30 Years of the Apple Lisa and the Apple IIe 171
walterbyrd sends this excerpt from an article that might make you feel old:
"At its annual shareholders' meeting on January 19, 1983, Apple announced two new products that would play a pivotal role in the future of the company: the Apple Lisa, Apple's original GUI-based computer and the precursor to the Macintosh; and the Apple IIe, which represented a natural evolution to the highly successful Apple II computer line. ... The Lisa introduced a completely new paradigm—the mouse-driven graphical user interface—to the world of mainstream personal computers. (Note that the release of the Xerox Star workstation in 1981 marked the commercial debut of the mouse-driven GUI.) The Lisa’s elevated retail price of $9995 at launch (about $23,103 in today’s dollars), slow processor speed (5MHz), and problematic custom disk drives hobbled the groundbreaking machine as soon as it reached the market. ... Around the time of the Apple III’s launch, Apple was so sure of the new computer's success that it had halted all future development of Apple II-related projects. But by 1982, as it became clear that the Apple II wasn’t going away (in fact, it was becoming more popular than ever), Apple scrambled to upgrade its aging Apple II line, which had last been refreshed in 1979 with the Apple II+. The result was the Apple IIe, which packed in several enhancements that regular Apple II users had been enjoying for years thanks to a combination of the Apple II’s plentiful internal expansion slots and a robust third-party hardware community to fill them."
if the apple //e is 30 years old (Score:5, Funny)
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II+
Re:if the apple //e is 30 years old (Score:5, Funny)
Oh great. Now you've done it. All the dinosaurs will wake up and chip in about what ancient and obscure computing platform was in vogue when they became of age. Of course, I would never stoop to such foolishness, except to mention that toggle switches still trigger a brief rush of dopamine in my decrepit brain. Ahh, the blinky lights.
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Would I be off-topic or just not-dinosaur-enough if I said my first computer was an Apple //e?
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To be an asshole and a pedant, one uses brackets with the normal Apple ][ computers and slashies with the //c :-D
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BMO
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To be an asshole and a pedant, one uses brackets with the normal Apple ][ computers and slashies with the //c :-D
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BMO
Yes you do, but the Apple //e computer (which followed the Apple ][+ and Apple ][ computers) used slashies before the //c..
I guess as an off-topic dinosaur asshole pedant, my first computer was and Apple ][+ as I held out for the basic in rom and improved color graphics over the Apple ][ model, but all my friends got the Apple //e and I was the one that had to suffer 40 column w/o native lowercase, since I couldn't afford an 80-column card :^(
As a stopgap I "liberated" a 70-column HRG patch that understood
Re:if the apple //e is 30 years old (Score:5, Funny)
Christ pal, you coulda just yelled "Get off my lawn!"
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>Apple //e computer ... used slashies before the //c.
>anon coward's pics
I.... I forgot...
I'm going to have to claim old timer's disease.
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BMO
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>Apple //e computer ... used slashies before the //c.
>anon coward's pics
I.... I forgot...
I'm going to have to claim old timer's disease.
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BMO
Relax. That old computers from Apple were not famous for having a great memory! =P
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Remember your PR#6 to boot the floppy from Applesoft in ROM. Cloads were for cheapskates ;)
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6 CTRL-P, if you were in ROM monitor.
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Oops... correction, you had to press RESET on the II+, the II went right into Integer BASIC, unless you had the Applesoft BASIC on a plug-in card I guess. We had it on diskette at my school.
As I recall, on the initial board revs of the ][, there was no power-on-reset meaning you had to hit RESET which dropped you into the monitor ROM, although later board revs added power-on-reset. Even with power-on-reset, on the ][ there wasn't autostart code in the rom so you had to get into BASIC and type PR#6 (assuming that almost every plugged their floppy controller into slot#6) to boot the floppy. Applesoft BASIC could be loaded from the floppy (or cassette) into main ram (assuming you had enough), or
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I had a professsor who used to like talking about programming via touching a nail to a series of contacts, inputting one bit at a time, and the wonderful innovation of a button that would input the whole byte a then *gasp* auto increment the input to the next byte in memory for you.
And to be fair to him, his ability to program in machine code (a hex pad with an enter key) strait into memory and have programs actually work as part of live demonstrations was
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Didn't most people populate Slot 0 with a 16k RAM card on the ][+?
Mine (er, the one my parents bought us in 1982...) had one, and I'm pretty sure they weren't pimping it for my benefit.
