Category: Documentation

Vintage French Apple Videos Now on YouTube

Brutal Deluxe Software, know for its contributions to the Apple community over the years both in Software and in vintage item reviews and documentation, has once again dug up a few golden items for the community to enjoy.  Three vintage French videos are once again viewable. They are as follows: – Le club Apple, 1986 A French-speaking video from Apple France, which introduces its users’ club and after sales department. – Un Apple pour tous, 1987 A French-speaking video from…

Brutal Deluxe adds Don Fudge’s Hi-Res Secrets

Brutal Deluxe has once again provided a golden item from the Apple ][ era to its website.  Don Fudge’s Hi-Res Secrets is available for download from the site, complete with Manual and Disk images. You can download the program at: http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/documentation/

Inside the Apple //e now Available online

Mike Maginnis has brought another great piece of Apple history to the world through his new Apple ][ Scans site.  Inside the Apple //e by Gary B. Little is now in PDF format on his site and freely downloadable. You can download the PDF by going to the Inside the Apple //e page at: http://apple2scans.net/apple-ii/inside-the-apple-2e

The Computist Project is Dead

Mike Maginnis posted a note today on CSA2 about the COmputist Project being dead.  In reality, the project has been combined with a number of other projects run by Mike Maginnis to create a new website.  Mike’s note is contained below: First, the Computist Project is dead…  It’s been static since 2006 and the website had been slowly falling into disrepair, so to speak. So now it’s been re-christened the Computist Archive, and has a new home at: http://apple2scans.net/computistarchive Second,…

The Pascal Newsletter: An Outsider’s Retrospective

David T. Craig 736 Edgewater, Wichita, Kansas 67230 (USA.) 20 April 1993 CompuServe 71533,606 INTRODUCTION This document attempts to provide a retrospective commentary about the Pascal Newsletter. This newsletter was published between January 1974 and November 1983. The newsletter’s purpose was described in the first newsletter as follows: This is the first issue of a newsletter sent to users and other interested parties about the computer programming language Pascal. Its purpose is to keep the Pascal community informed about the…

Mathematica – The Most Appropriate Application for Arithmetical Computations Yet

by Jim Flanagan The computer, if I remember my history lesson correctly in this, our baroque age of computing, was born of a need to do arithmetic computations at high speeds — speeds which are affable by contemporary measure. Today, while computers are able to fit upon our desktop, they are still far too large, while they are orders of magnitude faster, they are still too slow, and while they store compar- atively incredible amounts of data, it is not enough….

Tutorial-Creating External Functions with CDEFs

by Mike Smith LAMIR Software Corporation The hot word in programming these days is modularity. HyperCard is a good example of an application that is designed to use modules of code written in another language to extend the limited functionality of HyperTalk: hence the names of these modules (XCMDs, or external commands, and XFNCs, or external functions). You can do much the same thing for any application through the dialog box calling method — adding code to documents in the form…

When the Going’s Not So Easy

by Dan Shafer Browse. The lowest level of access to HyperCard. All you can do if you’ve been relegated to the ranks of the “browsers,” is go from one card to another. Open a new stack. Go Home. Not much else. So, you’d think the go command would be the simplest, most straightforward word in the HyperTalk vocabulary. You’d be wrong.  In recent weeks, my CompuServe friends and I have been talking about two interesting aspects of this often-used but…

Bright Star’s Talking Heads – Behind the Scenes with HyperAnimator

Elon GasparPresident of Bright Star Technologies, and developer of HyperAnimator Joseph MatthewsHyperAnimator Programmer The future evolution of the Macintosh interface may well include something Apple calls an “anthropomorphic agent” — a software-based lifeform that would reside in your computer, talking and listening to you, acting for you at your behest. Such an agent would be a kind of artificially intelligent alter ego, a software version of yourself that would know something about your style, your passions, your work habits, that…

HyperCard X-Dreams: Externals for the Rest of Us

How and Why to Use External Commands and Functions By Christopher Watson It is now evident that a new trend in programming has attracted a significant part of the Macintosh community. In growing numbers, novice programmers use HyperCard and its built-in language, HyperTalk, as a springboard toward involvement in higher levels of development. This makes good sense for several reasons. To begin with, HyperTalk is well suited as a beginner’s language, and learning it provides a quick and easy method…

Secrets of the Grow Zone Masters — Musings on the Memory Manager

By Dennis Austin It takes a lot of planning to put together a memory policy, and you never get it right the first time. No matter how much time you spend, it always seems you could be using memory more efficiently. The memory manager offers a wealth of tools for its control. The grow zone function is probably the most powerful, but it is only a tool, not a solution. This article explains ways you can use the grow zone…

