On 7/23/2026 12:42 AM, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:
On Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:14:54 -0500, BGB wrote:
As a weird bit of irony, I have more first hand experience with MPW
than I do with Xcode:
I was exposed to MPW once in elementary school;
I have not seen or used Xcode at all...
I used MPW heavily from about 1988 until I gave up on Macs as my
primary platform. Even when I was doing contract work where the
deliverable had to build with Metrowerks CodeWarrior, I still used MPW
to do most of the actual code editing.
It was a powerful command-line-style environment, clearly
Unix-inspired, within the limitations of the old MacOS. Thus, for
example, because of the lack of multitasking, the Make command could
not execute the generated build commands, it just output them. But
since every command window was also a text-editor window, it was easy
enough to select the commands and execute them.
This was sort of the weird childhood memory I had, like the use mouse to select command-text and a keyboard shortcut to run it command, was
entirely bewildering to the version of myself that existed in elementary school...
Like, a weird/surreal thing (defying much rational explanation), like
some day a guy brings in a Mac II style computer to the elementary
school, and shows me (and a girl that also hanged around) basically how
to use it (including ejecting and reinstalling the large MO-disk (on an external drive), something like drag the drive to the trash, then look
at the status light on the drive and wait for it to turn off, then push
hard on the button to eject it). I think, when the disk was put back it
(also requiring a good hard shove), the drive would spin back to life
and after a moment the drive would reappear on the desktop.
This being unlike the 3.5 drive, where dragging it to the trash would
cause the disk to eject itself. Or PC floppy drives where much less
force was needed for the eject.
But, yeah, IIRC, the guy brought up MPW, with some commands in one
window and a Pascal program in another (I mostly just remember that it
was Pascal, something fairly simple, like a "Hello World" or similar).
Some ritual of selecting the commands and hitting the keyboard shortcut
would cause things to happen.
But, I think, me and the girl tried to do so, but seemingly despite
repeating the same basic actions, it didn't work. I think neither of us figured it out, and the guy got frustrated. He took the computer and
left, never seen again.
But, like I didn't know why he was there.
Otherwise (prior to this), it was a case of I showed up in school, and I
guess when the teacher realized I already knew how to read and similar,
she went and got the school librarian, who then mostly took me off to
mess around with computers in some back corner of the school, mostly
doing Basic and similar (well, that or Oregon Trail on an Apple II, or
some sort of progression from Oregon Trail and similar, to Apple BASIC,
to QBasic).
Well, like, I started going to classes, and other kids were around and
can't do much. Teacher was showing letter cards, and I got annoyed so
just sorta told the teacher what the smaller text under the letter said.
The teacher froze, then got up and left the room. Very soon, another
girl in the class got up and went over to the chalk board, grabbed some
chalk, and started trying to draw stuff on the part of the board she
could reach. A short time later, the teacher came back with the
librarian, and I was taken elsewhere (then for a while, it was mostly
more of a one-on-one thing).
Well, also was taken to a building, where people did some cognitive type
tests (like, look at pictures of patterns and tell which comes next,
etc). I think one of the final things, was like I was in a brightly lit
room with a one way mirror, and then some guy brought in a wooden puzzle (consisting of various interlocking wooden pieces) and then had me
assemble it.
I think the result of this was that I was diagnosed as autistic, and
then the teachers mostly just sorta left me along and left me to mess
around with computers and similar.
I think this was sometime around the time the guy with the Mac II showed
up... And then disappeared again...
As for computers, there was the Apple II, and DOS PC's with QBasic.
QBasic was available on the PCs, and was more readily available in other contexts. I think I was mostly up to the level of figuring out how to
make spinning wireframe cubes in QBasic. It didn't take much to realize
that QBasic on DOS had a lot more going for it than on an Apple II.
Then a girl showed up, and kinda crowded my space. I think she was also tinkering around with the computers. I mostly remember that she was
kinda loud, and prone to odd behaviors; I remember her being around felt unpleasant, but not sure how to describe the feeling much better. Was
also around a similar age, and I remember she had long blonde hair.
Somewhere around this time, I ended up being friends with another kid in
the school, but this lasted until an incident (my own fault, not
inclined to talk about it). This whole experience was mostly just an illustration of my own character flaws at the time.
Well, one time I ended up boasting about my Basic skills, and his dad
was like "prove it" and pulled up QBasic, but for whatever reason I
didn't feel up to writing anything so proceeded to not write anything, realizing it would have been better had I not said anything. Like, I was
just not in the right mental state to write code at that moment.
...
Sometime around this time parents got a 486, and I could play various
games on this... I think, mostly Duke Nukem (the 2D platformer version), Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom. Ended up mostly getting into Doom.