It was less common on the vanilla ][s because they had Integer BASIC in ROM and used Slot 0 for AppleSoft Basic cards, and I think if you put a 16k card in the ][ you had to load AppleSoft basic from disk.
The irony being that the 16k card wasn't ordinarily useful because it shared the memory pages with AppleSoft on the ][+ an
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Yes, most ][+ users added a 16k card. The //e was much more expandable memory-wise - I think my moms had 768k. The big expansion for the //e was the 80 column card which enabled double hi-res graphics with a whopping 16 colors.
The first computer I ever used was an 16k Apple ][ with tape drive at my elementary school. It was a real pain to load or save data on it. The next year (or maybe it was 2 or 3 years later, but still elementary school) the school got 4 48k Apple ][+s with Disk ][ drives and those were
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I can still hear the sound of the floppy drives. Man, that's music to these old and tired ears.
The IIe was my first computer I programmed for as well. But the Macintosh was much more magical in what it could do.
Sheldon
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PDP-11
6502 assembly ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know the feeling. The //e is what I cut my teeth programming on ^_^
That was my second love, after the II+. Still miss the programming when it was direct and simple.
I am so glad that I learned assembly language on a 6502. If I had started on an x86 I probably would have had a bad attitude towards assembly like most who did start on x86. To be fair, x86 became a whole lot better once it went 32-bit. However 68000 remains my favorite. Learned it via coprocessor boards in our Apple //e systems. PowerPC was OK, it had its moments.
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The manual that came with my II+ had a section on 6502 Assembly that I believe was actually written by Steve Wozniac. I learned assembly in third grade just from that manual.
Could you imagine a kid nowadays putting down Angry Birds to figure out assembly code on his Intel i7 core-whatever? I don't know how kids today or in the future are going to learn the basics like we did.
(And get off my lawn!)
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6809 (Score:2, Insightful)
I, too, started with assembly on 6502 (well, the Commodore 64 had a 6510 to be precise). Then 68000 on the Amiga. Good times. After that I mostly developed on ARM2 and ARM3. That was the most beautiful instruction set I've ever seen. All effects on conditions codes are optional, which makes for some very efficient code. Bloody fast, too. For that time anyway, I've not kept up with current trends.
But, for sheer fun, nothing beats the 6809 CPU. You can feel it's halfway between the 6502 and 68000. Underrated,
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The really neat thing about the 6809 is the auto-increment index registers, and having two stacks. It's like it was purpose-designed for running Forth.
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And don't forget program counter relative addressing modes for position-independent code.
When I started on x86 I was shocked to learn there was no PC-relative addressing mode. What a hassle.
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Re:6502 assembly ... (Score:4, Interesting)
My first computer was an Ohio Scientific. 6502, 4k RAM. I added 4K (maxed the MB) and purchased the assembler. Loved coding up assembly code, wrote my own terminal emulator, had to wire in the RS232 interface. Shunned the Apple ][ because OSI did lower case and had graphic gliphs in upper 128 bytes of character generator, great for writing games. Apple ][ only had solid colored blocks, but could do hi-res graphics (cough) if you could afford 48k RAM. My second computer was an IBM Portable Computer (sewing machine case luggable) used for work. Third computer was an Apple Proforma, last of the 68020 family. My kids loved that one. Several fruit colored iMacs, skipped the basket ball version, have a couple flat screen iMacs, MacBooks, you name it. But I prefer my Fujitsu running FreeBSD.
I was working at a retail computer store when the Lisa came out. I recall sales falling through the floor with no new product, customers flocking to the new IBM PC (sold exclusively at IBM stores). Our store had to hire and train a Lisa specialist. He would spend an hour prepping for a demo, setting up a word processing window and a spreadsheet window to show how cool cut and paste was. He did not set that up in front of the client because of how long it took to load those two programs. I think he sold one.
The //e was introduced with the slogan "Apple II forever!" I doubted it then but was impressed by the longevity of the e and the c. Pleasantly surprised that the Lisa and Mac survived adolescence. Many Apple retailers did not, as they lacked the cash reserves Apple had amassed.
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DTACK?
Yes, I loved it! DTACK Grounded was also a fun read.
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that must mean I'm .... really old now.
But are those elephant floppy disks still good, nothing forgotten?
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Very probably just fine. I last booted my //e a year or so ago. Came up just fine. And yes, one of the disks was an Elephant.
