Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library (2017)
22 comments
·July 24, 2025whartung
JKCalhoun
Fortunately archive.org has MacTutor (which I think was the prequel to MacTech?): https://archive.org/details/mac-tutor/MacTutor%20Vol%201/
(I found the article [1] that showed me how to do animation with offscreen bitmaps on the Mac. A paper airplane game called "Glider" would follow soon after. [1] https://archive.org/details/mac-tutor/MacTutor%20Vol%203/pag...)
mrpippy
The home page has full collections of Inside Macintosh and “New” Inside Macintosh: https://vintageapple.org/
I would also love to see an archive of MacTech, their own web site has a pretty full archive but I always fear it’ll fall offline.
nxobject
I didn’t realize that IM was written for Pascal for that long, deep into the CodeWarrior days…
With my copy of THINK C, I felt like a medieval scholar having to learn Latin to keep up with the holy texts.
vdupras
What do you mean by "that long"? that Inside Macintosh ever had C snippets? AFAICT, Inside Macintosh was always about m68k assembly and Pascal.
joezydeco
I had a copy of the early "phonebook" single volume of IM and I wish I had saved it for posterity's sake. It had a LOT of rough edges.
drob518
Yea, me too.
wanderingstan
Concur. I was a young programmer and could only afford the first book. (or maybe it was volumes 1-3 together?) In any case, there were features I left out of my programs simply because I didn’t have the documentation. It really was a different world!
wmf
This really delayed me learning programming. $500 for Think C and almost $100 more for docs. Thank God for Frontier.
pjmlp
Back when Apple actually had great documentation instead of plain WWDC videos and generated out of code comments.
eschneider
Ooof, I still have entirely too many of those on paper. OTOH, when you need obsolete computer reference to do some bug fixes, they can be hard to find...
burnt-resistor
Super cool.
It's also neat to have some vintage, non-programming books about Apple culture. Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzani is one example.
joezydeco
I own TOI and it was interesting because Bruce was post-Apple and could tell some tales about certain things. And he was flush with Sun Microsystems cash to try some new stuff. My copy of the book came with a VHS copy of the Starfire concept video. Some interesting predictions that finally came true, 20-30 years later.
burnt-resistor
Meta MPK still has bits of Sun Microsystems logos here and there: back of the main entrance sign and some of the (repurposed) interior office window glazing.
</old-man-story>I used to care and feed a SPARCstation 2 and 4 at a nuclear engineering consultancy in the 90's. They had 128k ISDN internet access and one had expansion with commodity PC SCSI HDDs metadisked (risky like RAID0) with the existing drives.</old-man-story>
canucker2016
Edward Tufte books as well.
It's nice to have PDF versions, but I'm not giving up my Inside Macintosh volumes.
jwrallie
I am wondering if anyone here is programming targeting old hardware as a hobby. It is something I am thinking of looking into.
lachlanj
Truly an amazing effort to have these all in one place. I’d love to have some of these in hard copy, but this is the next best thing!
bradly
Very neat. ResEdit was my intro to programming and seeing that little Jack in the Mac really takes me back.
snvzz
Applaud the preservation effort.
Please consider an ipfs mirror of the site.
burnt-resistor
That'd be awesome. And mirror to internet archive so that it's available by torrent too.
musicale
Apple's own documentation really seems to have rotted. Of course it might help if Apple cared more about compatibility so that apps wouldn't break every year...
It is interesting that there's no references to Inside Macintosh.
Apple did not "give away" that documentation, you had to buy it. It was published by Addison-Wesley.
I was piled into a pickup truck with five other folks, as we went up to the bay area for an early (perhaps first) incarnation of MacWorld, where we saw all sorts of wonders. But one of them, hot off the presses, one the Inside Macintosh Vol 1-3 book.
It was $80 ($250 in today's dollars), I think, and I snatched one up. Mind, it was not easy to just plonk down $80, but that the zany stuff we did back then. Boy, were computers expensive!
Hard bound, paper sleeve, beautiful text and diagrams. Very nice.
Outside of that, I really like the Macintosh Revealed books they have here.
It would be nice to see a stack of MacTech archive issues as well.