What a pleasant surprise to see this on HN this morning as I wrote this article about 15 years ago! I had planned to do a whole series about the early mac but life got in the way :(
There was something really special about the early macs (system 6 & 7). Yes they were buggy and slow but the UI was such a massive improvement over anything else. It also felt more "personal" in a way that I haven't experienced since. I wish younger devs could go back with me and experience the excitement and possibilities of those times.
Hypercard especially made programming so accessible. Credit to Tom Pittman - his compiler allowed you to develop in hypercard but distribute a binary - very useful.
> If you must use Unix, Apple's AU/X was arguably the least painful way to do it (much easier to use than OS X), but even AU/X was so bad it didn't last long.
> The Mac OS gave my productivity an order of magnitude boost; everything since then (even Mac OS versions after 6) only goes backwards.
