Congratulations on a truly neat project! I'm particularly impressed by the revision control system. Since acquiring a Mac Plus and an SE/30 I've wanted to try a bit of programming, but have not really known where to start. It sure looks like Think C + Amend might be a good place to begin!
Edit: have we hugged it to death? I can initiate a connection but never get a login prompt.
You'll want inside macintosh 1-5 and a decent starter book. If you want system 7 then you need the newer inside macintosh volumes or volume 6 at least.
Think Pascal was the easiest way for me to get started. It fits well on the screen. I use resedit to do resources and then you just link the resedit file in the project preferences. The book Macintosh Pascal Programming Primer is pretty good for learning how to start.
Think Reference is useful too, or ObiWan for an online reference.
If you prefer C, it's a little idiosyncratic on the Mac. Code warrior, older versions, will run, and so will Think C. There was also Symantec C++ for the Mac that I never tried.
If you want the apple tools, they were released on CDs called ETO in the latter years. MPW is ... well it gives you a shell but it's got a learning curve.
You can also cross compile to the Mac with Free Pascal. There's also a Modula-2 system called MacMETH. Microsoft had a version of Visual C++ that had a Mac compiler too. Sometimes the easiest thing is to set up an appletalk share and do your coding on a familiar machine with a large monitor.
As a few other folks have said, the inside Macintosh books are extremely valuable references for Mac-specific code. I keep pdfs of them open the whole time I’m working on my Macintosh projects.
I recapped my original Mac Plus but the floppy drive is toast. I picked up a BlueSCSI kit that I have yet to assemble — it ought to allow me to boot from a "hard drive" (SD card on the BlueSCSI, I think) and so bypass the floppy drive entirely.
I think I would like to get a THINK C up and running again and write a game using the old Mac Toolbox.
I built a decent Mac look-alike (under emulation, Raspberry Pi + miniVmac) that might actually make for a better environment.
There some irony that jcs blog post is making the front page of HN, given that he claims to have been permanently banned from HN (pg says otherwise) and created lobste.rs about 10 years ago as an alternative.
Logging into a BBS as a kid was so cool. It felt illegal to get a phone number, dial it up, poke around, download whatever games they had, sometimes they had MUDs too. Then you'd look for new numbers to other BBSs.
Edit: have we hugged it to death? I can initiate a connection but never get a login prompt.