|
|
|
|
|
|
by snewman
1247 days ago
|
|
|
I don't think we ever developed any software targeted at the Lisa (or if we did, it was in the brief period before I joined). We were always developing for the Mac, initially cross-compiling from Lisa. We did move to Mac-based development after not too long. I have zero memory of why/how that happened, but I'm sure it was clear even at the time that the Mac was the more sustainable long-term platform (also the Lisas were insanely expensive). Still, for a while there it was a real stretch to squeeze a reasonable dev environment into Mac hardware. I remember – and this feels insane as I'm typing it, but it happened – at some point we actually paid someone to fab an add-on circuit board that we somehow glommed into our Macs (these were probably 512KB or 1MB models, I can't remember) that doubled the RAM size. The additional RAM couldn't be used for normal applications, it somehow manifested as a RAM drive. We had one RAM drive in the add-on memory, a second RAM drive partitioned from the standard motherboard memory, and the rest of the standard memory was used to run dev tools and/or the application under test. Putting all of the source code into a RAM drive was necessary to make the development experience tolerable (I can't remember whether the concern was source code navigation, build times, or both... EDIT now that I think about it, it might have been the object code rather than the source code that needed to be on the RAM drive; or perhaps both). Different times... |
|
|
Only towards the end of the 1980s were hard drives inexpensive enough to become commonplace. My first 65 MB drive cost $949 (ca 1989), and that is why we were using floppies and RAM drives instead. The RAM drives did survive reboots and crashes most of the time, which helped quite a bit as you may imagine.