Important! Some very interesting things about the Black and White Macintosh family:
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QuickDraw is one of the first drawing routine libraries to use region clipping.
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QuickDraw used custom microcode of the MC68000 microprocessor to achieve its speed.
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The Computer History Museum interview contained lots of explanations about particular shortcomings in the decisions made in the early Macintosh user interface. Some of them were made solely for a world where very few people actually had experience using a computer graphical user interface. Others had long since become artifacts of widespread graphical user interfaces despite their suboptimalities.
- Scroll bar at the right? That was for the sake of the placement of the sizing box, to avoid accidentally clicking the window iconify button.
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The menus were originally located at the top of windows, but then relocated to the top of the screen for the Macintosh. This was seen as advantageous given the small screen size. Yes, for larger screens, menus attached to the windows does make more sense.
- In order to use use with this setup, pointer acceleration was also implemented in the Macintosh.
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Changing the cursor to the current tool in MacPaint was of course viewed as essential given the modal nature of the program, which only made sense for its use case.
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Photo scanning for digital photos was done very early on with the Apple II as an enthusiast effort.
** Bill Atkinson’s wife always wondered why he wanted to take a perfectly nice photo and create a not-so-nice-looking approximation of it. For a very long time, he had no answer to this question. But now, with the ubiquity of digital photography, the answer is obvious. Because it was the future of photogrpahy, digital photography.
Yes, indeed X11 didn’t come onto the scene until well after the Macintosh was already released. Even X1 didn’t come on until afterward. The Lisa and Macintosh projects were already well in development before the X Windowing System even started development. Not to mention they were much more beautiful in design and usable for inexperienced computer users.
Other interesting questions answered.
- Why was the Macintosh programmed in Pascal? Pascal was basically the first reasonably high-level programming system for the Apple II. Variable scoping, that was the most important advantage over the Integer/Applesoft BASIC. So that’s why. All the work in porting to the 6502 was already done by UCSD, only the BIOS needed to be written to glue that programming platform into the Apple II. The earliest Macintosh software was cross developed. First the Lisa was cross developed from an Apple II, then the Macintosh was cross-developed from the Lisa.
20171202/DuckDuckGo macpaint quickdraw source code donald knuth
20171202/http://computerhistory.org/atchm/macpaint-and-quickdraw-source-code/
20171202/http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658007
So where is the video interview? I’d like to see those select photos. It must be around somewhere, just not linked directly from the transcript landing page.
This is the backstory behind getting the source code publicly released. Importantly, the technical work on getting the source code to modern computers was all quickly finished in the year 2004, the same year that there was the 20th anniversary celebration where Donald Knuth was in attendance and requested the MacPaint/Quickdraw source code, but in order to get through legal at Apple, they had to dilly-dally around for 6 years until finally Andy Hertzfeld met personally with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and the request then went through almost immediately.
20200517/https://www.macworld.com/article/1152817/macpaint.html
20171202/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
20171202/https://www.folklore.org/
20171202/https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I%27ll_Be_Your_Best_Friend.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date
20171202/https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Well_See_About_That.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date
20171202/https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Scrooge_McDuck.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date
20171202/https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Moustache.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date
20171202/https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Good_Earth.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date