10 Apr
2000
10 Apr
'00
6:18 p.m.
Maybe not quite as bad as TI, although that $150
"developers club" affair
is pretty close (at least to me, who was a starving college student at the
time).
Apple gave the Inside Macintosh stuff to pretty much any University or
College that wanted it.
It's easy for people to insist that documentation ought to be free, and
you can make a better case for it today (with electronic distribution)
than back in 1984, but the fact was that the $150 would barely have
covered Apple's costs.
For comparison, how much did a DEC Orange Wall (TM) of VMS documentation
cost in 1984? I seriously doubt that DEC gave it away, and suspect that
the complete set was *much* more than $150, but I don't recall hearing
the same degree of grumbling about it.
IMAO, anyone who wanted to write Mac software in 1984 and didn't because
of a supposed lack of technical documentation was simply not sufficiently
motivated. The docs were widely available.