Pioneering Apple Lisa Goes 'Open Source' Thanks To Computer History Museum (arstechnica.com) 81
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As part of the Apple Lisa's 40th birthday celebrations, the Computer History Museum has released the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under an Apple Academic License Agreement. With Apple's blessing, the Pascal source code is available for download from the CHM website after filling out a form. Lisa Office System 3.1 dates back to April 1984, during the early Mac era, and it was the Lisa equivalent of operating systems like macOS and Windows today. The entire source package weighs is about 26MB and consists of over 1,300 commented source files, divided nicely into subfolders that denote code for the main Lisa OS, various included apps, and the Lisa Toolkit development system.
First released on January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa remains an influential and important machine in Apple's history, pioneering the mouse-based graphical user interface (GUI) that made its way to the Macintosh a year later. Despite its innovations, the Lisa's high price ($9,995 retail, or about $30,300 today) and lack of application support held it back as a platform. A year after its release, the similarly capable Macintosh undercut it dramatically in price. Apple launched a major revision of the Lisa hardware in 1984, then discontinued the platform in 1985. [...] Lisa OS defined important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts, control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch automatic system shutdown.
First released on January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa remains an influential and important machine in Apple's history, pioneering the mouse-based graphical user interface (GUI) that made its way to the Macintosh a year later. Despite its innovations, the Lisa's high price ($9,995 retail, or about $30,300 today) and lack of application support held it back as a platform. A year after its release, the similarly capable Macintosh undercut it dramatically in price. Apple launched a major revision of the Lisa hardware in 1984, then discontinued the platform in 1985. [...] Lisa OS defined important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts, control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch automatic system shutdown.
PCBs (Score:3)
I want the Gerbers! The software there is ways to find,but the hardware takes more effort! /lot/ of missing tracks.
Turns out rat pee eats PCBs.. So a 'shed find' machine we have.. Unusable due to a
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I doubt board layout files haev been converted to that format. Probably pages and pages of large blueprints for the schematics and trace layers.
And yep, urine tends to be corrosive. Somewhat recently our group ran across some relatively new cat piss-damaged equipment that we had to rebuild. It's amazing how it can just outright dissolve copper clean off the board like it was never there. But then again I suppose that's the entire premise of circuit board etching... (I've also seen leaky capacitors do si
Re: PCBs (Score:2)
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I doubt board layout files haev been converted to that format. Probably pages and pages of large blueprints for the schematics and trace layers.
And yep, urine tends to be corrosive. Somewhat recently our group ran across some relatively new cat piss-damaged equipment that we had to rebuild. It's amazing how it can just outright dissolve copper clean off the board like it was never there. But then again I suppose that's the entire premise of circuit board etching... (I've also seen leaky capacitors do similar damage, though to a lesser degree, usually just kncking out the thru-holes)
Probably hand-taped PCB layout. No real CAD layouts back in 1980, when the original Lisa Development work was started.
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Altium and KiCad sure have simplified things!
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the gerber format is pretty simple -- i'd bet a scanner and some CV techniques could do a conversion to gerber, but I'm not sure if anybody has the time/equipment/motivation to undertake such a project
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So I'm not quite old enough that I really did PCB layout the "old way." But my understanding is Apple used actual paper tape and stickers for things like pads on transparency. I'm not sure how you would convert that to gerbers easily. It would be nice if someone has the transparencies somewhere so they could be scanned in at least so you could have a map to repair the PCB.
Altium and KiCad sure have simplified things!
I recently learned that the Apple ][ PCB was the first CAD layout at Apple. Reportedly, Jobs threw a fit when he saw the hand-taped layout, and. . .
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Hmm. Didn't know that. The PCB looked hand taped to me. I wonder what sort of CAD system they used. I heard Jobs had a number of "aesthetic" issues about the PCB layouts there while ignoring the electrical characteristics. An environment I am glad I don't have to work in.
I just heard that recently, and have no way to verify its authenticity.
I heard that the original layout was hand-taped, but Jobs hated it.
Never heard that he continued to micro-manage that which he had no reason/business to.
But I certainly believe it!
Finally (Score:1)
Just a Raspberry Pi and 3D printed case (Score:2)
It was just made to make the Mac look cheap. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It was just made to make the Mac look cheap. (Score:4, Informative)
It was just made to make the Mac look cheap.
