Edited sentence: At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market.During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW.Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even exist yet, and given that this was the actual program used by Apple's world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations.In Stephenson's description of the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop development environment, he wrote:.In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running—probably even before they'd gotten it up and running—was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done.It was what Apple's own engineers used to write Macintosh code.MPW did not exist at the time the original Macintosh was released in 1984—the first version of MPW did not come out until 2 years later, long after the Mac OS was already "up and running"—so the only way to write programs for the original Macintosh was to cross-compile them from a Macintosh XL, although Stephenson is correct that MPW's primary interface was CLI-style.MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the premier software development system for the Mac.…[after running MPW]…