Rainbow Hill Pty Ltd was an Australian Company that I founded in early 1992
together with my wife (Monika). In 1992 I had a contract with Alcatel SEL
AG of Stuttgart (Germany) and needed a company to invoice them. Once the
contract was over, back in Perth (Australia), Monika and I decided to keep
the company alive to develop and market a program for the Macintosh. That
program was MacDOS. It provided a command line interface for the Macintosh.
MacDOS received positive reviews in the technical press:
- MacUser, an Australian magazine on Macintosh
products
- MacWorld, the then most important Australian
magazine on Macintosh products
- Howard Publications, an American publisher of
sixteen newspapers
- MacWelt (in German), the leading German
magazine on Macintosh products
I still think that it was a brillian idea. At the time, if you had to delete,
copy, rename, or move files on the Macintosh, you had to click and operate on
each one of them individually. Apple, realising that this was a problem,
had developed AppleScript to let you control repetitive operations. There was
also a competing program (Frontier) that had been developed for the same
purpose. But both programs were complicated and difficult to use. You had
to create scripts with an unusual syntax that most users would find difficult
to understand. With MacDOS, you only needed to start the program,
cd to the folder with the files you needed to process, and use
commands like
delete,
copy, and
rename
with wildcards to do what you needed to do. No fuss at all.
But I made a bad mistake: I should have called it MacScript and only loosely
modelled its commands on DOS. Instead, I spent quite a bit of effort in
reproducing the quirks of commands like XCOPY and put off most of its
potential users by including the dreaded word DOS in its name.
1992 was a time when the the WorldWide Web was still to come in any serious
way, and the Internet was perceived by most as non-commercial. And yet, I
managed to sell copies of MacDOS all over the world, from European countries
to Canada and the USA, from South Africa to Japan. It was fun to be a
MasterCard, VISA, and Amex merchant and receive orders by fax and email.
I just didn't succeed in selling a single copy within Australia, despite
advertising and promotions.
In 1994 I developed MacDOS 2.0, which was fully AppleScript-able. It was
still a commercial product. Then, when I moved to Switzerland towards the end
of 1994, I converted the program to shareware as MacDOS 3.0. You could
download the fully functional package but without the chapter of the manual
that explained the commands. I would send you the missing chapter with all
the explanation of all the goodies once you registered the shareware. Before
leaving Australia, I also closed Rainbow Hill Pty Ltd.
I wrote MacDOS entirely in C. I cannot describe the
thrill I felt the first time I saw the
C> prompt in a
Macintosh window. I even implemented the possibility of interrupting commands
by pressing cntl-C. That was the only situation during my programming
career in which I used setjump/longjump. For those of you who do not know
the programming language C, it is a mechanism that lets you jump from one
point to another within an application. You can see it as a super-GOTO and
obviously the longjump mechanism is anathema for most "enlightened"
programmers. It is a maintenance nightmare, but with cntl-C you must be able
to drop everything you are doing, pop out of who knows how many functions, and
return to a point of the application where you can redisplay the prompt.
I needed longjump to do that.
I do loathe DOS and only got used to Windows under duress, but MacDOS forced
me to buy a PC with DOS 5. You might have noticed that I insist in writing
cntl-C instead of the MS-sanctioned ctrl-C.
.
