MacBASIC

~ the obit ~

MacBASIC died in August 1985, when I was one year old, so there is no version of this where I get to claim it. The reason it earns a grave anyway is that the decision behind it is one of the few in computing history where you can name the price, and the price was a dollar.

Donn Denman started on it in late 1981, as part of the original Macintosh effort. Andy Hertzfeld's reasoning for building it in house is on the record and it holds up: a BASIC interpreter mattered because users had to be able to write their own programs, and the team did not trust an outside vendor to make those programs feel like Macintosh programs. Marianne Hsiung worked on it with him, with Larry Kenyon and Bryan Stearns contributing later.

What they produced was a real language rather than a line-numbered toy. It had floating point and graphics commands that drew into actual windows, where Microsoft's console-bound version offered neither. A benchmark comparison published in the Washington Apple Pi journal in May 1984 put it ahead of MS BASIC for Macintosh on speed, which is a detail worth holding onto, because the faster one is the one that got buried.

Apple ended the project in August 1985, abruptly enough that it caught three book publishers mid-print. Those publishers had written MacBASIC books with Apple's cooperation and found out the hard way, which is how the cancellation reached InfoWorld on 19 August 1985 under the headline "Apple, Publishers at Odds." That article is still the best-dated trace the thing left.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the trade ~

Microsoft's license to Applesoft BASIC ran eight years from 1977 and was due to expire in September 1985. The Apple II was still paying Apple's bills in 1985, and Applesoft was how an Apple II booted into something you could type into, so the renewal was not optional for Apple. Bill Gates understood the position precisely and set a condition: Apple had to stop competing with Microsoft BASIC on the Macintosh.

Apple took the deal. MacBASIC went to Microsoft for one dollar, and Microsoft shelved it, which was the entire purpose of buying it. No Microsoft release of the code it had just acquired ever shipped.

~ what donn denman was told ~

Denman's manager told him the project was on hold indefinitely and that he was to destroy the source code along with every copy he had. No reason was given. He had been on it for most of four years at that point. Apple then tried to claw back the beta copies it had already sent out, which did not work, and the company never issued a statement explaining what had happened to a product it had been actively helping authors document.

~ the copies that got away ~

The recall failed completely. Beta MacBASIC circulated unlicensed for years, the Dartmouth computer science department had already built an introductory course around it, and the three orphaned books kept explaining a language you could no longer legally obtain. For a while that was enough to keep it alive in a small way.

What finished it was arithmetic rather than lawyers. MacBASIC was written before anyone worried about 32-bit clean addressing, so as the Mac moved on, the unsupported copies simply stopped running, and there was nobody left with the source to fix them. Microsoft's BASIC for the Macintosh, the slower one, is also gone now. It just took longer.

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