Macintosh Toolbox
More info
- Creator
- Apple
- Released
- 1984
- Type
- Programming interface in ROM
The routines in the Macintosh ROM that gave every program windows, menus, dialogs and text fields for free — and in the same stroke decided what a Mac program would look like.
The 64 KB of ROM in the first Macintosh held both an operating system and what Apple called the User Interface Toolbox: QuickDraw for drawing, a Window Manager, Menu Manager, Control Manager, Dialog Manager, TextEdit for text boxes, and a Resource Manager that kept icons, menus and dialogs separate from the code. A program didn't draw a pull-down menu, it asked for one. The price was that every menu looked the same, which was the whole point.
Calls went through A-traps: 68000 instructions beginning with A that the processor doesn't recognise and therefore hands to a table, where each entry points into ROM or to a patch in RAM. That let Apple fix ROM bugs from the System file and let programs replace routines machine-wide. Three volumes of Inside Macintosh from 1985 described it all. The Toolbox grew colour in 1987 and PowerPC in 1994, became a tidied-up subset called Carbon when Mac OS X arrived, and was not retired until 2012.