Who Wrote System 1.0?

[Mac128]

We all know Bruce Horn and Steve Capps wrote the Finder, it's right there in the About box. But who is officially credited with the system software itself? Is it buried in the code somewhere? Is it noted clearly somewhere in one of the many books about Apple I've read or preferably on some easy to search website? I realize it may have been a team effort, but still, who was on that specific team?

 

[ealex79]

I read in a blog from a guy that developed on the resource system and the executable format of Mac OS but I cannot find it anymore.

If I find it, I post the link... but the keywords I remember: 'mac os toolbox resource hack linker' make alas, no sense in this context on Google.

:b&w:

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

You could probably work out who it's contributors were form reading through the various accounts at:

http://www.folklore.org

I don't know how many people worked on the OS side of the Mac, probably 10 at most...

 

[equill]

System Software 1.0 (System 3.1/Finder 5.2, Feb. 1986) for the 512K is presumably not what you wish to know about, given your usual research instincts, so I was driven back to Cary Lu's book for the authorship of System 1.0.

Jobs (I still have difficulty in assimilating my recent discovery that he is pronounced as 'tasks' or 'occupations' rather than as the Biblical name) and Gates are recorded by Lu, a Microsoft employe writing a book for Microsoft Press, The Apple Macintosh Book, as having consulted closely during the hardware and software development for the Macintosh. Certainly this embraced applications, but I cannot corroborate my long-held remembrance that Gates, inter alia perhaps, had a hand in coding the System.

What Lu's book (1984) did reveal was this:

... the only way to add more memory without redesigning is to use denser memory chips. The initial Mac uses 64-kilobit (K) RAM chips. As 256-kilobit RAM chips become widely available at a reasonable cost, they will be installed in the Macintosh, quadrupling the total memory to 512kB.
The 256-k chips are the same size as the 64-k chips, so there is no need to redesign the board. A data-selector component, two resistors, and a capacitor must be changed as well. All the software and the ROM can handle the 512-kB memory already.

The added emphasis is mine.

Lu goes on to hint at, but not forecast, future developments with the statement that the MC68000 can directly address up to 16MB of RAM.

de

 

[Bunsen]

I was under the impression that the last thing Gates ever wrote per se was Applesoft BASIC

 

[Mac128]

System Software 1.0 (System 3.1/Finder 5.2, Feb. 1986) for the 512K is presumably not what you wish to know about, given your usual research instincts

You are correct sir! I do not acknowledge Apple's retro-active naming convention. If you lived it like I did, there was no "System Software" bundle-branding until System 5 came along and even then (with its System 4.x & Finder 6.0) nobody called it that until System 6 unified the individual parts. It was just "System this" and "Finder that" which were actually mixed and matched freely based on nothing more than computer folklore of the day. I share Eric Rassmusen's astute theory that some Apple development lackey was rushed trying to meet a deadline and hastily assembled that flawed chart (and the source of so much confusion in the Mac world), thinking it a good idea at the time, in order to meet a deadline for that first Develop CD. It certainly wouldn't be the first time Apple published something it shouldn't have that was not thoroughly reviewed for accuracy and logic first.

I am therefore referring to the first System version release officially known as 1.0 (but actually .97, though I'm sure it was the same team on .85 dated a month earlier as well), along with Finder 1.0 on the first published System Disk.