I don't find the Lisa serious, not at that price. But it did make the very expensive Macintosh look cheap in comparison.
The Lisa predates the Macintosh. Its development began a year earlier, and its release also came a year earlier. They backnamed the last Lisa to "Macintosh XL". So it's more like the Macintosh made the Lisa look like crap.
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It was just made to make the Mac look cheap.
I don't find the Lisa serious, not at that price. But it did make the very expensive Macintosh look cheap in comparison.
The Lisa predates the Macintosh. Its development began a year earlier, and its release also came a year earlier. They backnamed the last Lisa to "Macintosh XL". So it's more like the Macintosh made the Lisa look like crap.
A Mac XL is actually different than a Lisa. The video timing was changed to make it have square pixels, like the Macintosh. Plus, it ran the Mac System and Finder, and could run Mac Software.
But the Lisa is why the Mac ended up with a 68000 CPU, rather than the 6809 its prototypes had. No one wanted to port the assembly-language QuickDraw from 68k to 6809.
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A Mac XL is actually different than a Lisa.
It's identical to the Lisa 2/10 [wikipedia.org], and a "Screen Kit" was available that made the pixels square, but you didn't have to install it (and it didn't come with the XL [macstories.net].) You could buy the Screen Kit at the same time as the Macintosh XL, and the dealer did the install [apple2.org.za]. So no, a Mac XL is not actually different from a Lisa. I did a MacOS install on a Lisa 2/10 once, at a small alternative school in Santa Cruz that one of my friends attended (the slightly less small alternative school I actually went to had an actua
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A Mac XL is actually different than a Lisa.
It's identical to the Lisa 2/10 [wikipedia.org], and a "Screen Kit" was available that made the pixels square, but you didn't have to install it (and it didn't come with the XL [macstories.net].) You could buy the Screen Kit at the same time as the Macintosh XL, and the dealer did the install [apple2.org.za]. So no, a Mac XL is not actually different from a Lisa. I did a MacOS install on a Lisa 2/10 once, at a small alternative school in Santa Cruz that one of my friends attended (the slightly less small alternative school I actually went to had an actual Macintosh, actually.)
I know I say a lot of mean things about Apple, but that's because I've been their customer before through multiple generations of systems. But by all means, tell me more, actually!
I thought that the Lisas that were sold as Macintosh XLs actually had the Screen Kit factory-installed, and were shipped in "Macintosh XL"-marked boxes, with Macintosh System and Finder, plus things like MacWrite, MacPaint, MacDraw and maybe even MacProject, rather than LisaOS.
But you are right that, other than the Screen Kit, they were actually Lisa 2/10s, hardware-wise, with a single 3.5" floppy rather than two Twiggy Drives. I worked for a Consultancy that actually had two 2/10s that we ran as Macs. I do
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It reflects the chaos and politicking of a very divided management of the era. Between November 1980 and January 1984 they released *three* new platforms: Apple III, Lisa and Mac. (Sure, they struck gold with the Mac and the rest is history.)
Imagine working on the Apple 2 during that era, you know the people keeping the company afloat, and having the best and brightest talent pulled off onto various competing side-projects.
Perhaps if Woz had hired a united management team to channel Jobs' creative energies
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I don't find the Lisa serious, not at that price. But it did make the very expensive Macintosh look cheap in comparison.
The NeXTStation was proof that Steve Jobs learned nothing from the Lisa mistakes: making an uber-expensive desktop that was cutting edge and big on the Wow! factor, but so expensive that people couldn't buy them and so no one was writing mass market software for them. Sometimes I think the Mac was less a revolution in Jobs' mind than a chance to salvage what he could from the Lisa by putting the concept in a much cheaper hardware package.
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The NeXT was odd. The market was already well established for workstations, and the NeXT didn't really do anything "new" except to not be beige. It also used no standards (even it's NuBus used a different form factor than standard NuBus cards), and you had to use the NeXT laser printer instead of other models, etc. We had on in the lab but it was like the 386 PC - off by itself and no one wanted to use it.
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We had on in the lab but it was like the 386 PC - off by itself and no one wanted to use it.
in the CS departments I am familiar with NeXT was popular due to the NeXTSTEP operating system. Academics loved it.
