[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).