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New old dev tools found

Crutch

Well-known member
I'm pretty excited to have found the following old dev tools on eBay recently, all of which I don't think were previously available for download anywhere:

THINK's Lightspeed Pascal 1.0 (1986): This is the original version of this highly influential programming environment from 1986, which took everything great about Macintosh Pascal with its remarkable debugger and integrated IDE, removed the copy protection and made it even better by adding a first class compiler. By the way, the manual (not sure if its online anywhere either?) is also terrific and includes a chapter called "Inside Lightspeed Pascal" that explains how the complier sets up a separate "user world" to run code while keeping the compiler/debugger environment in memory and available, including which Toolbox traps had to be patched and why! https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/think-lightspeed-pascal-10

THINK's Lightspeed C 2.15 (1987): I had previously uploaded Lightspeed C 2.01 (1986), which was (I think) the earliest version of THINK C available for download, however my original set was missing disk 3 (apparently because it was not included with upgrades from THINK C 1.0). The set of v2.15 I found, however, is complete -- by this point THINK had combined the three 400k disks onto two 800k disks, so the full suite of files, including the "Pongerang" demo from Steve Capps (!!), is now available for download for (I think) the first time. https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/think-lightspeed-c-201

Symantec "THINK's Lightspeed C" 3.0 (1987): The first version of THINK C under the Symantec name, before they dropped the "Lightspeed" branding. https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/symantec-think-c-30

I am not sure who else around here geeks out on old dev tools quite as much as I do, but I think the Lightspeed Pascal 1.0 in particular is a nifty find for what it's worth! Hope others get a chance to check these out one day.
 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Ooooh yes. If you ever get the time, pleeeeease scan the manual, I'd really like to read the stuff about how that all works.
 

Mu0n

Well-known member
Very cool, will check it out. The old working code from Steve Capps excites me the most!
 

Mu0n

Well-known member
I checked out 'Pongarang' from Steve Capps. I was hoping for some Sound Driver routines, but he's just using a giant source code file, SysBeep for sound. He does fetch the baseAddr for the offscreen bitmap for the screen he wants to use the proper way instead of the hard-coded way (which would break under different macs). The sprite he uses for the character that moves around is written directly to RAM with StuffHex and a very long string sent to it - that was a pretty funny way not to deal with resource madness for such a simple game.
 

Crutch

Well-known member
That is funny. I don’t think I’ve ever used StuffHex for anything. But I do like the fact that it’s called StuffHex.
 

Crutch

Well-known member
@cheesestraws very belatedly posting this here ... the brief but very interesting "Inside Lightspeed Pascal" chapter from the Lightspeed Pascal 1.0 manual which gives some quite detailed info on how the compiler maintains the separate compiler and user worlds.

I know you will excuse the poor quality scan, this was taken with my iPhone ... I didn't want to unbind the manual, the purpose here is information sharing not aesthetics :)
 

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  • THINK Pascal 1.0 manual ch14.pdf
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cheesestraws

Well-known member
That's really interesting. Reading that made me amazed that they managed to get the whole thing working properly under Multifinder...
 

Crutch

Well-known member
I know right. Reading the Layer Manager code you linked me a while back made me amazed that MultiFinder worked at all!!
 
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