[watersb]

MPW is the Macintosh Programmer's Workbench.

I had forgotten about these.

I think my first real push with MPW was using it as an environment to host the AT&T C++ compiler, which at that time was still a bunch of preprocessor macros written by Bjarne himself.

[JKCalhoun]

I was introduced to MPW when I started at Apple in 1995. I started on Quickdraw GX (if anyone remembers that).

Not specifically related to MPW, more about the times, a clean compile of the Quickdraw GX framework took something like eight hours. (Fortunately incremental builds were much quicker.) Nonetheless, it was common to kick off a clean build as you were leaving the office for the night.

Funny to think about that compiler compiling all night as I had dinner, watched a little cable TV, got some sleep....

[kabdib]

The Mac you compiled that on likely had a 5Mhz (yes, FIVE MEGAHERTZ) SCSI bus for its disk I/O. And none of the headers had "#pragma once" . . .

Was QuickDraw GX also known as Skia, perhaps earlier in its life?

[mwcremer]

Skia was the graphics part. The printing part was “El Kabong” (Quick Draw McGraw’s alter ego.)

[mistrial9]

I was a cfront beta site using MPW; for people that don't know, that was the self-compiling C++ from C, before the first AT&T C++ compiler, in the late 1980s.

[rjsw]

Cfront was from AT&T, it compiled C++ to C. I had the source to Cfront 1.2, which was before multiple inheritance was added to the language.

[mistrial9]

I agree and we are saying the same thing. There was no C++ compiler, the C++ language was processed by cfront, similar to the preprocessor and include compile phase. AT&T supplied cfront. The language spec was changing. I wrote applications with it, not checking "language lawyer" syntax problems. I wrote general feedback on performance, and things that would make the language practical. It is hard to describe those days, but concepts of object-oriented programming were new to many people, and I was quite interested in building actual applications. The linker was the common linker for multiple other languages, like gcc today.

[scroot]

I booted up MPW in an emulator last year to check it out. Definitely a unique experience. Very cool.