[kabdib]

MPW was pretty neat, and I've not seen its equal since I left Apple. It's a simple concept, a shell-plus-screen-editor that lets you have both source code and commands in the same window, and the combination let you do things like put context-sensitive commands in project directories. A little like Jupyter, I suppose.

The NIH attitude of the team didn't help the toolset make inroads anywhere. MPW had its own take on Make and a bunch of other Unix-y tools. Basically it was a license to revisit a bunch of hoary, old (even then) utilities, sometimes improving them, sometimes striking out.

My lord, it was slow. It didn't help that the fastest I/O on a Mac back then was a 5Mhz SCSI bus hooked to spinning rust. Builds could take hours. The symbolic debugger was . . . interesting (okay, it was awful).

[I worked on a bunch of its tools, including the linker and some runtime stuff.]