Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one has more comments already so maybe that one is the dupe
Except the other one was posted two hours earlier...
Is the difference due to promotion or randomness? Reminds me of business competition.
LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
31–40 of 87 posts
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except the other one was posted two hours earlier...
Is the difference due to promotion or randomness? Reminds me of business competition.
Likely the descriptiveness of the title. This one has three “things” in the title - Lisa, open source, computer history museum. The other has just one - the Lisa. Nothing about the license, nothing about the museum.
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#33Lisa was the really expensive Apple aimed at businesses right? I think I've seen it mentioned on the 8-Bit Guy's show. I wish I had visited the CHM when I was out on the west coast. I'll have to add it to the list for next time. I have been to the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. For those of you travelling there, I highly recommend it and Recycle PC (in the same area). They've got a ton of old working systems you…
I bought a Lisa system and lots of accessories at a garage sale when I was a kid. The guy had kept all the receipts for everything, and the total, including a couple of 5MB and one 10 MB hard disk, was over $20,000. He used it for business, and it had some business apps that I don't recall. I sold the whole pile of stuff for a few hundred dollars (and I paid less than that for it, I don't remember how much, but I was…
Have you seen the TV series "The Americans", which is set in the early 80's, and has spot-on era props and scenery? They have a Commodore Pet (with the adult-sized non-chicklet keyboard ;) in their real estate office! It makes sense that deep cover KGB spies like Phillip and Elisabeth would have the computer for the masses not the classes, comrade!
The kids Paige and Henry even have the exact same Star Wars blanket I had (which their parents tuck them into at bed time, then sneak out and skulk around stealing Star Wars secrets from the US Government).
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#34I’m reading Jaron Lanier’s new book on VR and he mentions coding some of the earliest haptics on a Lisa.
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#35I think a better name for this would be Mac OS series 0. Going back to being serious seeing the source code for LisaOS sounds exciting . Apple changed my life when I used an Apple 2 in grade school. My first computer I got for Christmas was a G5 iMac. In college I used MacBooks and they replaced one with a newer model. I’m not sure I would have my current job if I wasn’t in Steve’s paradise .
I feel that calling it "Mac OS series 0" comes too close to a touchy subject for it to be considered a better name. Raskin's original vision for the Macintosh project was a text-based UI. (The Canon Cat was a descendant of that design.) Only later did Macintosh gain support for the Lisa-style graphical programs. I don't know the timeline, but I can point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh which says: > Smith'…
Geh, in reality the Mac didn't get an operating system in the true sense of the word (proper process separation, memory protection etc.) until like... System 7.6 or maybe even later in OS X. Classic Mac OS was more like an overgrown API than a proper OS environment. A real step backwards from the Lisa...
It's baffling to me that instead of cost reducing the Lisa, Apple ran two parallel product lines (Mac and Lisa), similar to each other and competing with each other.. and from reading histories it sounds like it came down to territorial turf wars and Job's ego that made this the case. Lisa wasn't Jobs baby... so it was killed.
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you're correct; Mac XL sounds right to me, too.
Yup, Macintosh XL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_XL ). I remember a company (forget the name, likely long gone) at a Macworld Expo (in Moscone!) in the late 80s or early 90s selling refurbished Lisas and Mac XLs.
Sun (something or other)... they were an Apple reseller that not only did the refurbs but also wrote the software that allowed the Lisa to run 128K ROM Mac stuff.
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that calling it "Mac OS series 0" comes too close to a touchy subject for it to be considered a better name. Raskin's original vision for the Macintosh project was a text-based UI. (The Canon Cat was a descendant of that design.) Only later did Macintosh gain support for the Lisa-style graphical programs. I don't know the timeline, but I can point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh which says: > Smith'…
Wow, the 6809 was the Chrysler Cordoba of 8 bit microprocessors! It was tastefully luxurious and highly orthogonal, sporting a powerful hardware multiply instruction, and soft Corinthian Leather. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6809 https://youtu.be/tfKHBB4vt4c?t=10s But I'm sure glad they ended up using the 68K for the Mac.
Using a 6809 they could have made a far cheaper, far more accessible machine. Moving to the 68000 meant moving to more expensive support chips, and required more RAM, and the like.
But it did mean they could use the QuickDraw code from the Lisa. And in the end the Mac interface ended up being a kind of dumbed down ripped off version of the Lisa, instead of the Jeff Raskin thing with hot keys and the like of early prototypes.
I just wish they'd worked instead on making an actual cost reduced Lisa, using the same Lisa OS, but without the crappy copy protection and the overpriced hardware...
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel that calling it "Mac OS series 0" comes too close to a touchy subject for it to be considered a better name. Raskin's original vision for the Macintosh project was a text-based UI. (The Canon Cat was a descendant of that design.) Only later did Macintosh gain support for the Lisa-style graphical programs. I don't know the timeline, but I can point to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh which says: > Smith'…
Geh, in reality the Mac didn't get an operating system in the true sense of the word (proper process separation, memory protection etc.) until like... System 7.6 or maybe even later in OS X. Classic Mac OS was more like an overgrown API than a proper OS environment. A real step backwards from the Lisa... It's baffling to me that instead of cost reducing the Lisa, Apple ran two parallel product lines (Mac and Lisa), s…
Lisa wasn't Jobs baby
True in one sense... false in another!
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#39In the earliest days of the Mac (1984) you had to have a Lisa to develop for the Mac, because that was the machine the Pascal compiler ran on. I bought a Lisa and a Mac for this reason. It'll be fun to see the source code.
In the earliest days of the Mac (1984) you had to have a Lisa to develop for the Mac
Looks like the concepts of strictly separating users and developers, as well as paying extra to develop for the platform, have been with Apple for a very long time. From what I've read, even developing for and on the Lisa itself was a huge hassle.
The other concept which Apple might've pioneered with the Lisa is forced obolescence --- the software as well as the custom RTC chip were designed to not handle dates beyond 1995, less than 15 years after it was released: https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/01/lisa_cloc...
(In contrast, while the original IBM PC didn't have an RTC, DOS was able to handle dates up to 2235. Plus, for better or worse, users and developers were considered simply different extremes of the same demographic for much of the PCs early history --- computer magazines would print Asm listings or hexdumps to be entered in DEBUG, essentially letting users gradually become developers too.)
I certainly agree the Apple Lisa was "ahead of its time"... but not in a good way.
Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum
#40In the earliest days of the Mac (1984) you had to have a Lisa to develop for the Mac, because that was the machine the Pascal compiler ran on. I bought a Lisa and a Mac for this reason. It'll be fun to see the source code.
Funny enough the Lisa ended up being used to develop a competitor's OS as well... Digital Research used the Lisa to develop its initial versions of GEM (the GUI that ended up on the Atari ST and on some MS-DOS systems and was the underpinning behind the Ventura Publisher DTP system) and GEMDOS and I believe also CPM 68/K.
As the sources for GEM were open sourced years ago, so was the build environment and images for getting it running on the Lisa. I wasn't able to get them to boot on any of the Lisa emulators out there though.