6 Nov
2006
6 Nov
'06
1:48 p.m.
Jason McBrien wrote:
In the Apple anniversary edition of this week in tech,
Andy Hertzfeld
said
that almost all the original Mac apps were written in pure assembler,
as the
compilers for the 68000 weren't that advanced at the time, and they
needed
to wring out every last bit of performance from the platform. I'd
assume the
same would be true for the Lisa apps.
No, all of the Lisa software (applications and OS) were written in Pascal.
The core graphics code (which became QuickDraw on the mac) was all
written in
highly tuned 68000 assembly language.
As mentioned above all the key macintosh apps were written in assembly
because
the macintosh was built as a memory-starved machine (128K RAM to start)
whereas
the Lisa started out at 512KB but shipped as 1MB machines.