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There's a passage in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs where Jobs moves Andy Hertzfeld to the Mac team by unplugging his computer and driving it over to the Mac building.

This got me wondering: what kind of computers did the Mac team use to develop software? Clearly it's a standalone machine, since it can be unplugged and physically moved, but I can't find any information about this.

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  • Which Mac? There are a number of evolutions Apple's Mac OS has experienced. The current one is BSD-based.
    – user188153
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 11:13
  • The original Macintosh, in the early 1980's.
    – Bill
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 11:14
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    @JoshCaswell link leads to another story, Black Wednesday, in which Andy Hertzfeld gives details about the context of his move and which computer it was that Steve Jobs unplugged and moved (an Apple II).
    – mouviciel
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 20:13

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Bruce Horn's article "I Don't Have a Computer" on Folklore.org indicates that the Lisa was the development machine for the original Macintosh:

I was ready to go, and I had been on the Mac team for several weeks but still hadn't gotten a Lisa, the development machine we used.

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    @mouviciel: Apple II's first ("Meanwhile, the Lisa team had been writing their first code in Pascal, running on Apple IIs, because the Lisa hardware wasn't ready yet."), then I believe they switched to using Lisas as well.
    – jscs
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 13:12
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    @JoshCaswell: this seems to provoke the obvious next question "what computers did the original Apple II team use for development" ;-)
    – Doc Brown
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 14:12
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    @DocBrown - there's a great interview with the original Apple II "team" here
    – kdgregory
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 14:48
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    @DocBrown NeXT cubes brought back from the future :D
    – jscs
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 14:58
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    Damn, I knew it, Steve W. borrowed my Delorian when I visited him in 1976 ;-)
    – Doc Brown
    Commented Dec 6, 2016 at 16:10

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