Adding Token Pasting to a non-ANSI Compiler, A Stack Data Type

Programming in C By Allen Holub Most Mac compilers claim to support the ANSI C Standard, in fact they support a subset of ANSI. Among the features most often omitted from that subset are the new preprocessor directives. The program described in this article corrects this problem to some extent. It is a C preprocessor that augments the standard preprocessor used by your compiler, expanding macros itself in order to support token pasting and the five predefined macros specified in…

Software License Agreements – The Key to Shrinkwrap Serendipity

“Copyright law does not provide a publisher with any protection against possible law suits brought by users who are unhappy with the performance of the software or who have somehow been damaged by a serious problem with the software.“ by Paul GoodmanMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 84 It’s finally finished. For the last two years your company has been working on its newest software product. Countless days, evenings and weekends went into design, programming, testing and debugging. All of the…

The Front End — Macworld Expo: Silicon Beach News for HyperCard Developers

by Raines CohenMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 127 Last January’s MacWorld Expo in San Francisco featured a number of announcements exciting to HyperCard developers. Some were notable in and of themselves, while some represent milestones in discussions that began long ago and are likely to continue for the forseeable future.  The most talked about software of the show was, of course, SuperCard from Silicon Beach Software. SuperCard is a HyperCard-like package that is highly compatible with the Apple product yet…

Smalltalk/V Mac : A New Standard in Object Oriented Programming

Michael C. Storrie-Lombardi, M.D.MacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 90 Smalltalk, the original object oriented programming (OOP) environment, has finally arrived as a full-blown Macintosh implementation thanks to Digitalk, Inc., at the extraordinarily reasonable price of $199. Early signs point toward Smalltalk/V Mac introducing OOP and Macintosh personal programming to a large group of people currently unable to find a programming environment that combines power with a minimal learning curve. Getting Excited About Smalltalk/V While most of the personal computer world…

A Brief History of Smalltalk and the Personal Computer

By A.P.P.L.E. StaffMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 — Page 95 Most of the personal computer community recognizes Smalltalk as the brainchild of the enormously creative Learning Research Group led by Alan Kay at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Computer science historians will recognize Smalltalk characteristics with roots in Simula, LISP, and SketchPad. Smalltalk has followed the powerful LISP strategy of treating different types of data (text, graphics, symbols, and numbers) in a uniform manner. It bundles the behavior of each data type…

The Business of Software – How to Avoid the Product Rollout Blues

by Anna O’Connell and Doug HousemanMacTech QuarterlySummer 1989 – Page 105 “The rollout is the product’s transition from vapor to reality.” “One program shipped recently was written on Mac II’s and tested only on Pluses. The result was the makers didn’t know that the program didn’t run on the SE.” “The size of your market and the status of your competition will determine sales for your product. If the competition is well established and has a full-featured product, you may…

Topic Index to MacTech Quarterly Vol. 1 No.1

# 3COM 604th Dimension 36 A A/UX 18, 36, 67, 112 A0, 76A5, 19, 76, 79-81, 102Abaq, 107Ada, 42, 44, 45ADD BAR, 102ADD MENU, 102Adobe Systems, 38AI, 10, 11, 110-112,114-116Aldus, 60Amatek, 107Amiga 33 analog-to-digital, 35Ann Arbor Softworks, 156APDA 31Apollo, 112app4Evt, 70-73, 116, 117Apple, 11, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 33, 34-36, 38, 39, 58, 64-69, 73, 75, 76, 79-81, 98, 110, 112, 115-117, 156Apple III, 156Apple menu, 19, 68, 69, 73, 75, 76, 80, 115, 117Apple Pascal 64AppleCD, 36AppleLink, 31,…

FoxBase Plus – Mac — The Race Goes to the Swift

by Mick O’NeilMac Tech QuarterlySpring 1989 – Page 50 As the Macintosh penetration of the corporate and small business market has accelerated, compatibility and connectivity with resident MS DOS software and systems has becomes increasingly important. Thus, multi-system software developers like Microsoft, Aldus, and Word Perfect Corporation have insured that their latest spreadsheets, desktop publishing software, and word processors include the ability to recognize, open, and format data files created under both MS DOS and the Macintosh operating environment. Compatibility between…

Visions of the Future – New Opportunities for Macintosh programmers

Essays on the near future by software wizards Dan Allen, Frank Alviani, Elon Gasper, Ted Johnson, Scott Knaster and Leonard Rosenthal. The Macintosh is now a mature product. As of January 1989 Macintosh is five years old. It has come a long way: from 128 KB of RAM to 8 MB, from 400 KB floppies to 1.2 MB, from no hard disk to gigabytes if needed, and from two applications (good old MacWrite and MacPaint) to thousands. The average Macintosh…