Macintosh Programmer's Workshop

~ the goodbye ~

Apple's development system for the Macintosh cost real money and arrived through a professional developers program, which put it two layers away from me. The machine itself was import-priced in Turkey and barely visible outside design studios, and the program was for people whose employer paid dues to Cupertino. Whatever I was compiling in the late 1990s, it was compiling on a PC.

The Macintosh shipped in January 1984 and for the first two years you could not write software for one on one. Development happened on a Lisa, cross-compiled, which is a strange thing to remember about the computer that was supposed to be the future. MPW 1.0 landed on 24 September 1986 and closed that gap. It supported Pascal and nothing else at first, with a C compiler arriving in version 2.0 on 20 July 1987, and the shape of the thing settled with 3.0 on 30 November 1988.

What you got was an integrated environment in the pre-IDE sense: assemblers for the 68000 and later for PowerPC, plus the build system and linker and resource tools that went around them, with compilers added over the years. Version 3.3 came in May 1993 for the start of the PowerPC transition, and 3.5 on 17 December 1999 for a platform already being replaced. Apple's own system software went out the door built with it, along with a large share of the commercial Mac applications anybody over forty remembers.

Its death was a squeeze from both ends. Metrowerks CodeWarrior took the paying developers through the 1990s by being faster and friendlier, which is why Apple eventually stopped charging for MPW and just put it on the web. Then Mac OS X arrived with Project Builder, which became Xcode, and there was no reason left to keep a classic-only toolchain breathing. Work on version 3.6 stopped in late 2001 with the last prerelease, 3.6d7, sitting in public as the final state of a fifteen-year-old product.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the worksheet ~

The MPW Shell did not behave like a terminal. It was a text editor whose windows were live: you typed a command anywhere in any document and hit the enter key on it, and the line ran. Output went back into the same window as more text, which you could then edit and run again. The file you kept open for this was called a worksheet, and it accumulated into a personal record of every build command and every one-off script you had ever needed.

The effect is hard to explain to anyone whose mental model of a shell is a prompt at the bottom of a scrolling log. Your command history was a document you could rewrite and hand to a colleague. Nothing in the Unix lineage worked that way, and the closest living relative is a notebook interface of the kind that took another twenty years to become normal.

~ the compiler that talked back ~

MPW C is remembered for its error messages, which were written by somebody having a good time. "Too many errors on one line (make fewer)" is the famous one. The best one is a confession about standards compliance: "String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that's 3 more than ANSI said I should)." The jokes died before the product did, because when Apple moved to PowerPC it replaced the original compilers with ones written by Symantec, and the replacements had nothing funny to say.

~ the last build ~

Apple never posted a notice. The last prerelease simply stayed the last one, the download kept working for years out of inertia, and the developer technote describing how to get MPW going is still sitting on Apple's site in the archive section, explaining a toolchain for an operating system that stopped shipping in 2002.

What replaced it is still here. Project Builder inherited the job in Mac OS X and Xcode grew out of Project Builder. The modern path from a text file to a signed Mac application still runs through software descended from the thing MPW was. The worksheet did not make it across, though. That part Apple left behind.

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