30 years ago this week, Turtlesoft sold its first copy of MacNail. It was a set of estimating templates for Macintosh Excel 1.03, spruced up from the spreadsheets we used for Turtle Creek Carpentry. MacNail came on one floppy disk. The label had a nail head that we whipped up in MacPaint, and printed at 72dpi dot matrix.
As we overhaul the Goldenseal source code this year, it’s fun to think about how much has changed since 1987.
Back then, the Mac Plus was an expensive, high-end machine that came with 1 megabyte of RAM. That was generous for the time (MS-DOS maxed at 640K), but programmers still had to be frugal. Our staff spent many hours thinking of ways to shrink the MacNail spreadsheets by 1 or 2K. It was a big deal, deciding whether to use 1 or 2 or 4 bytes for a value.
These days, programmers can count on a few 1000 megabytes of RAM. It’s often reasonable to use an 8-byte value, just in case that number gets too big in some weird future world. We wouldn’t want Goldenseal to fail when you start work on your 2-billionth project, right?
Back then, it took 3 minutes just to open the MacNail spreadsheet file. Progress bars and spinning cursors were vital, to let people know the computer hadn’t frozen. Having a big progress bar helped, so you could do something else across the room, and see when it was almost done.
These days, processors are 100x faster. This week we removed all the code that spins cursors, because modern machines are so fast they don’t need a rotating clock or hourglass. We kept the progress bars, but they’ll be a subtle little bar at the bottom, rather than a full-size window. There aren’t many things that will take more than a second or two.
When we first began programming Goldenseal in the mid 1990s, it took 7 minutes to rebuild the source code, even if just one word changed. Large changes had to run overnight, and complete project rebuilds took a whole weekend.
These days, Goldenseal rebuilds in 15 to 150 seconds, depending on how much changed. That means many more cycles of writing-and-testing per day. Practically speaking, programming is much less draining when you can make a change and just try it out, rather than triple-checking to make sure the logic is correct before daring to build it. Programmers can think more about large design issues, and less about punctuation and typos.
Back in the 80s, programming languages were still young. They broke a lot, and required complicated coding to accomplish anything. Just drawing a button on the screen could easily take 30 lines of rather complex code.
These days, C++ and other languages have matured. They’ve added well-tested libraries, so it’s possible to write code that runs fast, and won’t crash. There is still plenty of learning curve for each new library, but the Internet makes it relatively easy to find tutorials and answers.
Meanwhile, Goldenseal Pro is just starting to fill data into breakdown tables. Half the work seems to be throwing out all the old code that we don’t need any more.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
Turtlesoft.com
