Basic at Apple is one of my favorite pre-Mac storylines, from Woz inventing Integer Basic in a period of several months (which he described as the hardest thing he's ever done) to Apple having to be dependent on Microsoft for its floating-point Basic, as VisiCalc became the killer app for the Apple ][.

In the OP, there's a great comment hidden away in the easy-to-miss comments section. It's by Arthur Luehrmann, a Dartmouth professor who was asked to create a manual from Macintosh Basic. He wrote what I consider one of the best essays about "computing literacy": "Should the Computer Teach the Student, or Vice-Versa?"

http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/seminalarticle1...

Pasting Prof. Lehurmann's comment on MacBasic here for posterity...it has some interesting musings about the importance of personal programming and has a Steve Jobs cameo to boot:

> Andy gets this sad tale right. My partner Herb Peckham and I were free-lance writers brought in to create a manual for Macintosh Basic, which we did. More about that later. I first met Donn when we were both serving on the ANSI Basic Standards committee, whose goal was to set up specifications for a modern version of Basic that would contain loop structures, if-then blocks, and procedure calls, so the notorious GO TO statement could go away. Tom Kurtz, co-inventor of Dartmouth Basic, was also active on the ANSI committee. I've known Tom since 1965, when I was teaching physics at Dartmouth, and I knew Tom was keen on implementing a modern, structured version of Basic, and getting beyond the old (and much-criticized) line-number-dependent language that was becoming ubiquitous on micros, thanks to Bill Gates's interpreter (which was mostly correct, except if you wrote FOR I = 1 TO 0, the loop would be executed once:no pre-test). I had added graphics primitives to Dartmouth Basic around 1976 and developed an X-Y pen-plotter to carry out graphics commands mixed in with the text being sent to Teletype terminals. My interest on the ANSI committee was to make sure the new Basic had a standard set of graphics statements. It became clear that Donn also wanted Macintosh Basic to be a modern, structured language that would leave Applesoft Basic as a memory. I pressed for Mac Basic to also include the graphics statements we were standardizing on the committee, and Donn ultimately agreed. That was around 1979. By that time I was at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley heading a program to teach kids about computers, both at LHS and remotely via Teletypes in Bay Area schools. We also had Commodore Pets, and we outfitted a van to take wheeled desks with mounted Apple IIs out to schools. Essentially, we taught programing in Basic on all systems. I left the Hall in 1980 and, with Martha Luehrmann and Herb Peckham, started Computer Literacy Press. Our purpose was to serve the needs of all the new computer users that were suddenly appearing, thanks to micros. Our first book project was "Apple Pascal:A Hands-On Approach." Apple liked it and included a copy with each Pascal software package it sold. (If anyone is interested, I still have a dozen copies of the book.) That brings us to Macintosh Basic.

Apple invited us to create "Macintosh Basic:A Hands-On Approach" and have it ready in time for shipping with the software, which was six or eight months away. Herb and I took up offices at Apple and met with Donn several times a week to review progress. And what a pleasure it was to work with Donn! He was good at explaining details we had questions about, and he was completely open to ideas we had about the graphics elements. The same was true of Marianne Hsiung. So, as the months went by, it looked like Macintosh Basic would be the user-oriented language for the Mac:and it would be great. Our book was finished and in page proof, ready for the press. BUT . . . Steve Jobs invited me into his office one morning. Our office was a few doors away, and we talked from time to time. Steve seemed uncertain about something. Then he handed me a disk and said, "What do you think about this?" I took it to our Mac, loaded the software, and what I saw was Microsoft's version of Basic for the Mac. Against Donn's and Marianne's creation, it looked antique: no structured programming elements, line numbers essential for GO TOs, primitive graphics commands, limited data types:a throwback, in a word. So, the next day I went back to see Steve. He asked, "What do you think?" I said, "Steve, it's a piece of shit." He didn't say anything, but looked grim. A week or so later, we learned that Apple's Macintosh Basic project had been canceled. Andy Herzfeld explains the situation accurately. The Apple II was the cash cow at that time, and without Applesoft Basic it would be worthless. Gates played hardball, and Apple caved. And so, sitting on a shelf in our basement are the page proofs of our book, "Macintosh Basic:A Hands-On Approach." It's the best of the 20 or 30 books we've done. But the saddest thing to me is that the Mac shipped with no user-level programming language. It was the beginning of the end of ordinary people writing their own programs. Computer buyers became customers of programs (now renamed "applications") written by experts, not creators of their own, albeit modest, programs. It didn't have to be that way.