In an article regarding Palm’s decision to use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 for their next Treo (see related article Palm goes to the dark side, next Treo to use Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0), Tech pundit Rob Enderle writes:
“It is interesting to note, that few seem to remember that Microsoft wrote the first MacOS under contract to Apple nearly two decades ago but, like most Apple partnerships, this one also ended badly.” – Rob Enderle, September 26th, 2005
Let’s pause to let that one sink in… savor, bask, indulge… Okay, one more time:
“It is interesting to note, that few seem to remember that Microsoft wrote the first MacOS under contract to Apple nearly two decades ago but, like most Apple partnerships, this one also ended badly.” – Rob Enderle, September 26th, 2005
Huh? Count us among the few that don’t remember a bit of that historical tidbit. We thought Apple’s Macintosh team designed and built the original Macintosh hardware and software: Bill Atkinson, Chris Espinosa, Joanna Hoffman, George Crow, Burrell Smith, Jerry Manock, Jef Raskin and Andy Hertzfeld. We searched all over, but cannot find anything about Microsoft writing the first Mac OS. Can you? About the only thing we can think of that Endere might mean is that Apple licensed Microsoft’s Applesoft Basic for the Apple II. Is that what he means? Or perhaps he means that Steve Jobs recruited Microsoft to be the first third party applications software developer for the Mac?
Some of the places we looked (and failed) to find out about how Microsoft wrote the first Mac OS under contract to Apple:
• kernelthread.com – The Macintosh
• Wikipedia – Mac OS
• Jef Raskin – Recollections of the Macintosh project
• MacKiDo – Early Mac OS
• Encyclopædia Britannica – Macintosh and the first affordable GUI
• Folklore.org: Andy Hertzfeld – The first time we demoed the Macintosh to Microsoft
• Folklore.org: Andy Hertzfeld – Steve Jobs confronts Bill Gates about copying the Mac
Enderle’s full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, are we among the few that don’t remember that “Microsoft wrote the first Mac OS under contract to Apple nearly two decades ago” or has Enderle just taken his “Enderleness” to hitherto unknown level?
“Or starting a myth on purpose.”
He is the Fudmeister
what a moron
Enderle probably believes that Al Gore invented the internet.
What a spank-monkey.
CitizenX writes: “I was selling for the Byte Shop up in Seattle in the early 80’s, 80-85, and M$ did NOT write the first Mac OS.
As a matter of fact it was written in Pascal.”
Sorry, but this too is incorrect. Woz wrote DOS in 6502 Assembly Language. I’ve even seen the source code (and modified it for faster boots).
Now Apple did produce a product called the Language Card, a 16K RAM card, into which you could load the Pascal language. Some of the Pascal system was written in Pascal, but not all of it, since Pascal was not a true compiled language (Pascal, on the Apple ][, compiles down to an interpreted code known as p-code).
Dutch writes: “Applesoft basic was written by Steve Wozniak, the other Steve at Apple.”
Sorry Dutch, but M$ did indeed write Applesoft BASIC. Woz wrote the much faster, leaner Integer BASIC.
Of course in those days, M$ was a fledgling start-up.
I had to write him because this blunder was just too big. Here is the reply he just sent back.
That was a me just going to (sic) fast that morning. It should have said Microsoft assisted in writing the first MacOS not that they did it by themselves which clearly wasn’t the case. Somehow helped write, which was what I was thinking, became write (probably was distracted for a moment or simply skipped a word and then spell checker corrected the tense). Anyway thanks for pointing that out, you do know they did the application support and interpreter though right? (They did the basic interpreter for the MacOS as well).
Rob Enderle
Principal Analyst
Enderle Group
Well, I guess I can understand his mistake. He probably got distracted when his G5 iMac tipped over, or perhaps he saw something shiny.
This is an old lie I’ve heard since about 1988. I’ve known people who based their DOS box purchase on the “fact” that MS-DOS must be the same as Macintosh since Microsoft wrote the Mac System software. I am completely serious.
The follow-on to Windows XP — what do they call it, “Copland?” — must be in serious trouble for Microsoft to be trotting out this felgercarb.
Whenever people talk about how Apple failed yadda yadda, I tell them, Apple failed in only two ways 1) firing Steve Jobs 2) underestimating how completely stupid people are and how willing they are to believe and spread lies.
