[snorkel]

What really turned developers away from Apple after the Apple II was not only the price but that you couldn’t sit down at a Macintosh and start programming it like you could with an Apple II. You couldn’t really do that sitting in front of a PC either unless you were happy with GW BASiC, or you bought a Borland compiler, but at least there were less obstructions in your path if you wanted to develop a PC application versus an Apple application. The Macintosh felt like a locked down black box, like you bought a car with the hood welded shut. Overall, PCs were just much more accommodating to developers than the Apple products until Steve Jobs came back and switched everything over to UNIX-based operating system.

[joezydeco]

HyperCard should have been that system. I really wonder what the Mac would have been like in the 90s if every machine had that in ROM, ready to go. The web would probably have been a bit different.

[robterrell]

You might find the story of MacBasic interesting: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Apple intended to ship the Mac with a programming language, a really nice threaded and graphical Basic, but Bill Gates put the squeeze on them.

[bux93]

No need for a borland compiler, just type your assembly right into debug.exe!