Then ended up getting internet, and on the internet managed to find the
Wolf3D source (on the ID Software FTP server), and started trying to understand this arcane relic.
Seemingly went and got Turbo C, but was unable to get the Wolf3D code to
build or work. Did start tinkering with other.
By the end of elementary school, was moving from QBasic to C.
Partly it was because it became obvious that C was far more capable than QBasic, even if C was harder to use. I also tried to mimic some parts of
the Wolf3D code even if I didn't really understand it. Got to the level
of doing a single rotating Wolf3D style block, using a texture from the
game.
It was very slow, but I remember that I had tried to use a sort of naive
3D projection strategy that I had used for wireframe cubes in QBasic,
namely taking X and Y and dividing by Z. I think at the time, I didn't
have the idea of caching or linearly interpolating the values, so would
do the X/Z and Y/Z division for every column, and then walk across 64
columns for each face.
It sorta worked, but nowhere near fast enough to be scaled up to an
actual game.
Also in these years, went from Win3.x to Win95.
After 6th grade, family moved elsewhere (to a different part of the US).
Then (then around 7th grade) HDD hard crash happened (and I lost
basically everything). After this crash, went over to WinNT4 and Cygwin
(and dual-booting to Linux). I remember that after the crash, I also
went entirely over to C (so, the HDD crash was the final end to my
QBasic era).
Middle School also sucked, they just sorta expected me to sit around in
the classes all day with little else to do, which was boring and sucked. High-school experience was mostly similar (bigger challenge was just to
get through it and not freak out due to the general unpleasantness of
the experience).
Well, and I had also been told not to talk about any of the stuff from
the old school, etc. To just try to be "normal", etc. Which partly meant trying to adopt a persona sorta like "Forest Gump" as the archetypal
"normal person" (though in a way, also failing to recognize a few major details from the character). Though, ironically, it wouldn't be until I
was much later that I understood the "heart" or intent of the movie,
like him being a generally nice character and being witness to the
relative tragedies in the lives of those around him. Though, the main
thing at the time was sorta "try not to say or do anything that draws
needless attention" (and in some ways, I was actually someone somewhat different, *1), ...
*1: It wouldn't be until decade later that I started trying to reconcile
some of this.
Well, and in the High School years:
Getting and tinkering with the Quake source;
Then soon eroding Quake into a broken and unusable mess.
Also trying to write a small experimental OS kernel;
Got something to boot off a floppy,
also a basic filesystem and shell, ...
Writing a Scheme interpreter;
Early work on a JavaScript interpreter.
Then, taking college classes:
Tinkering with Quake 2 source;
Advancing my JS clone (then known as BGBScript);
Writing the first version of BGBCC
As a fork of the first VM for my JS clone;
Initially, for using C as a script lang,
Sorta like Quake 3...
But, this sucked...
Partly abandoning the Quake2 engine and writing a new 3D engine.
Tried to mimic the Doom 3 engine.
With stencil shadows and material shaders, etc;
Then Minecraft came out, and I pivoted to cloning Minecraft.
Failed to actually get a degree though...
I didn't exactly have "study skills".
Post college years:
Wrote a new 3D engine, aiming to be simpler/smaller/faster.
Was still a Minecraft clone though...
Was partly written in a custom language (BGBScript2).
BS2 was a language sort of inspired by Java and C#.
Went for a cruder art style, as I got annoyed with whiny gamers.
Crude sprite graphics, low res textures, ...,
these guys went away.
wasn't doing stuff to have people complain about the graphics.
Make graphics "retro" and these guys leave me alone...
Also the framerate wasn't quite so "dog crap".
Then started tinkering with the SuperH / SH-4 ISA;
Then got BGBCC to target SH-4.
This mutated into an ISA that I called BJX1.
Rebooted BJX1 into BJX2,
mostly to clean up some of the awful mess...
Mostly continued mutation of my ISA project.
Wrote a 3rd 3D engine (yet another Minecraft clone)
But, aiming to be lighter still...
Needed to run on a 50MHz soft processor with small RAM footprint.
...
<Present>
Now I am old...
Then again, it wasn't until I was well into my 20s that my coding skills mostly stopped being "total crap"... Did stuff, but the code wasn't
exactly "good"...
And, I have basically spent half my adult life tinkering with a custom
ISA, and I still don't know if there was a point to any of this...
But, at least the ISA project managed to be half-way interesting, even
if it is lacking any sort of practical use.
Does kinda seem like whatever potential value I had mostly just amounted
to nothing though.
Well, or I wasn't really ever much of anything, or maybe just defective...
...
--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)