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The snag was that it didn't talk to other stuff. Ie, you couldn't use your normal Unix account on it (maybe whoever set it up left off a few steps), it didn't run X Window System, you couldn't print from it to the normal lab's printers, sharing files was a pain, etc. NeXTStep wasn't a big deal compared to SunOS; the UI was a bit newish but then so was NeWS. The only thing a bit interesting was Mach as the kernel.
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The snag was that it didn't talk to other stuff. Ie, you couldn't use your normal Unix account on it (maybe whoever set it up left off a few steps), ...
Or maybe that was intentional. I recall some unix workstations had class specific logins. They only wanted students in a particular class, or on a particular project, using them.
NeXTStep wasn't a big deal compared to SunOS ...
That wasn't what I saw. There was an absolute preference, comments along the line "I'm getting to use NeXT for my project, [so and so] is stuck with a Sun". Now when I talked to these folks it was really about objective-c and the associated NeXTSTEP APIs. Which live on today in macOS. The NeXT systems were a minority of the workstat
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NeXTSTEP the core of macOS today (Score:2)
I don't find the Lisa serious, not at that price. But it did make the very expensive Macintosh look cheap in comparison.
The NeXTStation was proof that Steve Jobs learned nothing from the Lisa mistakes
Hardly. The NeXTStation's operating system, NeXTSTEP, is essentially the core of macOS today.
I think the Mac was less a revolution in Jobs' mind than a chance to salvage what he could from the Lisa by putting the concept in a much cheaper hardware package.
Lisa and Mac were separate parallel projects. Jobs originally did not have control over the Mac project.
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It was vastly more advanced than the Macintosh was as well, as it was intended for serious office use not home use. The price was high, but also the price for actual workstations was also very high. The big difference is that workstations were often engineering oriented whereas the Lisa was office oriented. I saw one of these in use at a defense contractor, being used by an administrator's secretary. I thought it was pretty spiffy at the time, but not as practical as a vt100...
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It was vastly more advanced than the Macintosh was as well, as it was intended for serious office use not home use. The price was high, but also the price for actual workstations was also very high. The big difference is that workstations were often engineering oriented whereas the Lisa was office oriented. I saw one of these in use at a defense contractor, being used by an administrator's secretary. I thought it was pretty spiffy at the time, but not as practical as a vt100...
Hardware packaging-wise, it was very far advanced than the Mac, with swappable subchasses that would allow a repair tech to restore a broken Lisa back to service the n minutes. But as far as "advanced", hardware design-wise relative to the Macintosh, not really.
In the end, they both have similar hardware designs, at least fundamentally. That's why it was easy for Apple to tweak some video timing in the Lisa, and start selling it as the Macintosh XL, running the same OS and Application Software as the Mac.
And before Lisa ... (Score:4, Informative)
Despite its innovations, the Lisa's high price ($9,995 retail, or about $30,300 today) and lack of application support held it back as a platform.
I used a Xerox Star 1108 Dandelion LISP Workstation from 1985-1987 at my university when I was an undergraduate research assistant working on a NASA grant, Analysis and synthesis of abstract data types through generalization from examples [nasa.gov] in LISP -- it was pretty sweet and, if I remember correctly, more expensive than that. Still have my Interlisp-D manual.
Lisa OS defined important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts, control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch automatic system shutdown.
I'm pretty sure Apple got all the from Xerox and the Star [wikipedia.org] systems pre-dating the one I used.
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Got distracted before completing that last thought, so following up ...
Lisa OS defined important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts, control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch automatic system shutdown.
I'm pretty sure Apple got all that from Xerox and the Star [wikipedia.org] systems pre-dating the one I used.
Noting from the Legacy [wikipedia.org] section of the Xerox Star Wikipedia page (above):
Members of the Apple Lisa engineering team saw Star at its introduction at the National Computer Conference (NCC '81) and returned to Cupertino where they converted their desktop manager to an icon-based interface modeled on the Star. Among the developers of Xerox's Gypsy WYSIWYG editor, Larry Tesler left Xerox to join Apple in 1980 where he also developed the MacApp framework.
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Apple's interface was much different than what Xerox had, by a lot [apple-history.com].
Microsoft, OTOH, simply stole interface features from Apple. Windows didn't have a trash can or overlapping windows before they copied Apple.
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Apple didn't steal from Xerox, unless you believe using the broad concept of a windowed interface is "stealing."
