Donn Denman, who joined the early Mac team at Apple in 1982 with the task of building a BASIC programming language interpreter for the new computer, feels that today’s Macs are not all that different from the ones built 20 years ago, but thinks we’ll see a lot of changes in the next 20 years. Read the interview at MacMinute.
Donn Denman: Apple is Getting ‘More Connected’
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“Hey [Steve], I got over the MacBASIC thing, OK?” Denman says. (More on MacBASIC in a moment.)
Why would Donn be upset in the first place?
After the Mac shipped, Denman helped finish a beta of MacBASIC; however, changing market conditions as well as the appearance of a BASIC interpreter from Microsoft caused the product to disappear without ever reaching release.
And why would Apple use Microsoft’s BASIC instead of their own for both the Apple ][ and Mac?
Is it true?
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=MacBas…
[…] in what probably was the single worst deal in Apple’s history […]
Keyword: perpetual
“Why would Donn be upset in the first place? ”
The one he wrote got replaced.
“And why would Apple use Microsoft’s BASIC instead of their own for both the Apple ][ and Mac?”
Microsoft had already finished one that had floating point calculation support. Remember, back then Microsoft was mainly writing languages and not operating systems. They later had to keep the Microsoft one to keep compatibility with all their old applications. It was a short term fix for a symptom, but it didn’t fix the real problem. Typical John Sculley.