Mac84 🍏Whoa, I found another floppy from original Macintosh team member Joanna Hoffman! 😳
It contains the earliest version of ResEdit I’ve seen, v1.0 D4 - from 1985! 💾
Ken McLeod@mac84tv That is cool! It beats 1.0 D12 by 3 months. Of interest, my copy prints a "Void" marker next to Gene's address, which might be an addition since 1.0 D4 in case some wiseguy tried to send in a bug report 40 years later...
Nigel Wadsworth 🇦🇺@_the_cloud @mac84tv At least you can still hand deliver to the office ;)
@mac84tv Poking around in the resource file, it looks like this was a PICT with text programmatically overlaid on it, perhaps to suggest a bullet being fired at the address if it was too far out of date? Hmm.
Chris Silverman 🌻@_the_cloud @mac84tv If I recall from my resource-fork spelunking days, things like ^0, ^1, etc represented variable text, right? Were there other messages that would have appeared there, or was that just because VOID might only be displayed at a later date?
Fascinating find.
@csilverman @mac84tv Yes, ^0 was a placeholder for variable text. The odd part is that the ASCII string "Void" doesn't appear in the CODE, STR, or STR# resources. Maybe it's obfuscated? This early pre-release version already had an alternate about box (hold down opt-cmd keys when selecting About) and pig mode (opt-cmd-shift).
@_the_cloud @mac84tv heh, I remember Pig Mode. I dimly remember it had some technical purpose—it wasn't just an easter egg—but I don't recall what that was.
Odd about the missing Void text. Makes me wonder if it's actually an error; maybe some other value was meant to go there, and isn't working for some reason, so the OS just displays "Void" instead?
@csilverman @mac84tv From what I recall, ResEdit in "pig mode" would try to load all resources into memory, i.e. be a memory hog. Since most Macs only had 128 or 512K at the time, resources were normally loaded only as needed and could be purged (assuming the Purgeable flag was set) to make room when some other resource needed to be loaded.
EDIT: I had this backwards. In pig mode, ResEdit tries to purge resources aggressively. It *pretends* to be a memory hog so purging and reloading occurs.
@mac84tv What is in that MacWrite file named "BigMac.let", I wonder.
@_the_cloud Ah, that’s unrelated to this disk but that was a follow-up letter from the software developer of MacCalc inquiring about a 512K Mac from Apple. It’s from September of 1985 and addressed to Alain Rossman, Apple’s software evangelist.
@mac84tv Nice. The thought had crossed my mind that this might have something to do with the never-released "Big Mac" project that was supposed to run UNIX. The 512K model was Fat Mac.
Fabien@mac84tv @Cdespinosa So weird to see "send bugs at {postal address}!