Editing Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (section)

==History==
MPW was started in late 1985 by Rick Meyers, Jeff Parrish, and Dan Smith (now Dan Keller).  It was going to be called the Macintosh Programmer's System, or MPS.  (Notice that coincidentally the three last names start with MPS.)  'MPS ' has always been the [[creator signature]] of the MPW Shell as a result of this.  Since MPW was to be the successor to the Lisa Workshop, they decided to rename it the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop. Before the arrival of MPW, Mac applications had to be cross-developed on a Lisa.

The MPW Pascal compiler is descended from the Lisa Pascal compiler. Apple's [[Larry Tesler]] worked with [[Niklaus Wirth]] to come up with [[Object Pascal]] extensions which Ken Doyle incorporated in one of the last versions of the Lisa Pascal compiler. This enabled [[MacApp]].

Early contributors included Rick Meyers (project lead and MPW Shell command interpreter), Jeff Parrish (MPW Shell editor), Dan Smith (MPW Shell commands), Ira Ruben (assembler and many of the tools including Backup, PasMat, and more), Fred Forsman (Make, Print, SADE, and assembler macro processor), Al Hoffman (Pascal compiler) Roger Lawrence (Pascal and C compilers, including the error messages), Ken Friedenbach (linker), Johan Strandberg (Rez, DeRez, RezDet), Steve Hartwell (C libraries), and Dan Allen (MacsBug, editor).  The Apple Numerics Group also contributed math libraries.

MPW 1.0 was completed on September 24, 1986.  A shell [[memory leak]] was fixed on October 10, 1986, and MPW 1.0.1 was born.  MPW 2.0 was completed on July 20, 1987. MPW 3.0 was done November 30, 1988 and included a completely new C compiler.<ref>{{cite magazine |title=Developer Developments |journal=[[Macworld]] |date=April 1989 |volume=6 |issue=4 |page=93 |url=https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8904_April_1989/page/n94/mode/1up |first=Lon |last=Poole}}</ref> Around the same time, the beta version of the [[C++]] compiler as well as [[MacApp]] 2.0 (for Object Pascal) were made available.<ref>{{cite magazine |title=C++ and MacApp 2.0 |journal=[[Macworld]] |date=April 1989 |volume=6 |issue=4 |page=91 |url=https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8904_April_1989/page/n92/mode/1up |first=Lon |last=Poole}}</ref>  MPW 3.1 and 3.2 came in the next few years, with MPW 3.3 released in May 1993, adding distributed tools support and incremental linking.<ref>{{cite magazine| magazine=[[MacWeek]]| date=24 May 1993| url=https://archive.org/details/MacWEEKV07N21/page/n11/mode/1up| page=12| title=MPW 3.3 release through APDA| first=Raines| last=Cohen| volume=7| issue=21}}</ref> MPW 3.4 was completed July 14, 1995, and MPW 3.5 was done December 17, 1999. MPW 3.6 was under development when work was halted in late 2001.

During MPW's twilight years, Greg Branche supported MPW unofficially through the Apple MPW-dev mailing list. The list, and the lists.apple.com server that hosted it, was planned to be shut down January 17, 2014,<ref name="turnOffLights2014"/> a decision that was later reversed.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://lists.apple.com/archives/mpw-dev/2014/Jan/msg00014.html|title=Reprieve!|access-date=2014-05-27|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140214130934/http://lists.apple.com/archives/mpw-dev/2014/Jan/msg00014.html|archive-date=2014-02-14|url-status=dead}}</ref>