I had the vague sense at the time -- and, to be clear, I wasn't a Mac person until the late 1990s so it's before I knew anything about the platform -- that for reasons I never understood it was more difficult to write code for the pre-MacOS Macs actually ON those Macs.
The other thing that may escape a modern reader is that the Mac timeline is really two eras: The original classic Mac era, with its Chicago-and-sepia look, and then a huge and stark transition to what was initially called OS X and is now called MacOS.
They are entirely different systems, but people outside the Mac world often mistake the transition to something more like Win95 -> NT/XP. It's not that. It's way more.
OS X is when the Mac got shiny to technical people, because it was (and is) based on FreeBSD, and even shipped (and ships) with a host of the sorts of tools you'd expect from a Linux distro. And it was introduced in a time when LAMP development was huge, so if you were in that world writing an interpreted language targeting MySQL and Apache it was EASIER to work on a Mac than it would've been to stay on Windows.
So, sure, today we see lots of devs and even whole software companies standardizing on the Mac, but in 1995 this would have been unthinkable.
The other thing that may escape a modern reader is that the Mac timeline is really two eras: The original classic Mac era, with its Chicago-and-sepia look, and then a huge and stark transition to what was initially called OS X and is now called MacOS.
They are entirely different systems, but people outside the Mac world often mistake the transition to something more like Win95 -> NT/XP. It's not that. It's way more.
OS X is when the Mac got shiny to technical people, because it was (and is) based on FreeBSD, and even shipped (and ships) with a host of the sorts of tools you'd expect from a Linux distro. And it was introduced in a time when LAMP development was huge, so if you were in that world writing an interpreted language targeting MySQL and Apache it was EASIER to work on a Mac than it would've been to stay on Windows.
So, sure, today we see lots of devs and even whole software companies standardizing on the Mac, but in 1995 this would have been unthinkable.