You mean broad concepts like a rectangle with rounded corners, which Apple patented and sued Samsung over?
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rounded corners on products no longer exist! (Score:3)
You mean broad concepts like a rectangle with rounded corners...
...and 25 more physical attributes that, when all added up, prevented Samsung's own lawyer from being able to discern their product from Apple's.
Bringing up Samsung helps your point, but not in the way you wanted it to.
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Apple didn't steal from Xerox, unless you believe using the broad concept of a windowed interface is "stealing."
You mean broad concepts like a rectangle with rounded corners, which Apple patented and sued Samsung over?
Give it a rest.
If you look at the first Samsung phone after the iPhone debuted, it is plain to see there was a lot more stolen than rounded corners:
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbo... [vox-cdn.com]
Re: And before Lisa ... (Score:2)
Pretty sure they had an agreement in place on that since Xerox didn't think it was a product they could sell. They actually invested $1M in Apple at the time to develop the products better.
Re:And before Lisa ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think the Lisp machines were pretty cool. They're definitely not for the average end user of course, but the idea that it's Lisp from top to bottom, and that you could muck with any of that code at any time or better or worse was pretty interesting. Like Emacs, but for the entire system. Never used the Xerox, but I use a Symbolics, and the command line was great and there's been nothing I've been that matched (pop up a window of completions to select, a list of valid options or arguments to a command
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Re:And before Lisa ... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure Apple got all the from Xerox and the Star systems pre-dating the one I used.
No, Apple got it all from the Xerox Alto, which predates the Star by eight years, and which was the machine that Apple and Microsoft got to see the GUI concepts demonstrated on. I got to see some of those Alto machines once, but never saw them running, when I bought my Sun 3 (later 4) from David Case.
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No, Apple got it all from the Xerox Alto, which predates the Star by eight years, and which was the machine that Apple and Microsoft got to see the GUI concepts demonstrated on. I got to see some of those Alto machines once, but never saw them running, when I bought my Sun 3 (later 4) from David Case.
You sure it was the Alto? According to the Legacy [wikipedia.org] section of the Xerox Star Wikipedia page:
Members of the Apple Lisa engineering team saw Star at its introduction at the National Computer Conference (NCC '81) and returned to Cupertino where they converted their desktop manager to an icon-based interface modeled on the Star. Among the developers of Xerox's Gypsy WYSIWYG editor, Larry Tesler left Xerox to join Apple in 1980 where he also developed the MacApp framework.
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Despite its innovations, the Lisa's high price ($9,995 retail, or about $30,300 today) and lack of application support held it back as a platform.
I used a Xerox Star 1108 Dandelion LISP Workstation from 1985-1987 at my university when I was an undergraduate research assistant working on a NASA grant, Analysis and synthesis of abstract data types through generalization from examples [nasa.gov] in LISP -- it was pretty sweet and, if I remember correctly, more expensive than that. Still have my Interlisp-D manual.
Lisa OS defined important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts, control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch automatic system shutdown.
I'm pretty sure Apple got all the from Xerox and the Star [wikipedia.org] systems pre-dating the one I used.
Yes, Steve Jobs got it from demos at Xerox PARC of the Alto, which preceeded the Star.
Don't remember how much the Dandelion cost, but it was surely more expensive than the Lisa. I am guessing two or three times as much! The Dandelion was a (very nice) cheap Lisp Machine. It's big brother was the "Dorado".
I think I have that right. I used an Alto a little bit, but (being entirely focused on the MIT machines) didn't pay much attention to the Xerox machines. A bias I always regretted a little because they had
Re: And before Lisa ... (Score:1)
Re:And before Lisa ... (Score:4, Informative)
The drag and drop was a bit newish, but moveable windows was long established before 1984. The other stuff as you say was on the Star, but also other systems who also copied ideas from Xerox as well. But it hurts the myth of Steve Jobs to say that he just did a lot of copying.
Now if it was the Macintosh, then yes you could argue that much of this was new on the "home" computer market. Lisa was priced a lot more than that, but also cheaper than workstations, so was sort of an in-between computer. Not really powerful enough or designed for computing, it was more of a straight up secretary/administrator computer.
The Mac was a bit interesting because it managed to get some of the core of that into a cheaper model which was a lot of good engineering. The Lisa probably proved that it was possible.
