The Early Origins of Apple Developer Tools

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The Early Origins of Apple Developer Tools

In the late 70s, Apple founder Steve Wozniak wrote the original BASIC interpreter for the Apple II. Like most early software, it originally shipped on audio tape and required tedious loading from a data cassette player. Once loaded, users could write their own programs. The ability to write those software programs contributed a lot of value to systems, as the base system couldn't really do anything itself. In 1979 VisiCalc arrived and delivered a the first really practical application for buying a home computer.

Wozniak never got around to delivering support for floating point math in his "Apple BASIC," so the company licensed a BASIC interpreter from a tiny operation from New Mexico called Microsoft. That product was called Applesoft BASIC, and Wozniak's earlier version became known as Integer BASIC.

Microsoft's version was very slow, creating a demand for an additional BASIC compiler, which Microsoft also supplied as a solution to the problem. Relying on Microsoft for its developer tools turned out to be a catastrophic problem for Apple, which signed itself into an eight year contract covering Applesoft Basic.

Apple's MacBASIC Disaster

As Apple's Macintosh project was beginning to take shape in 1981, the company decided that it should deliver its own programming environment for the Mac rather than again delegating the task away to a third party. Apple feared that outsiders might not "get" the new Mac user interface that it had been investing so much research and development into perfecting.

Microsoft's contract for Applesoft BASIC expired in 1985, just as Apple was preparing to release its own MacBASIC. Sure enough, when Microsoft delivered its own BASIC for the Mac, it used a console interface rather than taking advantage of the Mac's new graphical environment.

After discovering Apple was planning to release its own, superior MacBASIC, Bill Gates was livid. His Applesoft BASIC was destined to be obsolete within a few years, but he also knew Apple was still making most of its profits from Apple II systems. Gates exploited that fact to tie the renewal of the ongoing Applesoft BASIC contract into a deal where Microsoft would buy Apple's MacBASIC for $1 and sandbag it.

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