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No, not at all, the folklore story doesn't even address Apple's strategy. Their developer relations were "Apply Here" back then. Macintosh shipped with zero developer tooling, not C/C++, not Pascal, not BASIC.

And, we have no idea what Donn's BASIC was actually like ... it probably wasn't "Visual Basic", or even a platform. Just better than Microsoft's halfazz port of their micro basic. (which did have some quickdraw commands.)



If you'd like to see what Donn's BASIC was like, you can! The Internet Archive has a version that runs in-browser [1].

Although the Folklore article says there were two books describing Donn's BASIC, I believe there were at least three: Introduction to Macintosh BASIC, Using Macintosh BASIC, and The Macintosh BASIC Handbook. All three are available at vintageapple.org [2].

[1] https://archive.org/details/mac_MacBASIC.335

[2] https://vintageapple.org/macprogramming/


Thanks! I had no idea it was out there. (Although it looks like it's not very 'visual'.)


> we have no idea what Donn's BASIC was actually like

We literally know exactly what it was like. Dartmouth was already using a late beta of the software for a Basic class when Microsoft forced Apple to cancel the release of the final version.




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