Re:And before Lisa ... (Score:4, Informative)
Despite its innovations, the Lisa's high price ($9,995 retail, or about $30,300 today) and lack of application support held it back as a platform.
I used a Xerox Star 1108 Dandelion LISP Workstation from 1985-1987 at my university when I was an undergraduate research assistant working on a NASA grant, Analysis and synthesis of abstract data types through generalization from examples [nasa.gov] in LISP -- it was pretty sweet and, if I remember correctly, more expensive than that. Still have my Interlisp-D manual.
Lisa OS defined important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts, control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch automatic system shutdown.
I'm pretty sure Apple got all the from Xerox and the Star [wikipedia.org] systems pre-dating the one I used.
Nope. Not all.
First off, there was no code or hardware sharing between PARC and Apple; it was all reverse-engineered from memory!
But it wasn't stolen, either. Jobs gave Xerox a bunch of Apple stock (100,000 shares!) in return for an Agreement from Xerox to allow them to develop similar technologies as the Star without getting sued.
In the end, Xerox sued Apple anyway; but 190 of Xerox' 198 Claims were Dismissed.
Plus, Apple made several significant improvements to Xerox' Windowing and Screen Drawing systems as well as the entire concept, which the Star never had. Pull Down Menus and the Menubar, Direct Manipulation of Documents, automatic Window Redraw and Drawing into partially-obscured Windows, Dual-Fork Files, the Finder, the Clipboard, Desk Accessories and more that we all take for granted in a GUI environment, are all uniquely Apple innovations.
Here's a great article from one who was there:
https://www.folklore.org/Story... [folklore.org]
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I'm pretty sure Apple got all the from Xerox and the Star [wikipedia.org] systems ...
Nope. Not all. ...
First off, there was no code or hardware sharing between PARC and Apple; it was all reverse-engineered from memory!
But it wasn't stolen, either.
I didn't mean to imply any of that, but that they got (some of) the ideas from Xerox.
Apple deserves a lot of credit, but not all the credit ...
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I'm pretty sure Apple got all the from Xerox and the Star [wikipedia.org] systems ...
Nope. Not all.
First off, there was no code or hardware sharing between PARC and Apple; it was all reverse-engineered from memory!
But it wasn't stolen, either. ...
I didn't mean to imply any of that, but that they got (some of) the ideas from Xerox.
Apple deserves a lot of credit, but not all the credit ...
But neither does Xerox.
If you keep pushing backward in the Timeline, you start seeing the seeds that finally grew into the Xerox Alto and Star, then into the Apple Lisa and Macintosh.
But in fact, the actual idea of a Networked, Hyperlinked Computer equipped with a Touchscreen(!) GUI traces back to 1930, and a person named Vanveer Bush, and his theoretical (and quite accurately-prescient) "Memex":
https://arstechnica.com/featur... [arstechnica.com]
But, for some reason, Xerox never gets accused of ripping-off Bush, Stanford Res
Great... (Score:2)
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A few museums. I know of one that has a Lisa with the recalled twiggy drives.
The Wow factor was strong with this one (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Wow factor was strong with this one (Score:4, Insightful)
The Lisa was graphically astounding for the time.
And more visually consistent that Windows 10/11...
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The Lisa was graphically astounding for the time.
And more visually consistent that Windows 10/11...
Not visually stunning compared to the Lisp workstations ca 1978 (or their follow-ons in the 80s and 90s). But orders of magnitude price difference.
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I remember getting the first Smalltalk 80 books, and thinking about how it was all cool, but it was a very long time before I saw a computer able to run it. It had all the graphical stuff early on when even many high end workstations didn't have the resolution for it and vector graphics were still a thing.
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And more visually consistent that Windows 10/11...
It's also more visually consistent than OSX, which uses two different widget sets, and used to include three if you counted iTunes (which you had to, since it was required to talk to so much Apple hardware.)
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Xerox PARC (Score:1)
This wouldn't be /. if one of us old farts didn't mention Xerox PARC's prior art in graphical user interfaces
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You wouldn't be an old fart if you didn't fail to notice that someone did it fifty minutes before your comment, so you didn't have to
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Hang on, let me push a button to call my nurse to adjust the back support before I respond angrily to the "old fart" insult.
Copyright (Score:2)
1982, Xerox
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1982, Xerox
Actually more like 1973.
Pascal? (Score:2)
That's probably what surprised me the most. Building an OS in Pascal had to have been a fun time...
