Hasta La Ideas

Ignoring all the hoopla over faulty antennas and finicky reception, Apple has been doing some legacy preserving in July with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Earlier this month, they gave the museum permission to post documents from its earliest history: their very first business plan and a “Preliminary Confidential Offering Memorandum” from 1977, which showed their plan of attack strategy in entering the still very new home computing market, both of which can be seen here. Following that, just yesterday came the announcement that Apple has donated more of itself, albeit somewhat virtually. The company has given the museum the original source code for both MacPaint and QuickDraw, two of its earliest programs for creating illustrations using their software and hardware. Assuming you know what you’re doing, you can even download the code from the museum’s site and tinker around or whatever you do with code (clearly we’re not knowledgeable in this area). Some history about the programs in the museum’s announcement, and even more over on BusinessWeek‘s Apple blog. Here’s a bit about the early days:

In writing MacPaint, [Bill Atkinson] was as concerned with whether human readers would understand the code as he was with what the computer would do with it. He later said about software in general, “It’s an art form, like any other art form…I would spend time rewriting whole sections of code to make them more cleanly organized, more clear. I’m a firm believer that the best way to prevent bugs is to make it so that you can read through the code and understand exactly what it’s doing…And maybe that was a little bit counter to what I ran into when I first came to Apple…If you want to get it smooth, you’ve got to rewrite it from scratch at least five times.”

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