On 10/21/2011 2:14 PM, nospam wrote:

on a mac, the printer was basically another window. anything you could
draw on screen you could 'draw' to the printer. adding print support to
an app was trivial.

It is true that to write to the printer, you opened it as a window
and made the same API calls that you would to display on the screen.
Unfortunately, the Imagewriter driver made some "interesting"
optimizations, such as writing in a square aspect ratio in landscape
mode but a non-square aspect ratio in portrait mode. If one needed
to change that behavior, it made for "interesting" times.

But there was nothing trivial about writing an early Mac application.
The API was documented in three loose leaf notebooks, and contained
stuff that worked, stuff that didn't work, and some components, such as
CoreEdit, that either were vaporware or that Apple decided to keep for
itself.

The Mac's original native language was Pascal, with the expected weird
I/O extensions. But there wasn't a Pascal compiler which ran on the
Mac at release. Instead, you had to compile and link your programs on
a Lisa, write the result on to a floppy and then run it on one of
your Macs. I say one of your Mac's, because you needed a second Mac
to run an assembly level debugger.

--
Mike Benveniste -- (Clarification Required)
You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing
stranger than truth. -- Annie Leibovitz