How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people
I had a Mac from around 1993 to 1997. I even wrote articles for minor league Mac journals.<p>My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software experience, which I appreciate. But Apple (represented in my mind by Steve Jobs) didn&#x27;t want his platform to be flooded by crappy software. Even HyperCard never had his wholehearted support (I used it extensively, despite its odd and limited language), and I think Apple was glad to finally dump it.<p>If you had a reason to write crappy software, as I did, you ended up with Visual Basic. What I mean by &quot;crappy&quot; is software that solves a problem reliably, but can&#x27;t be scaled. For instance, installation might require help from the author, and entering a bad value might make it crash, but a small handful of tolerant users can handle these issues.<p>The solution today, with open source, is that the people bring programming to the people.