EMS: An elephant never forgets. [modernmechanix.com]
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Hush. I remember the original Apple ][. Imagine how I feel.
I remember playing with the Lisa (perhaps Lisa 2 it was '84) in a computer showroom. Later when the Macintosh came out, I was surprised by how much smaller it was.
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Poor Lisa, she never had a chance (Score:2)
Lisa was better, its price was the killer ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Macintosh was such a superior machine in nearly every aspect that the unsold Lisas had to be hauled off to the landfill.
I don't know about the Mac being superior. I had the chance to use both, the Lisa had many advantages over the original Mac.
The problem with Lisa was the $10K price tag. That just put it out of reach of many Apple II developers so a market never really materialized, unlike the Mac which was affordable by such developers.
Prior to the first native Pascal, and later C compilers, friends and I were actually using 68000 coprocessors for Apple IIs to write Mac software in assembly. A Microsoft Basic program running on the Mac would read the binary from the serial port, poke it into RAM and jump to it. I am not saying this was cost effective compared to buying a Lisa for Mac development, but we had time and no money. One of my friends actually completed a strategy game port from PC to Mac in this manner. I'm not sure but I think it was one of the SSI games. Its not as crazy as it sounds. Core non-UI code could be debugged to a degree on the Apple II's 68000 coprocessor.
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Memory protection was not invented on a PC so your history lesson is way off. Also, Windows/386, which not only predates Win95 but Windows 3 (it was a Windows 2.1 variant) was protect mode.
Microsoft offered Xenix on the 286 and IBM offered TopView starting back in 1985. Both had protected memory.
Sorry, but the Lisa was not the "original first step" for protected memory. It does fit nicely with Apple lore though.
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Anybody remember having to use a Lisa to develop for the Mac? Cross compile. Put it on floppy disk. Then test it on a Mac. And every step was painfully slow. Compilers. Linkers. Inserting a floppy disk. Copying the file. Ejecting the disk.
Inserting the disk into the Mac had a much
The Lisa was a flop (Score:4, Informative)
The Lisa had a mouse and was pushed by Apple management due to the high price tag. The Apple IIe was much cheaper, had visicalc, supported a certain level of commodity hardware and wasn't pushed by Apple management.
The Apple IIe outsold [statisticbrain.com] the Lisa 20 to 1.
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Imagine that. A computer priced at around $2000 outselling one priced close to $10000. I guess it wasn't all gold paved sidewalks, peace and free love back then.
Re:The Lisa was a flop (Score:4, Informative)
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Oh, it was all gold paved sidewalks, peace and free love back then.
Only the price of gold was MUCH much lower.
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Imagine that. A computer priced at around $2000 outselling one priced close to $10000. I guess it wasn't all gold paved sidewalks, peace and free love back then.
Even more significantly -- that's about $24k in 2012 dollars.
Re:The Lisa was a flop (Score:5, Informative)
Except he didn't give proper credit. While Xerox had the first commercial sale of the mouse, it was invented by Doug Engelbart [wikipedia.org].
AAAAA!! Wrong! (Score:2)
Except he didn't give proper credit. While Xerox had the first commercial sale of the mouse, it was invented by
Doug Engelbart [wikipedia.org].
Telefunken in Germany beat Engelbart and Xerox to it and was already selling a mouse called the "Rollkugel" before Engelbart's demo [oldmouse.com] as an optional peripheral with it's computers. Engelbart did his demo on December 9, 1968, Telefunken was already selling mice by that time.
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Lisa oh Lisa (Score:2)
The Apple IIe was my first computer. At Bell Labs I also used the Lisa, which was interesting and a bit buggy but also the first "fun" computer to use.. but I had more fun using TROFF.
Apple ][ note: schematics included (Score:4, Interesting)
If I remember correctly, my Apple ][e included all the board schematics, which made it easy for everyone to make cards/etc. A few years ago I found my AppleSoft basic tutorial, which was pretty neat.
Ah, the good old days. Too bad nothing's beaten Wizardry when it comes to RPGs.
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The logo on it still said "Apple //e". This [wikipedia.org] is what the one I owned looked like, and that was in 1984. The link you refer to says that the ][e was renamed to the //e when the //c came out, but the //c did not come out until 1985.
I also remember the splash startup logo on my //e saying "Apple //e" at the top of the screen, which differed distinctly from "APPLE ][+", which I had been used to seeing previously at school.
