10 ms·

The Apple //e was the hacker-friendliest machine ever. It's probably the ideal learning platform for anyone looking to go into computer science, although perhap

The Apple //e was the hacker-friendliest machine ever. It's probably the ideal learning platform for anyone looking to go into computer science, although perhaps not app programming as a career, which requires a narrower skill set and more focus.

zwieback 13y ago
I was a die-hard Apple fan until the Mac came out, which felt like a betrayal to the original Wozniak-driven Apple philosophy. The PC, ironically, became the continuation of what Apple meant to me.
- analog31 13y ago
  I suspect that their experience with the //e influenced the decision to make the Mac a closed box. Like you, I found the PC to be a much more comfortable transition. Because the Apple ][ was a locked design, folks started poking directly into ROM and RAM locations, for instance directly manipulating system variables, or even jumping into the middle of ROM subroutines. A book called "What's Where in the Apple II" documented almost every known hook. My mom had that book. She's my hacker role model. As a result of the way that software interacted, it became virtually impossible for Apple to update the ROMs without breaking popular apps. The next generation of personal computers all represented different approaches to avoiding this problem by providing well documented entry points while offering no guarantee of long term code stability. IBM made one mistake: They let people hard code the address of video RAM, which is what led to the legendary 640k barrier.
  - antics 13y ago
    Is this sort of anti-hack mentality one of the reasons why, in some versions of ProDOS, there was a conscious decision to omit the assembler, and to encourage programmers to use BASIC? (Our version, in this article, for example, had no assembler; only BASIC and the monitor program.)
    - lscharen 13y ago
      There is always the mini-assembler assuming you have the enhanced ROM //e. ] CALL-151 * ! ! 300: LDA 1000 http://support.apple.com/kb/TA39083?viewlocale=en_US http://support.apple.com/kb/TA39083?viewlocale=en_US
      - antics 13y ago
        I don't have the Apple //e in front of me, but I remember this not being present on our version of ProDOS.
        guessedaccess 13y ago
        The mini assembler was built into the ROM of all enhanced //e's
        nwp90 13y ago
        Mini-assembler was in all II, II+ and //e. II had Integer Basic, II+ and //e had Applesoft. Can't remember which ones had SWEET16 though. May also be "all of them". If all you want is LISP, burn it into an EPROM and replace the stock one.
        zwieback 13y ago
        I think Sweet 16 was with Integer Basic. My II+ didn't have it but I could get it by loading Integer Basic into the language card.
        rbanffy 13y ago
        It was absent from the II+ due to the larger Applesoft BASIC interpreter. If you had a "Language Card" (a 16K expansion that brought the machine to 64K) you could load Integer BASIC on the card and use the assembler.
        rumbler 13y ago
        Also in the original II and II Plus. On those older models, I think you need to type "F666G" at the monitor prompt to get to the mini-assembler. The "!" command was implemented in the enhanced IIe ROM.
  - msvan 13y ago
    Your mom was a hacker? I'm jealous.
    - analog31 13y ago
      My mom was a high school teacher in a small rural district with a Ford plant. In the early 80's, she took a couple of programming classes as a hedge against possible layoff, and ended up starting a class at her school. She paid for the computers out of her own pocket, and class met before the regular school day. It should be noted that during this time period, outside of a few affluent districts, virtually all teaching of programming at the K-12 level was done on an ad hoc basis by teachers who volunteered their time and money. Edit: Not "was" a hacker but "is" a hacker. ;-)
  - antitrust 13y ago
    I wish they'd taken a middle path. Having BASIC (or another language) built into the machine was a big plus and encouraged people to see continuity between the OS, the hardware and the code. If that BASIC had to use built-in functions and data-types instead of simply POKE-ing and PEEKING-ing as a de facto interface with the underlying machine code, that would still have been hacker-friendly without being inflexible. It was such a weird relationship between desktop machines and UNIXes back then. It's like the desktop designers had to re-learn the lessons of UNIX in the small. So much was forgotten.
    - analog31 13y ago
      I agree. In my view, the "walled garden" of iOS is just the next step in what Apple had already intended to establish for the original Mac. To be charitable, I can imagine it being based on the idea of protecting the user from Bad Software. But lots of us wanted to write Bad Software such as little programs for our own use, or for limited, specialized use by other people. I found the Mac programming docs (Inside Mac) to be impenetrable, and the overhead for writing Hello World enormous. Then I fell in love with HyperCard. But we all know what happened to that.
      - antitrust 13y ago
        > In my view, the "walled garden" of iOS is just the next step in what Apple had already intended to establish for the original Mac. I imagine this is a quandary that shows up not in computing, but anywhere that users interact with a single source of definitive rules. For example, it might be easier for government to erect certain walled gardens... or for companies to do this with their employees, parents with their kids, etc. It's not that I don't understand their position or view it as probably the best way to herd cats (I mean, "consumers"). But hacker-friendliness is what gets you the top echelon of users drifting toward your hardware and software. As a result, it's a huge (but invisible) business draw.
- antitrust 13y ago
  This was my experience exactly. I loved the open Apple //, even though it had limited growth potential. I found the Macintosh to be confining (and still do, although more in an interface design sense now).
- rumbler 13y ago
  Same here. I went from an Apple IIe to a Macintosh SE. It was a nice computer for typing high school papers on (yay PageMaker 1.0), and the GUI of System 5 was beautiful on the little black-and-white screen. There was some hacking involving fonts, inits, and ResEdit, but despite despite getting a C compiler and a few books, I never was comfortable programming on it, and always felt like there was something missing. Two years later I got a '386 clone, bought Turbo C and all the fun came back at once.
Vivtek 13y ago
It certainly worked for me.

