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by dietrichepp
639 days ago
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I’ve been going back and working on retro development. These days, making software for the 68K Macintosh, which is where I learned to program in the first place. I dug a lot through old books, comp.sys.mac.programmer posts, and the source code from Soft Dorothy and others (like the GliderPro source). It’s a trip seeing this old code through new eyes. I can see why the old Macs crashed so much (beyond the basic “they had no memory protection” explanation). I’m also fond of the 1-bit art, like the author mentions, and I curate a list of accounts on Twitter which post 1-but artwork (if you know anybody who’s missing from the list, let me know): https://twitter.com/i/lists/1578111923324944397 The nice thing about programming for a limited system is that it limits your options. It’s a nice break from the more modern experience where you can do anything by pulling in the right library. I sometimes imagine a world where computational power is frozen, and we simple get better and better software for systems that are well-understood. The thing about these old systems like the Mac 68K machines is that the pace of hardware development was so fast it made you dizzy. If a new processor came out like the 68020 or 80386, then you had maybe a couple years at most to make something that really used it to its full potential. If you waited too long, you’d be competing against a new generation of software written for a new generation of hardware. |
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Never mind making wrapper functions for dealing with Handles and such.
To your point though, wow, how much simpler the Toolbox was compared to a modern OS. It does indeed feel fun to try some retro development again.