[biturd]

I feel being a staunch Mac user from the beginning has been detrimental to me. My first computer was a commodore 64, which I typed the programs out of the book into the terminal and it made balls move around on the screen and such. But I was really young, and no one was there to catch me, so I never thought to fiddle with it, I thought it was like a set of instructions and you had to follow them. I did not yet understand creativity at that age.

I then later, many years later, was given a Mac Plus. I could use BBS software to chat, but remember thinking, it is very hard to even type a conversation back and forth to a user elsewhere with a modem. There really was no software for it, or if there was, it was hard to find or even know about.

How did you know to learn C and then get a compiler? And how did you afford the software to develop back then? Wasn't code warrior around several thousand?

[jamestnz]

Wow, your history matches mine quite closely (manually typing BASIC programs into the C64 whilst not really "getting it", then going on to the Classic Mac OS and onto BBSes). I first got into the Mac around System 6 with a Mac 512Ke, then onto a Plus and other machines from there... remember hacking at apps with ResEdit?

Also keep in mind that the standard language for the classic Mac was originally Pascal[1], not C.

In addition to Metrowerks CodeWarrior (which I also recall being pricey), there was also the Borland TurboC++ family. And starting from around System 7 there was MPW from Apple[2], which targeted a number of languages and was eventually free.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Workshop

[chc]

Well, I was talking about OS X, which was released around 2000, probably much later than your Mac Plus days. OS X included a whole Unixy environment and shipped the Developer Tools (GCC + the precursor to Xcode) on a second CD. I had already done some programming before that, though, in Mac game-making software (World Builder and Adventure Simulator), and with JavaScript on the Web, but the ability to really program my computer with Objective-C and Cocoa was amazing.

There was also a free development environment by Apple for OS 8 (maybe earlier, I don't know) called MPW. I think it was originally a paid product, but Apple ended up just giving MPW away because everybody used CodeWarrior. But I found it difficult to use and didn't get much further than some basic C lessons I found somewhere on the Internet. All the more advanced stuff I found wouldn't work (I think it was probably targeted at Windows or Unix, but all I knew at the time was that MPW couldn't compile it).

[gaius]

CodeWarrior academic was much, much cheaper.