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Well, I had a revision B motherboard (something I specifically requested, because of certain features I wanted to experiment with), and the extended 80 column adapter, which expanded my system memory to 128k (bank switched, since only 64k was addressable), but the CPU in my system was definitely not a 65c02.
My system also did not have the MouseText characters that came out with the //c, so by the link you are referring to above, I had an unenhanced Apple //e. Nonethless, both the logo on the case and th
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That's right - the rev B motherboard. That was required for double high rez with the 80 column card. I was lucky my mom got a rev B because I had no idea, nor should I have had any idea at that age. Not sure what other features the rev B had though. I do know it was also expandable to about 1.5MB of memory using every slot (we used 4 slots and had around 768k, but I think only Appleworks really took advantage of it).
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Well, as I no longer have the machine, I can't look inside to make sure. I do remember what it looked like on the outside very vividly however (being my first computer of my very own), as well as the startup page (because it was different from what I was used to at school).. Also, this was before the //c came out (I don't remember exactly how much time went by before the //c, but it wasn't long.... probably less than a year).
And yeah... pedantry. Still, a fun trip down memory lane.
BYTE (Score:5, Interesting)
For an amazing read look up the BYTE magaxine review of the Lisa. The article takes you on an amazing trip where the writer is trying to describe for the first time so many things we dont even think about.
IIRC he describes the 'pointing device' (mouse) as "about the size of a pack of cigarettes that moves a point on the screen - The screen then uses small pictures of common tasks to represent your actual desk top.
Watching them describe 'the desktop metaphor' when they dont know what it is a crazy reminder of just how fast this all happened...
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And the actual review of the Lisa on BYTE magazine: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-the-development-of-apples-lisa/ [modernmechanix.com]
Re:BYTE (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the review is here: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/the-lisa-computer-system-apple-designs-a-new-kind-of-machine/ [modernmechanix.com]
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Lisa (Score:2)
Re:Lisa (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is what they got wrong. It was not a stand alone device. It really required a bigger more powerful machine to work well. That is why I move to the much less powerful, useful, rugged Palm V. At the end of the day, a partner was more useful than a competitor.
Apple has gotten that right now. Data can be viewed across a range of devices. Entered anywhere viewed anywhere. Which is the critical difference between the iPhone and Newton. Data Compatibility between the software. Google is also doing a very good job at this using Google Drive. MS still seems to be focused on making sure they receive a license payment for each individual box.
Lisa was better than most people realize (Score:4, Insightful)
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It was also, to my understanding, much nicer for hardware technicians. The case opened up easily, and everything was handy to get at. Certainly in comparison to the original Mac (and many of the later models too) which required weird screwdrivers and had exposed high voltage parts. No one who's accidentally touched a flyback transformer in a Mac ever forgets it.
The slide-out reference cards under the keyboard were also a good idea, and were present on the Mac during prototyping but never shipped. Too bad, o
(sigh) memories (Score:3)
The Apple ][+ was the very first computer I ever really programmed on to any significant degree, which I used at school, and I had a //e at home myself in 1984.
To date, it remains the only computer that I ever worked with which I felt I understood thoroughly. I had a reference book "What's Where in the Apple" which documented all of the Apple's i/o memory location/blocks, zero-page addresses, and practically every ROM procedure entry point, which I ended up practically memorizing.
I have many fond memories of writing for that platform, and I doubt I'll ever forget it.
Heck, I still remember some of the hex opcodes for 6502 instructions: EA was NOP, 4C was JMP, 20 was JSR.... and 60 was RTS.
I remember I was sad when Woz decided to leave Apple, because I knew, even then, that meant that Apple was probably not going to take the Apple // line any further.
Thirty years ago... tomorrow (Score:2)
Wouldn't it have made more sense to post this tomorrow, which is actually the 30th anniversary of the press release, rather than the day before?
//e + Mockingboard, skyfox, ultima, music const (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone a Mockingboard fan?
I cut my teeth too on BASIC and 6502 assembly back then when I was 11 years old in junior high school.
The mockingboard had excellent info w/ assembly examples etc. for working with the sound chips.
Used to use the 6522 interrupts on the mockingboard to do different things not always related to sound!
Huge ultima fan especially with mockingboard.