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It was possible to use Assembler and Pascal together, so low-level stuff was possible.
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It's probably a result of Apple having a Pascal implementation on the Apple II series. Pascal is easier to interpret than C. Apple Pascal was based on UCSD Pascal, which also explains some of the peculiarities of ProDOS [stackexchange.com] (which supported [wikipedia.org] block devices with controllers supporting the UCSD Pascal firmware protocol.) Since Apple had already written an OS in a mix of Pascal and assembler (ProDOS) it made sense to do it again for the Lisa, so they could utilize their Pascal investment (including the skill investm
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ProDos was written in straight assembly, possibly SOS (Apple /// OS) on which ProDos was sorta based had some pascal but I doubt it. You are right about the disk structures coming from Apple Pascal, especially the way 512 Byte sectors were implemented on the 5 1/4 floppies as well as how block devices were generally recognized.
Re: Pascal? (Score:2)
People fail to understand that Pascal is not a bad language. And, the object oriented extensions made to language enabled it to move beyond the basic training language Worth designed.
I developed for the 128K Mac on a Lisa before compilers became available for the Mac. Sold my vast collection of Inside Macintosh (which described the features in detail). The original three (I think) were what was needed to get started. I donâ(TM)t recall how many volumes I had when I sold it at a flea market in 1996,
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I have glorious memories of pouring through the final numbered one, Inside Macintosh VI (covering System 7), back in the day.
You could knock out a Clydesdale with that thing it was so huge.
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Speaking as someone who was there, I can tell you Pascal is a terrible language. I'd love to throttle the person who decided to use it for teaching programming. Too hard for beginners, and not powerful enough for experts. There's a reason it's mostly dead, today; I'd argue that even Fortran was better.
So basically, you had to break from the standard to make it usable. (And while I haven't seen OOP Pascal, you'd be hard-pressed to co
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What were the alternatives, really? There was no one-true-language concept at the time. Using VMS at the time it had a gazillion different languages (all modified slightly to be incompatible with other systems). Unix was C but unix was still too hippy for a lot of people, but if you used BSD Unix it also had a gazillion different languages. Structured languages were all the rage at the time, and Pascal was the most commonly known. Apple also used UCSD Pascal for it's Apple II. There were much bigger o
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That's probably what surprised me the most. Building an OS in Pascal had to have been a fun time...
Most operating systems had been written in assembler, but Algol, Lisp, PL/I, and also C were famously used. Since there was a PASCAL compiler for the machine, seems pretty obvious.
I had a Lisa for a few years. Basically useless. (Score:1)
It was passed onto me by my Uncle when he switched to a Mac back in 1986ish.
It had the basic apps (text editor, image editor) and something like 3 games. I tried getting into using it but the lack of anything for it just made it a paperweight, PCs were just so much more accessible to a poor kid that learned how to refurbish and frankenbox parts from discarded PCs into usable systems.
I went away for two weeks and my room-mate put one of his speakers on top of the external hard drive (which was the size of a
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At least the later Lisa models (not sure about early ones) could be loaded with MacOS 5, effectively turning them into a Macintosh. The UX was about the same as using an actual Macintosh at the time, no real perceptible difference except that the machine was about twice as big and the screen slightly larger.
Modern port? (Score:3)
I am tempted to take it on for fun, but I would guess younger and brighter minds than mine will beat me to it.
I am however going to go on a wild code snoop to see how much we have forgotten since computer science died in the universities.
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It's been a while, but what was the process for changing window titles? I thought the Window Manager stuff came in pretty early -- was that a System 7 thing too?
Cool, now how about A/UX and Apple System 8 (Score:2)
It would also be nice to have A/UX, Apple System 8, and NeXTSTEP source code, basically everything that led up to the creation of Mac OS X 10, and I think it's definitely about time they port MacOS GUI environment to the Linux kernel... well, at least they better do it before Microsoft beats them to the punch with Windows for Linux 3.11
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All three of those would be awesome, but I'm definitely curious to see how much of A/UX (besides AppleSingle/Double) was present in Rhapsody PR. Maybe people being reminded what was possible by the time of OS 8.6 will be inspired to try simplifying our current bloated *nix ecosystem.
My, how Apple has changed (Score:2)
We used one... (Score:1)
Yep, too expensive (Score:1)