While we’re all fact-checking each other…
Citizen X wrote “M$ did NOT write the first Mac OS. As a matter of fact it was written in Pascal” which is mostly correct. Most of it was in Pascal, the rest was in 68000 assembly (and this was a substantial amount but probably not the majority).
Then Rainy Day miscorrects with the true but non-sequitur argument, “Woz wrote DOS in 6502 Assembly Language.” Citizen X was talking about Mac OS.
Now, if only a certain professional analyst, a Principal Analyst in his own company, showed as much professionalism as us here in the peanut gallery.
So, to conclude, either Enderle mistyped – in which case he should have checked his work – or he just got his “facts” wrong – in which case he should have done his research. Either way, he’s an idiot.
Now, there is only one way to use this information: any time Enderle is quoted in the “real” media (although that epithet is hardly as prestigious as it might have been in the past), we simply draw the attention of that news outlet (and anybody quoting it) to Enderle’s delusional rantings, thus discrediting him from being used in the future.
Rainy Day:
Citizen X was talking about MacOS that, in fact, was almost completely programmed in Pascal.
About AppleSoft, the name came from Apple & MicroSoft so, yes, M$ was involved on developing that floating point BASIC.
What Woz did for the disk drives was to simplify the electronics on it. The format they decided to use cannot read two contiguous zeroes (the thing just read them as one zero) so Woz coded the bytes so there were no contiguos zeroes, expanding the size of each block of bytes.
PCP, I no longer think it could be Crack. It must be PCP. Or heavy daily doses of LSD.
That is obviously a troll article. Or Enderle is a real dumbass.
Sorry CitizenX, i had Apple ][ on the brain. In fact you are correct, the original MacOS (then known as Macintosh System Software) was indeed written in Pascal.
Rick: I recall Woz saying he wrote DOS too. Most folks think of Woz as a hardware guru, which he was, but he was a skilled 6502 coder too.
Ricky Dock: Even Jobs now agrees that it was for the best that he got “fired” from Apple in the 80’s (although he stops short of saying it was for the best for Apple, which it was, at the time).
Okay Enderle, if you’re doing any research and by chance come across this board, you said replying to one of our amateur fact-checkers “ndelc”
“It should have said Microsoft assisted in writing the first MacOS not that they did it by themselves which clearly wasn’t the case.”
They had nothing to do with it.
“Somehow helped write, which was what I was thinking, became write (probably was distracted for a moment or simply skipped a word and then spell checker corrected the tense). Anyway thanks for pointing that out, you do know they did the application support and interpreter though right?”
Here you are trying to spin gold from jargon. If by “application support” you mean “wrote some applications for” then you mean the right thing but expressed it poorly. I doubt you mean the right thing.
In the context of an operating system, “application support” is stuff that helps an application start up, display information, collect user events, shut down, save data to permanent store, and so on.
In the Macintosh, this layer has always been written by Apple. Always.
This is quite obvious, because the Open and Save dialogs in even Mac System 6 were better than the Open and Save dialogs in Windows XP are today. If Microsoft wrote those for the Mac why did they make them suck on Windows?
And there exist oh so many more such cyber-archeological examples of “application support” written by Apple for Macintosh that still to this day have no equal on Windows.
For a stunning example of what I (and other programmers) mean by “application support,” I refer you to the Classic MacOS Resource Manager, even the one shipped with System 1.0. Windows XP has nothing like it. It has a dumb little icon loader and that’s about all.
If Microsoft wrote the application support for Mac OS, this would mean they wrote the Resource Manager. Why did they write such a good one for Macintosh, and put such a bad one in Windows?
“(They did the basic interpreter for the MacOS as well).”
Your use of the definite article is erroneous, as there have been *many* BASIC interpreters (and compilers) for Macintosh.
BASIC is a programming language, “Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code,” developed at Dartmouth.
One of the best versions of BASIC ever made was made by Apple for Macintosh, called MacBasic.
Microsoft had their own competing BASIC for the Mac, but it was a console-based BASIC which did not use any Macintosh features (like the application support you think Microsoft wrote). MacBasic, in contrast, was a beautiful language which showed what a Mac-style BASIC should be.