Music Construction Set -- landmark interface from child prodigy Will Harvey
Anyone wire up their non-maskable interrupt to jump into the monit
Jobs Fired (Score:1)
The problem with the Lisa was that it was built by a bunch of ex-HP engineers, to whom a $10,000 price tag wasn't extraordinary -- it's not like they bought their own equipment, the company did. But that was dramatically different from the Apple II+ customers, to whom $1500 was affordable. The Macintosh use
Slow? (Score:2, Informative)
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Tell me, how did you jump over to our timeline?
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Says the person that never used a Disk ][. The C64 disk drive was only marginally faster than the C64 tape drive, which is to say, go take a nap while loading or saving anything. Also the C64's lack of expandability made it obsolete faster.
I'm not saying the C64 was bad - great graphics and sound for the price at that time compared to pretty much anyone else, but certainly not better in every way. Now Amiga OTOH...
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Story Title... (Score:2)
Is it just me or did anyone quickly read the story title as: 30 Years of the Apple Lisa and the Apple LIE:
I guess my subconscious view of Apple is showing...
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You must be reading this on a Chromebook to mistake Lisa for LIE:
(Go on, do tell us another one...)
It was the IIE part in "30 Years of the Apple Lisa and the Apple IIE" that looked like the word LIE to me...
(you might want to work on that reading comprehension...)
what $2,000 USD got you in 1983... (Score:3)
Funny how PC prices still hover in the same general price range.
In 1983, for about $2,000, I got this (I was 13):
Apple //e, 64KB
Green Monochrome Apple Monitor
Apricorn 80-column card (for displaying 80-columns, duh)
Imagewriter Printer (9-pin dot matrix, noisy as heck)
Two 5-1/4" disk drives (and disk drive controller card)
PFS Write (Word Processor)
Snooper Troops (game)
Cheap Particleboard Desk
1-year subscription to NIBBLE magazine
Best Christmas gift ever. Of course, this was my ONLY Christmas gift for some time, as it depleted a huge chunk of my parents' savings, so after this Christmas gifts consisted of one or two pieces of $50 software (like Wizardry, or Bard's Tale).
This setup lasted me until late 1988 when I saved up enough summer job cash to build a 386 clone.
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PFS Write (Word Processor)
Snooper Troops (game)
Ah, the days when you had to pay for decent software, and you probably did not get the source.
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Ah, the days when you had to pay for decent software, and you probably did not get the source.
Pay? Not when we had Copy II Plus.
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Yes!!
And don't forget Locksmith 5.0!!! Damn that program was fast. Back when you could control the alignment of the read/write head through IO and write half-tracks.
Actually, I don't miss that at all. Heh.
Praise And Horror For The Apple IIe (Score:3)
As I mentioned in another post, I very much appreciate my parents for getting an Apple IIe (with the 80 column text card) but it took me long after to consider how expensive that piece of hardware was for them just in 80s US$ let alone what it could cost today!! My fond memories of coding my own stuff (like a school presentation with ASCII graphics) and playing "Agent USA" and "Ultima 4" and "Ultima 5" and other games but it never really sunk in until these anniversaries came around just how expensive the hardware and software really was.
So while I salute my parents and Apple for providing me with a neat little computer to play and do some BASIC code on, I am really shocked it went anywhere due to the price tag.
remember? (Score:2)
3d0g
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I'll byte... 3d0g was the DOS reentry point. You'd typically type this when you wanted to exit the monitor (which you would enter by CALL -151)...
So, how about this one.
CALL -151
FA62:4C 59 FF
3D0G
or
CALL -151
B942:18 60 BAAA:00 3D0G
That bring back any memories?
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Anyone else misread that as "Apple Lie?" (Score:2)
I wonder what that says about my perception of the company :)
The problem with the Lisa (Score:5, Interesting)
The Lisa got so many things right. A good GUI, a protected-memory operating system, and a hard drive file system. The problem was price. The price problem was due to trouble at Motorola. The Motorola 68000 didn't do instruction backout properly, so it couldn't handle page faults correctly. That was corrected in the Motorola 68010, but the 68010 was too late for the Lisa. So the Lisa had to use a compiler hack to work around the lack of instruction backout.
Because the 68000 couldn't do instruction backout, Motorola didn't make an MMU chip for it. So the Lisa had a custom MMU built out of a large number of ICs. This pushed the parts count and cost way up.
Because good hard drives weren't available for personal computers when the Lisa was designed, Apple built their own, the LisaFile. Apple's attempt at hard drive manufacturing produced a slow, expensive, unreliable drive.
