Nick Turner's
Macintosh experience
working with the Macintosh
since the beginning
I started working with the Macintosh in 1984 at Apple, helping them create the first version of Inside Macintosh. I worked on an Apple III and a Lisa, writing the hardware section of the manual.
After purchasing my own "Fat Mac" (with an amazing 512K of RAM!) I began consulting as a Mac programmer. I designed an innovative resource-based pseudo-multitasking shell for Sierra Systems. Back at Apple, I built a set of assembly language tools that became part of a factory automation system.
In the summer of 1987, my friend Hugh Daniel lured me to Cambridge, MA to work with him at Wedge Computer, on a fascinating port of the Unix PixRect graphics library to the Macintosh. We spent six months laboring to reverse-engineer 68000 assembly code and reassemble it using Quickdraw calls instead of the native Unix calls. When the snows came, we could open NEWS windows on the Mac, alongside normal Mac OS windows.
By this time I was established as a Mac consultant, and had begun my own projects in evolving art, artificial life and genetic programming. Between Mac programming projects at Apple, Ungermann-Bass, and other companies, a personal venture called Fractal Heart Art had emerged, which still continues today. I am working on a variety of interesting Macintosh-based applications.
The old 512K Fat Mac is long gone -- my workhorse machine today leaves it in the dust!
Onward and upward!