zwieback 13y ago

I was a die-hard Apple fan until the Mac came out, which felt like a betrayal to the original Wozniak-driven Apple philosophy. The PC, ironically, became the continuation of what Apple meant to me.

analog31 13y ago
I suspect that their experience with the //e influenced the decision to make the Mac a closed box. Like you, I found the PC to be a much more comfortable transition. Because the Apple ][ was a locked design, folks started poking directly into ROM and RAM locations, for instance directly manipulating system variables, or even jumping into the middle of ROM subroutines. A book called "What's Where in the Apple II" documented almost every known hook. My mom had that book. She's my hacker role model. As a result of the way that software interacted, it became virtually impossible for Apple to update the ROMs without breaking popular apps. The next generation of personal computers all represented different approaches to avoiding this problem by providing well documented entry points while offering no guarantee of long term code stability. IBM made one mistake: They let people hard code the address of video RAM, which is what led to the legendary 640k barrier.
- antics 13y ago
  Is this sort of anti-hack mentality one of the reasons why, in some versions of ProDOS, there was a conscious decision to omit the assembler, and to encourage programmers to use BASIC? (Our version, in this article, for example, had no assembler; only BASIC and the monitor program.)
  - lscharen 13y ago
    There is always the mini-assembler assuming you have the enhanced ROM //e. ] CALL-151 * ! ! 300: LDA 1000 http://support.apple.com/kb/TA39083?viewlocale=en_US http://support.apple.com/kb/TA39083?viewlocale=en_US
    - antics 13y ago
      I don't have the Apple //e in front of me, but I remember this not being present on our version of ProDOS.
      - guessedaccess 13y ago
        The mini assembler was built into the ROM of all enhanced //e's
        nwp90 13y ago
        Mini-assembler was in all II, II+ and //e. II had Integer Basic, II+ and //e had Applesoft. Can't remember which ones had SWEET16 though. May also be "all of them". If all you want is LISP, burn it into an EPROM and replace the stock one.
        zwieback 13y ago
        I think Sweet 16 was with Integer Basic. My II+ didn't have it but I could get it by loading Integer Basic into the language card.
        rbanffy 13y ago
        It was absent from the II+ due to the larger Applesoft BASIC interpreter. If you had a "Language Card" (a 16K expansion that brought the machine to 64K) you could load Integer BASIC on the card and use the assembler.
        rumbler 13y ago
        Also in the original II and II Plus. On those older models, I think you need to type "F666G" at the monitor prompt to get to the mini-assembler. The "!" command was implemented in the enhanced IIe ROM.
- msvan 13y ago
  Your mom was a hacker? I'm jealous.
  - analog31 13y ago
    My mom was a high school teacher in a small rural district with a Ford plant. In the early 80's, she took a couple of programming classes as a hedge against possible layoff, and ended up starting a class at her school. She paid for the computers out of her own pocket, and class met before the regular school day. It should be noted that during this time period, outside of a few affluent districts, virtually all teaching of programming at the K-12 level was done on an ad hoc basis by teachers who volunteered their time and money. Edit: Not "was" a hacker but "is" a hacker. ;-)
- antitrust 13y ago
  I wish they'd taken a middle path. Having BASIC (or another language) built into the machine was a big plus and encouraged people to see continuity between the OS, the hardware and the code. If that BASIC had to use built-in functions and data-types instead of simply POKE-ing and PEEKING-ing as a de facto interface with the underlying machine code, that would still have been hacker-friendly without being inflexible. It was such a weird relationship between desktop machines and UNIXes back then. It's like the desktop designers had to re-learn the lessons of UNIX in the small. So much was forgotten.
  - analog31 13y ago
    I agree. In my view, the "walled garden" of iOS is just the next step in what Apple had already intended to establish for the original Mac. To be charitable, I can imagine it being based on the idea of protecting the user from Bad Software. But lots of us wanted to write Bad Software such as little programs for our own use, or for limited, specialized use by other people. I found the Mac programming docs (Inside Mac) to be impenetrable, and the overhead for writing Hello World enormous. Then I fell in love with HyperCard. But we all know what happened to that.
    - antitrust 13y ago
      > In my view, the "walled garden" of iOS is just the next step in what Apple had already intended to establish for the original Mac. I imagine this is a quandary that shows up not in computing, but anywhere that users interact with a single source of definitive rules. For example, it might be easier for government to erect certain walled gardens... or for companies to do this with their employees, parents with their kids, etc. It's not that I don't understand their position or view it as probably the best way to herd cats (I mean, "consumers"). But hacker-friendliness is what gets you the top echelon of users drifting toward your hardware and software. As a result, it's a huge (but invisible) business draw.
antitrust 13y ago
This was my experience exactly. I loved the open Apple //, even though it had limited growth potential. I found the Macintosh to be confining (and still do, although more in an interface design sense now).
rumbler 13y ago
Same here. I went from an Apple IIe to a Macintosh SE. It was a nice computer for typing high school papers on (yay PageMaker 1.0), and the GUI of System 5 was beautiful on the little black-and-white screen. There was some hacking involving fonts, inits, and ResEdit, but despite despite getting a C compiler and a few books, I never was comfortable programming on it, and always felt like there was something missing. Two years later I got a '386 clone, bought Turbo C and all the fun came back at once.

Vivtek 13y ago

It certainly worked for me.