MacHack: The Annual Conference for Leading Edge Developers is pleased to announce the addition of Donn Denman to the 2001 conference keynote. Already gathered for this one-of-a-kind Macintosh engineering reunion are five key players from the original Macintosh development project: Andy Hertzfeld, Guy "Bud" Tribble, Caroline Rose, Bruce Horn and Jef Raskin.
Denman joined the early Macintosh team at Apple in 82(?) when there were about 20 people working on the project. He was tasked with building a BASIC programming language interpreter for the new machine. Along with Bryan Stearns, MacBASIC was coded from scratch but was put on hold as the ship date for Macintosh 1.0 approached. Denman joined the programming effort for the System and wrote the original Notepad as well as part of the Calculator and Alarm Clock desk accessories.
After the Macintosh shipped, Denman brought MacBASIC to beta, but changing market conditions as well as the appearance of a BASIC interpreter from Microsoft caused the product to disappear without ever reaching release. According to Denman, "MacBASIC was the first IDE for BASIC (as far as I know), and supported multiple edit and execution environments running on the original 128K Mac."
This yearis MacHack Conference will take place from June 21-23 in Dearborn, MI. You can find more information at the MacHack Web site.