and a rich programming environment with tons of rich foundation classes, all…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/2/26_Copland.html

    on “A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)”
  10. aeontech · 2018-07-09

    Submitted The Long View: Warhol – A Brief History of Video Editing, QuickTime and Avid as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion
  11. pjmlp · 2016-12-29
    No they weren't. MS-DOS was written in Assembly, just like Word for MS-DOS. Word got rewritten in C when it was ported to Windows. EDIT: You can see early versions here http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-... And the Lisa OS and the early versions of Mac OS were written in a mix of Assembly and Object Pascal. http://www.folklore.org/ (Search for Pascal) http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMa…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/20_MacPascal_and_Think_Technologies.html

    on “Rust is more than safety”
  12. swatson741 · 2025-04-14

    Submitted A/UX (2010) as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  13. pjmlp · 2016-09-27
    I guess we were spoiled by being able to have seen such environments, back when it was common to pay for software tools. Even Macintosh Common Lisp would already have been a good experience. http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/2/17_Macintosh_Common_Lisp.html

    on “Racket – Lisp beyond Clojure”
  14. lelandfe · 2024-05-16

    Submitted Building Photoshop 1.1 as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  15. philwelch · 2012-06-17
    Haven't finished reading it myself, but here: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/2/26_Copland.html

    on “How Depressives Surf the Web”
  16. lproven · 2024-03-28

    Submitted MacApp, probably the first ever GUI programming framework to be distributed as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  17. pjmlp · 2019-06-30
    Sure. - MacOS (pre-OS X) "Revolution in the Valley" https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-Valley-Insanely-Great-Stor... http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... - NeXTSTEP / Mac OS X Debatable about non-C non-Unixy part, but it surely isn't the focus of the whole stack. "Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach" https://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Internals-Approach-paperback/d... http://www.nextop.de/NeX…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/The_Long_View.html

    on “Fuchsia Developers Website”
  18. Lammy · 2021-12-04

    Submitted Warhol (2013) as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  19. pjmlp · 2016-07-29
    Here is how it used to be back in the day on the Mac. http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... Allegro Common Lisp now has an express edition: http://franz.com/products/allegrocl/acl_ide.lhtml http://franz.com/downloads.lhtml Also for a bit of time travel, there are quite a few documents from Interlisp-D at Xerox PARC available: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox?and[]=subject%3A... O…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2013/2/17_Macintosh_Common_Lisp.html

    on “Unexecute”
  20. WoodenChair · 2021-08-26

    Submitted Building Photoshop 1.1 (2013) as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  21. kragen · 2024-09-07
    i would rather say that steve jobs's vision was to make the dynabook impossible; the central feature of the dynabook is that it is a tool for computational thinking for the masses, while the central feature of most of the designs of the projects jobs led (mac 128, imac, ipod, iphone, ipad—though not next) is that they're closed to the users, requiring special tools to open and modify that are only available to a cho…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/6_Smalltalk-80.html

    on “The PERQ Computer”
  22. Arathorn · 2020-09-19

    Submitted The Long View on MacApp: The Original App Framework for the Mac as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  23. mietek · 2018-12-03
    > …the opaqueness was not conducive to creating a culture of power users and "semi-developers" unlike the PCs of the time. Utter nonsense, as anyone who has ever used ResEdit can tell. http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... Also, extended file attributes are alive and well.

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/5/1_Resources_and_Resource_Editors.html

    on “Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU”
  24. Ivoah · 2020-04-24

    Submitted Building Photoshop 1.1 as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  25. pjmlp · 2017-09-08
    Apple switched away from Pascal due to UNIX market pressure. http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V... And it was mostly to C++, not C. Pascal is used daily for embedded system work by MikroElektronika customers using mikroPascal. https://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal/ Any embedded application using Ada's Ravenscar profile, is an OS.…

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/9/25_A_UX.html

    on “Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]”
  26. tambourine_man · 2019-12-26

    Submitted A/UX – The Long View as a story · 2 points

    HN discussion
  27. mistrial9 · 2018-03-23
    this post may supply [0] some context http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/27_TMON.html

    on “The making of Dark Castle”
  28. todsacerdoti · 2023-12-02

    Submitted Fixing Canvas (2010) as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion
  29. ayuvar · 2013-03-31
    I'm surprised I haven't seen this site before. As someone who cut his teeth on the early Mac it sure explains a lot. Not many people would write an entire blog entry about how the Mac's dynamic memory allocation worked: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

    Comment linking /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/1/22_MoreMasters%3B.html

    on “Building Photoshop 1.0”
  30. salgernon · 2015-02-08

    Submitted The Long View “AppleTalk” (2012) as a story · 1 points

    HN discussion

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