Another person has been added to the keynote panel for the 2001 MacHack, “the Annual Conference for Leading Edge Developers.” Now on board is Donn Denman, who was a member of the early Mac team at Apple in 1982 when there were about 20 people working on the project. He joins other key players from the original Mac development project: Andy Hertzfeld, Guy “Bud” Tribble, Caroline Rose, Bruce Horn, and Jef Raskin.
Denman had the job of 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.”
After the demise of MacBASIC, he continued to work at Apple for several years and even became a key contributor to early versions of AppleScript. Denman now works for PowerTV helping to bring the Internet to cable set top boxes.
Hertzfeld is a former Apple II peripheral and Mac OS design team member. Rose is a former Apple technical journal editor. Tribble is a former Mac OS user-interface designer. And Horn, while employed at Apple, was responsible for the design and implementation of the Finder, Resource Manager, Dialog Manager, the type/creator mechanism for files and applications, the desktop database, and the multitype clipboard design, among other architectural innovations in the Mac OS.
Raskin was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple and is a consultant on human-machine interaction design. His new book, “The Humane Interface,” received three printings in nine months — it is in use at 11 universities, and is being translated into five languages. The book has been nominated for two awards.
MacHack 2001 will take place June 21-23, in Dearborn, MI. The 72-hour developers marathon will open with the keynote panel conference at 12:01 a.m. (CDT) on June 21.
For attendees, discounted registration is available for early response. Full attendees can register for US$425 online, a savings of $100 of the regular registration rate. Students can register for $50, which includes all-access to the conference as well as a special meal package. Total attendance is limited to 400. Student attendance is limited to 50. More info is available on the MacHack Web site.