By the time the Lisa shipped, Sun was shipping the Sun I, and the UNIX workstation era had started. The Lisa was in the same price range as UNIX workstations, but the Sun I had a 68010, Ethernet, and hard drives that were expensive but worked.
If it weren't for the instruction backout problem on the 68000, the history of computing could have been completely different. The Lisa was usable, but overpriced. The original Macintosh was an appallingly weak machine - one or two floppies, a slow CPU, and very little memory. This tends to be forgotten, but the original Mac was a commercial failure. Not until the hardware was built up to 512K and a hard drive was supported did it become profitable. (Or usable.) But it was saddled with an OS designed for 64K of RAM. (The original MacOS had a good GUI, but under the hood, it was a lot like DOS - not only was there no memory protection, there wasn't even a CPU dispatcher. The original Mac was supposed to have only 64K of RAM (most of the OS was in ROM) but shortly before shipment, it was increased to 128K.)
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From the way you write it you make it sound like the memory fault exception handling was broken, but to be fair to Motorola that was how it was designed to operate. The 68000, like other CPUs in its class at that time, was never really designed for a memory protected OS. The cost of implementing the necessary hardware was significant and Motorola probably figured they would offer the 68010 for customers who wanted that sort of thing and were willing to pay for it. Apple just couldn't wait.
It was great for a Unix workstation, though (Score:2)
As a personal computer, yes, it was overpriced and sluggish. As a workstation that you could run UNIX on, though, it was one of the best deals around. And yes, UNIX was available for it almost as soon as it was released--that's why my company bought one. It wasn't supported by Apple, but it was a commercially supported BSD, and even with the price for the commercially supported version, it was hands-down the cheapest UNIX workstation available.
(As for the original Mac, it's often overlooked, but one of the
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The original 68000 CPUs couldn't take TLB miss exceptions properly--some of the instructions would partly execute when you tried to take an exception. So you couldn't really do virtual memory properly with them, even with external logic (which people tried to do). The 68020, which came much later, had a built-in MMU.
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Nope, the Mac II had a separate MMU. Mac LC released several years later, and based on the same CPU, didn't.
The 68030 did...
Re:The problem with the Lisa (Score:5, Informative)
What is instruction backout?
When a page fault occurs part-way through an instruction, the CPU has to interrupt execution. After the page has been brought in from disk, execution can resume. But it must resume as if a page fault hadn't occurred. The usual approach is to restart from the instruction that failed, which means that instruction gets done twice.
The problem is that some instructions aren't idempotent - doing them twice has effects different than doing them once. On some CPUs, an instruction can call for both a memory access and a register increment. If the memory access faults, the register must not be incremented twice. So either the instruction has to be backed out to the state just before it started, or the state of the partially executed instruction has to be saved in the interrupted state. (The M68010 actually did the latter; there were extra words in the state saved on an interrupt to hold data about partially finished instructions.)
This gets much more complicated in superscalar machines, where multiple instructions have to be undone. See these lecture notes [vt.edu] from a CS course at U. Vermont, which discusses "back-out", and its successors. In machines with out-of-order execution superscalar processors, you can't just back up; undoing the state of the CPU on a page fault is a big deal. It works, but it took Intel 3,000 engineers to design the Pentium Pro to do out of order x86 code.
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Everybody had originals? (Score:2)
Ah, what fond memories of watching BBS screens drawn at 150baud after my dad repurposed a broken acousticly coupled modem. ah, the day we found a dead 300baud modem card in the garbage was a h
Apple //e story (Score:3)
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I read it as "Apple Lie". Silly marketing people.
Heh. Me too. I thought this was going to be a fun diatribe+flamefest.
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I know it sounds childish to say Derp Derp, I thought it said Apple Lie, but no seriously I had to re-read it also.
I never would have made that mistake 6 years ago.
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Oh come on, the Lisa was very innovative in getting a number of large corporations and state institutions to shell out large amounts of money on extremely sub-par hardware.
No, I think Sperry Rand can claim prior art on that one with their ridiculously overpriced/underperforming Univac near the end of the Univac cycle...
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I remember the digitizers. My school had some Koala Pads [wikipedia.org]. I had a //c and though the computer is long gone, I still have a box of floppies for the nostalgia.
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I can understand your bashing. Apple is not the same company anymore. But the topic is about the old Apple. Before it became as evil as Microsoft. Probably as evil as Google will one day become.
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I like turtles
I like Turtle Graphics.