Apple’s license for Applesoft BASIC (the Microsoft product for the Apple ][) was set to expire in 1985. To renew the license, Microsoft forced Apple to give them MacBasic. Apple had little choice, as their user base was still on Apple ][s running programs in Applesoft BASIC.
Microsoft de-Macified MacBasic (making it ugly and ordinary again) and retargeted it to Windows. Every Microsoft IDE, their entire “Visual Basic” and so on, is derived from that Apple-developed MacBasic.
So, Microsoft wrote *a* BASIC interpreter for the Mac. They also obtained a much better BASIC from Apple and built their language traps out of it.
In the meantime, RealBasic, by neither Microsoft nor Apple, has become *the* best version of BASIC ever.
To sum up, I’ll give you a clue — Microsoft is radically *uncreative*. If they can obtain a technology by purchase or even theft, they will. They never do their own work if they can help it. They are perfectly content to let other people do the hard work, to let the pioneers take the arrows.
So every time you are about to give Microsoft credit for anything, it’s a good idea to double-check. Radically *uncreative*.
Just as if you were going to accuse Apple of being boring, you’d double-check. Or call a politician “honest.”
Saying Microsoft wrote or helped write anything, is saying Microsoft committed a creative act. This is not in keeping with their corporate policy of radical *uncreativity*.
Alarm bells should go off long before your ass is fact-checked back into the stone age by a bunch of amateurs, as has been done so thoroughly, completely, and perfectly on this board on this day.
Yeah, I should have been clearer about Pascal. The original Mac OS was written in Pascal and some assembly as it was told to me.
I also sold a lot of the M$ CP/M cards at the University of Washington and around Seattle, although most were sold to colleges. Sold a lot of languages too. Fortran, Xenix.
M$ was a small company then.
“few seem to remember” – how about the same number of people as there are viruses for the Mac OS? NONE.
I’d like Enderle to produce any shred of “proof” of this off-handed comment/claim. Oh, wait, he’s an analyst. He’s not an investigative reporter, much less a so-called journalist. Won’t happen.
I agree with MacMania:
MDN, stop running this brain-dead fools nonsense in your headlines!
Incase you’re not aware, services like Google News picks up the crap, shows it on their headlines page; it then gets replicated by the lazy syndication junkies and takes on a life of its own.
If you insist on running headlines with this moron’s name, at least use a <i>descriptive</i> adjective before his name.
mw: think, as in THINK about what you’re doing and not your pocket book for all these ads on your page MDN.
Actually, Microsoft didn’t even write the first IBM PC OS. Bill bought it from Seattle Scientific. The first release the Microsoft di of it was DOS 2.0. I remember the cover article about it in I believe Byte MAgazine. It was entitled “The Dark Side of DOS 2.0”
Revisionist history by Rob Enderle
1: FUD the small Mac market share to get them to switch.
2: Con the majority Win drones not to.
Actually, yeah…now that I think of it…Microsoft was also subcontracted by Moses to write the 10 commandments… I know its true because I read it in an Enderle article. God love him.
Andrew Hamilton
Las Vegas Videographers
Hamilton International Productions
http://www.hiproductions.com
Rainy Day:
When I refered to the Woz job with the disk drivers, I didn’t exclude all the genious he did to all the Apple I and ][ projects. I just tried to illustrate one of the skills this brillant guy have.
Thanks for the Mac history lesson Ricky Dock. Awesome!
For those that wonder why MDN posts these idiot Enderle articles…
…here’s your sign.
Oh, and I love the photos MDN.
Our dirty hippy dorks can beat up their dirty hippy dorks
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maybe he meant Microsoft BASIC for the apple 2
If you look at the Enderle article, it has a link to “confirm” that M$ wrote the 1st. OS, it was called “sand”. I did a quick search for sand and Mac OS and found links for OS 9’s desktop, “Sand”. obviously not the same. Thing is Enderle’s link is a claim that M$ tried to help in the first OS. http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm Seems like FUD, but someone other than Enderle is trying to imly tat M$ had a hand in the first Mac OS.
From what I can remember, Microsoft was involved in early Mac development somehow, but more on the application side. They wrote the first spreadsheet, called Multiplan, I think. They may have assisted in some other ways early on, but certainly not in doing the main OS work.