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?