Top all-time · #2203
basalgangster.macgui.com
Personal blog · basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_Viewhistoryprogramming
basalgangster.macgui.com is a personal blog at basalgangster.macgui.com about 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.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 32 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link The Long View, Andy Hertzfeld's collection of histories of early Mac software, covering Photoshop, Object Pascal, MCL, A/UX and other Apple technologies, as background on classic computing.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called a 'great write-up' on building Photoshop from its source; called the site 'useful', and its history 'interesting context' and 'interesting'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 32 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Building Photoshop 1.07 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-03-31
- A/UX (2010)5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2014-09-04
- The Long View on Macintosh Common Lisp (2013)3 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2014-09-04
- The Long View: Warhol – A Brief History of Video Editing, QuickTime and Avid3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-11-05
- The Long View on MacApp: The Original App Framework for the Mac2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-29
- /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/6_Smalltalk-80.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-28
- TMON (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-23
- /RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2011/2/26_Copland.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-06-17
- Retro Mac Computing: MPW: The Long View (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-22
What Hacker News says?
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)”Submitted Building Photoshop 1.0 as a story · 159 points
HN discussionGreat 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)”Submitted Macintosh Y2020 as a story · 94 points
HN discussionSoftware 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”Submitted The Long View on Macintosh Common Lisp (2013) as a story · 54 points
HN discussionBorland 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)”Submitted TMON (2010) as a story · 13 points
HN discussionYou 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)”Submitted The Long View: Warhol – A Brief History of Video Editing, QuickTime and Avid as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNo 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”Submitted A/UX (2010) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI 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”Submitted Building Photoshop 1.1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHaven'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”Submitted MacApp, probably the first ever GUI programming framework to be distributed as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSure. - 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”Submitted Warhol (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere 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”Submitted Building Photoshop 1.1 (2013) as a story · 2 points
HN discussioni 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”Submitted The Long View on MacApp: The Original App Framework for the Mac as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> …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”Submitted Building Photoshop 1.1 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionApple 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]”Submitted A/UX – The Long View as a story · 2 points
HN discussionthis 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”Submitted Fixing Canvas (2010) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'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”Submitted The Long View “AppleTalk” (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
