Mac pointers and handles. Was: Chips that changed the world

As I remember it, the warning was there because Apple had already used the top eight bits of pointers to hold flags for locked, resource, purge-able etc and if you wrote over them the OS crashed or made your application crash when it overwrote your flags. A big chunk of one the developer conference was going 32 bit clean, whereby developers had to use system routines to test and set the flags instead of system macros which had been compiled into our source code without us realising they were macros. For instance it was normal to get the status byte of a handle before locking it and instead of unlocking it, restore the status byte. As these had been done using macros they just went straight to the master pointer and acted on its top 8 bits. There were also system calls or macros for extracting the lower 24 bits which very few people had used as it worked without, but Apple wanted us to use them so they could redefine them to do nothing later. Saving a few bytes caused both Apple and its developers a huge amount of effort later on. Incidentally, you refer to the "hernia manuals". Do you mean the ring bounds ones? At least you could split them up, volume 5 was the problem one, it was a paperback about 2" x 8.5" x 11". Later there was a volume about OCE (IIRC, Open Connectivity Environment) which was as bad if not worse, but at least I never needed to read it, I think that technology died because the application programmers were intimidated by the size of the manual. Does anyone here happen to have a copy of the original loose leaf QuickDraw 3D manuals? Someone chucked out my copy at work thinking they had been supeceeded, but they were far better than the later documentation and still apply to the Quesa open source project I use in my work. I would be willing to pay for them to be copied or scanned, maybe they could go on BitSavers or be put in the official Quesa documentation at SourceForge. Roger Holmes.