Macintosh

Once I returned from Japan, I set out to find a way to integrate my computer with some kind of electronic musical instrument. Prior to going to Japan I had bought an ARP Odyssey synthesizer. That device did not have any way of connecting it to a computer. When I went shopping I had in mind to get something that would allow the computer itself to synthesize sounds. But, I was told, the thing to do was buy a synthesizer with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). So I did: I bought a Casio synthesizer, as well as a Yamaha digital piano. Both devices supported MIDI. I then bought a MIDI expansion card for my PC clone and some software.

 

I remember complaining to the store where I bought all this, that the quality of the software was not very good. They told me that if I wanted the best software, I should do what professional musicians were all doing: I should buy a Macintosh.

 

I had looked at the idea of buying a Macintosh while I was still in Japan; there was an Apple store in Tokyo. But they had told me that in order to write programs for the Macintosh I would have to buy a Lisa, a much more expensive machine, so I gave up the whole idea.

 

The reason the original Macintosh didn’t support program development was that it didn’t have enough memory. Apple eventually realized that the amount of memory was too limiting for a number of applications and came out with the “fat MAC” and later the Macintosh Plus.

 

While still in Japan my wife and I had decided to have a second child. A little more than a year after our return, Sarah was born. My wife is Chinese and by Chinese tradition we had a one-month birthday party for Sarah. One of the people who was invited to the party told me that he had a used Mac Plus he was willing to sell. I bought it.

 

 

I bought a C compiler from Think C, which was later acquired by Symantec. It was the first IDE I had worked on.

 

The problem with programming the Macintosh was, to quote a friend, “you code and code and code and code, and then you code and code some more.” It was very tedious and low-level. It was therefore not possible to write a “quick and dirty” program using the Macintosh GUI interface.

 

Because the C language has a set of character I/O routines (gets, printf, etc., etc.) Think C did also. So it was possible to write character-mode programs for the Mac, although this was very un-Maclike.

 

The guy who originally sold me the Mac told me about a C++ object-oriented framework that Apple had produced. He said it made it much easier to write GUI applications. He was very enthused about it and about object-oriented programming in general.

 

The problem was that Apple wanted a royalty payment for every copy of a program that was distributed. Since I was writing Macintosh software as a hobby, I wanted to give away copies, not sell them. But I would have to pay Apple for each copy of each program I gave away. So I never used the object-oriented framework.