32 years of Macintosh application development

He still has it. It still boots.

Mindwrap’s co-founder and CTO purchased his first Mac in 1984 and since then has been continuously developing applications for the platform. From 68000 assembly language through ThinkC, Metrowerks C++, to OS X’s XCode objective-C development environments, Apple has defined the state-of-the-art in graphical user interfaces and ease of use.

When Mindwrap was founded in 1988, we needed a good end-user platform that could easily support the large amounts of memory scanned documents require while also delivering the speed to scan and display them.

The Mac II. Whoa… Color!

At that time, Windows was a pretty front end to MS-DOS and was still a 16-bit OS. Memory was allocated in a maximum of 32KB chunks, while a 200 dpi scanned letter size page needed 400KB uncompressed. This meant that to hold a complete image, special code would be needed to switch between the memory blocks during scanning, display, and compression. As an alternative, Apple had just released the Macintosh II in 1987 and it looked perfect – up to 8MB of RAM and you could allocate an image buffer as a single huge chunk. Combined with its built-in power to handle graphics – and color – the decision to base our first workstation on the Macintosh was an easy one. Mindwrap went on to develop special hardware interface boards and drivers for the Mac II to receive high-speed desktop scanner output. As the years went by and Apple released Macs with SCSI and USB interfaces, Mindwrap systems could be delivered with scanners that used one of these popular high-speed methodologies.

We definitely speak Macintosh

But Mindwrap never forgot its roots and we remain the leading provider of enterprise document management and workflow systems for Mac-based businesses. With the advent of Apple’s sophisticated Unix-based OS X and the move to Intel processors in the early 2000’s, more and more businesses are using Macs for their high quality, reliability, and ease of use. They continue to be an ideal platform for document management workstations. The USB 3.0 port on the latest iMacs easily supports high-speed double-sided scanning of over 200 letter-size pages a minute.

Read more about Macintosh Solutions here.