Key bit is first came out. I don't think in 1984 there was any dev tools for the Mac or very little (MS Basic I guess?). Think C was released sometime in 1986. Mac software production at the time was done on Lisas in a kinda similar fashion to iOS and the Mac today.
The Mac first came out in January 1984. C barely existed on microcomputers in 1984. Microsoft's first C compiler came out in 1983.
The first question out of a knowledgeable user's mouth would not have been "Can I write C on it?" You would rightly have deserved hostile stares rather than blank looks.
More context: When Microsoft unveiled Windows, John Sculley threatened legal action against them for copying the "look and feel" of the Macintosh. Bill Gates responded by threatening to stop development of all Macintosh programs and not renew the license for Apple II Basic, so Apple backed down. As a part of the remediation process, Apple had to stop working on MacBasic and (more importantly) sign an agreement granting Microsoft a license to create derivative works of the Macintosh's GUI.
Aztec C was the first C compiler for the Mac I remember... I think it was 1985? It was self-hosted too, no Lisa required. But Think C (and Think Pascal) were the real game-changers for me.
The Mac 128K came out in, pretty sure, September of '84. I bought mine in November of '84. (School discount.)
The first development tool I had access to was a port of UCSD Pascal. This was old school, original, UCSD Pascal v2. Simply imagine UCSD Pascal with a Quickdraw extension (that is if you can actually imagine UCSD Pascal at all...). I spent an entire evening making a button.
Next, we managed to get the next generation of UCSD. A much more "Mac native" dev environment, full access to the toolbox. We tried to build a sample program on a single drive machine. After about 30+ floppy swaps, the build failed. We didn't try it after that.
I don't know if I ever really got access to MS-BASIC. To be honest, at this point I was too busy having fun building Car Wars design spreadsheets in Multiplan -- which was AMAZING. If you weren't there, it's hard to imagine the impact of the mouse on a spreadsheet. It was cool enough in a word processor, but on a spreadsheet? Whoo boy.
In short order, I bumped the machine up to 512K in a back alley in Pasadena, and got my hands on a 400K external drive. Now, my friends, we're cooking with gas.
Indeed, Aztec C was the first compiler I bought. It provided a "unix like" dev environment with a unixy shell with an assortment of utilities, vi for the editor. It was completely competent for writing C on the Mac, you had full access to the toolbox. You need the 512K and external drive to pull it off, but it worked fine. Honestly, you needed that configuration for most anything. In those days, you rebooted -- a lot. (Programmers switch ftw!)
I had the "Phone Book" Inside Macintosh as a reference. Later we drove up to a computer show in San Francisco, and Addison-Wesley had just released the hard cover version. $80!! I still bought it (this was a lot of money for me). I also bought a very cool multi-tasking Forth, who's name escapes me.
Appreciate that C development on, well, any contemporary micro computer was a nightmare. Everything was slow, everything was small. Hard drives were rare. The Mac was no speed demon, but it was faster than a PC. It was faster than a Z80. Most anyone doing any real work for any of these machines, was doing it on something else. I think Microsoft did everything on VAXes (obviously not everything, but core development).
I got the Apple Smalltalk in late '85. This was THE Smalltalk. Blue book Smalltalk. The Xerox image on an Apple VM. This is where Squeak came from. But it wasn't very usable on a 512K machine.
Think Pascal was the real game changer. A full boat "IDE" self hosted on the Mac. This was, effectively, the "Turbo Pascal" of the Macintosh. It was dreamy. The Interwebz says it came out in '86.
Nobody I knew was using the Lisa. Nobody had access to one. We were all Mac geeks, making do. It's hard to imagine doing anything with a 9" screen, but we did. Just adapted. Wrote code on it, wrote (and laid out) the user group newsletter on it. I did database work on a Mac Plus, using 4th Dimension. Made some very nice reports for a survey system.
Bonus of a 9" screen? We all took our Macs with us. We all had those padded Mac bags. I bungied mine to the back of my scooter. When our user group met in a pizza joint, it was invaded with Macs, and we still had room for the pizza. Oh, and can you say...AppleTalk?
Ooh, are you by any chance the "J Calhoun" who made Glider? If so, thank you for making such an awesome game that is such a strong memory of mine from those days! :) If not, well, you share the last name and first initial of a legendary (IMO) Mac game developer! haha
That's funny because the first playing around with a paper-airplane-floating-on-a-column-of-air I did was on a Commodore 64 using character graphics (that I hand-edited to look more like a paper airplane and floor vent).
When I got a Mac Plus and figured out how to draw sprites, I recalled that little Commodore exploration I had done years earlier.
