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  • Blast from the Past: 1996 Programming FAQ

    by 
    Erica Sadun
    Erica Sadun
    12.25.2006

    Do you remember the days of MarksMan (aka Prototyper)? AppMaker? Mac Common Lisp? Smalltalk Agents? This FAQ may bring back some memories. It's a snapshot in time from 1996, which seems like yesterday in real time but was, technologically-speaking, a million years ago. The prices for developer tools really stands out--development packages for $695, a resource editor for almost $300. Amazing, isn't it, how cheap Mac Software has become on the whole? And I'm more than a little sure that a contributing factor is that the dev tools are free now. That was something that really struck me on the way back from NeXT to Mac. On NeXT, Interface Builder and the whole GNU programming suite were included. When I returned to doing Mac development, the sky-high prices for devtools (even with student discounts) really bugged me.