Re: Locating AppleScript Beginnings
Re: Locating AppleScript Beginnings
- Subject: Re: Locating AppleScript Beginnings
- From: John W Baxter <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 22:04:52 -0700
At 10:48 -0400 5/29/01, Bourque, Jason wrote:
>
Does anyone have the origins of AppleScript around. I did a search with the
>
web and couldn't even find out the year it was introduced.
>
>
Or even a short history.
UserLand Software (Dave Winer, Doug Baron, et al) described an
interapplication communication implementation for System 6.?. This was
presented to Apple, which elected to proceed with AppleScript
instead...UserLand proceeded with UserLand Frontier (much different from
the earlier ideas), released January, 1992. Frontier was soon adjusted to
comply with Open Scripting Architecture.
There was what I called a "stealth" release of AppleScript in the spring of
1993...if you knew where it was in the developer area on Apple's servers
you could have it. It was really released fall of 1993 in "System 7
Pro"...Apple's foolish and short-lived attempt to charge for some features
of System 7 while giving away the basic system.
At the time of the "stealth" release, Microsoft Excel had an excellent
scripting implementation in place...blemished slightly by the fact that
Apple had come along and "stolen" the terminology "text" from under the
implementation. (text of cell "..." was the formatted text found in the
cell). I developed and described, but didn't release for copyright and
lack-of-desire-to-support reasons, a modified aete which had a different
term (not well chosen, in retrospect). Canvas was also somewhat ready. I
had been scripting Excel in Frontier for some time when AppleScript came
out.
PageMaker was scriptable in Frontier using a large set of verbs written on
top of the do script verb...this was moved to AppleScript.
In these early releases, Finder scripting was, well, "different." [You
don't want to know!] Eventually, Apple released an extension which created
the "Scriptable Finder"...later Finder was rewritten and was scriptable on
its own. Finder terminology and encoding was cleaned up again, leading to
the "obsolete xxx" series of terminology things.
[Details subject to correction by those with better memories.] --John
--
John Baxter email@hidden Port Ludlow, WA, USA