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LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

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Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#51

Post by ancarda »

userbinator wrote: post #39
dreamcompiler wrote: post #19

In 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

Why did they do that? Did they have an explanation that doesn’t just boil down to “we wanted customers to keep upgrading”?

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#52

Post by SwellJoe »

DonHopkins wrote: post #33
SwellJoe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I haven't, but I've heard good things. I was watching Halt and Catch Fire which is also fantastic bit of history on several fronts (in addition to the computer history on the show, I happen to also love punk rock from that era, especially Texas punk rock, like Big Boys and the Dicks, etc., and so the soundtrack is fantastic), but I kinda drifted away from watching TV a while ago. I'll probably get back to it at some point, as I've heard the later seasons improved.

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#53

Post by tzs »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #19

In 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.

A friend of mine started a company in 1983 to develop Mac software. They didn't want to go the Lisa route for a couple of reasons. First, they wanted to write in C, not Pascal. Second, they wanted several developers working simultaneously and could not afford to get a Lisa for each.

They knew that MacFORTH was going to be available pretty much concurrently with the release of the Mac. They knew they could use that to write programs on the Mac to explore and reverse engineer things.

They bought a Callan Data Systems Unistar 200 Unix workstation [1], which was a 68k based all-in-one non-graphical Unix workstation. They also got a bunch of serial terminals (ADM3a's, if I recall correctly) and hooked them up to the Callan, and gave each developer a Unix account on the workstation so that several developers could be working at once.

The idea was to write in C on the Callan, use its compiler and assembler, and then somehow turn that object code into code that would run on the Mac.

They had the Callan connected to the Mac over a serial port, and a program in MacFORTH that would accept object code from the Callan and invoke it. With this setup, their developers could start working on parts of the product, with test harnesses in MacFORTH to let them test on the Mac.

My memory is getting fuzzy, but I think somewhere in there they wrote a Mac linker on the Callan that could generate Mac executable files, which they could send to MacFORTH on the Mac and have it write them to floppy.

[1] I was a systems programmer at Callan, and was able to get my friend a nice discount. I think it came to $5000 for a nicely configured workstation.

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#55

Post by kalleboo »

ancarda wrote: post #51
userbinator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Why did they do that? Did they have an explanation that doesn’t just boil down to “we wanted customers to keep upgrading”?

The year was stored as a 4-bit integer

> we wanted customers to keep upgrading

After 15 years? Who was going to be seriously using a 5 MHz Lisa in 1995 (yes you can spare me the "this broke school district is still using an Amiga to run their HVAC!" stories)

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#56

Post by colejohnson66 »

ancarda wrote: post #51
userbinator wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Why did they do that? Did they have an explanation that doesn’t just boil down to “we wanted customers to keep upgrading”?

If it means anything: 2^29 seconds is 17 years almost exactly

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#57

Post by userbinator »

kalleboo wrote: post #55
ancarda wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Why did they do that? Did they have an explanation that doesn’t just boil down to “we wanted customers to keep upgrading”?

The year was stored as a 4-bit integer > we wanted customers to keep upgrading After 15 years? Who was going to be seriously using a 5 MHz Lisa in 1995 (yes you can spare me the "this broke school district is still using an Amiga to run their HVAC!" stories)

The C64 was introduced in 1982, discontinued in 1994, and remained in widespread use for several years after that.

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#58

Post by GeekyBear »

armadsen wrote: post #21
beamatronic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that enormously expensive? Was it purely for fun or did you recoup your investment?

It sure was. The Lisa originally sold for $10,000 in 1983. The price dropped to about $5k (IIRC) for the Lisa 2 which came out the same day as the original Mac, but that was still very expensive. 128K Mac ($2500) + Lisa 2 ($5000) = $7500 in 1983 (~$18,600 in 2017 dollars).

In comparison, the Xerox Star was a mere $16,500, which would be a bit more than $40,000 today.

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#59

Post by rwallace »

protomyth wrote: post #48
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tramiel's Atari Corp did manage to keep 8-bit-ish pricing on its ST line, despite the 68k switch. But yeah, if the 65816 had come out a year or two earlier, I wonder if Amiga and Tramiel and friends would have chosen to develop on that instead. An 8/16 processor that could address larger memory regions but still could use 8-bit memory and 6502 support chips, and had the cycle efficiency and simplicity of the 6502. Ap…

Well, the 520ST was $799.99 for the monochrome computer, so it was quite a bit more expensive than the Atari 65XE at $99.99. If I remember correctly the 68000 itself cost north of $200 in quantities, so it was impossible to stay in the old price range. I remember a story of Commodore / Amiga trying to use the Amiga chipset with a cheaper processor. Of course they also tried it with a PA-RISC.

I thought the 68000 was down to something like $10 by that time? Given that, the price discrepancy is surprising, since the ST was intentionally a rather simple design. What exactly made the ST have to cost that much?

Re: LisaOS to be open-sourced and donated to Computer History Museum

#60

Post by dreamcompiler »

tzs wrote: post #53
dreamcompiler wrote: post #19

In 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.

A friend of mine started a company in 1983 to develop Mac software. They didn't want to go the Lisa route for a couple of reasons. First, they wanted to write in C, not Pascal. Second, they wanted several developers working simultaneously and could not afford to get a Lisa for each. They knew that MacFORTH was going to be available pretty much concurrently with the release of the Mac. They knew they could use that to…

I used Mach II Forth as well as Pascal. Mach II was a great resident compiler on the Mac and it was a joy to use. IIRC, MacForth was interpreted but in any case yes, several other languages were resident on the Mac before the "official" Apple Pascal was available.
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