In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)
"In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market. "<p>This is Unix revisionism. Most of the early development of the Macintosh is documented on folklore.org and they certainly didn't rebuild Unix to fit on a Mac. They bootstrapped the Macintosh using the Lisa development environment, which itself was bootstrapped with Apple ][s. Unix was far too large and unwieldy for microcomputer hardware of the time, and Apple didn't have a license for it anyway. There's plenty of stories of early/hobbyist Mac buyers realizing their $2k computer had no development tools, calling up Apple, and being told that they'd need to buy $10k Lisa machines if they wanted to do real app development. MPW didn't come out until 2 years later.<p>(If you just wanted an easy-to-use development environment, Apple HAD worked on a GUI-capable BASIC for the Macintosh. But Bill Gates got wind of this and refused to renew their Apple ][ BASIC license unless they canned the project. Since no BASIC license meant no more Apple ][s, Apple caved, and the version of BASIC that Microsoft did ship on the Mac had no GUI support whatsoever. They would eventually ship Hypercard three years later, of course.)