Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 87 posts

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

#61

Post by dreamcompiler »

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 --…

I didn't know about the RTC issue, but the separation of users from developers was strictly because of hardware limitations. The Lisa cost $10k and came from a separate division of Apple from the Mac, which sold for [around] $2500 and only had 128k of RAM and no hard drive. They were completely different target markets. Nobody at Apple at that time knew how to make a Pascal compiler run in the limited environment of the Mac. (But as mentioned above, the Forth vendors had no problem doing it.)

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

#62

Post by joezydeco »

DonHopkins wrote: post #30
eesmith wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Those who put down the 6809 have never programmed it. It was (and still is) a joy to work with and way more powerful than the other 8 bit chips of the era.

This is a 6809 at 1 MHz and no special graphics hardware: https://youtu.be/yrkx6vuiMrE

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

#63

Post by dreamcompiler »

beamatronic wrote: post #20
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.

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

Yes! But I was a student at UT Austin, which had a special student purchase agreement with Apple. Steve Jobs even came to campus and gave us a pep talk about it. So I got my whole setup for something like half price.

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

#64

Post by dreamcompiler »

adventured wrote: post #50
armadsen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

To put that into perspective, in the early 1980s the average new car was around $7,000 to $8,000 and the median new home price was ~$75,000 in 1983. It'd be like a personal computer costing $30,000+ today, in relation to those other major purchase items.

True. But the first time I saw a Mac in person, I knew it was going to change the world and I had to develop for it. I spent all my savings on a Lisa and a Mac. It's hard to describe today just how radically impressive that first Mac was.

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

#65

Post by hota_mazi »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #35
eesmith wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

> Geh, in reality the Mac didn't get an operating system in the true sense of the word

Indeed.

Apple's operating systems were completely outclassed by Windows 95, AmigaOS and BeOS (and by that I mean both at the OS level and also the GUI).

Even the "merger" of NeXt and Apple didn't give Apple a credible OS for many years after that.

This is why I can't help chuckle when I read comments such as "Lisa was programmed with planned obsolescence because it couldn't support years past 1995".

This is not planned obsolescence, it's just incompetence from Apple's software engineers. Back then, Apple was a lot better at product and hardware than software.

And when I see iTunes, I still think it's still kind of true today.

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

#67

Post by flyGuyOnTheSly »

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).

Jesus, that's as much as I paid for my brand new car recently...

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

#68

Post by GeekyBear »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #64
adventured wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put that into perspective, in the early 1980s the average new car was around $7,000 to $8,000 and the median new home price was ~$75,000 in 1983. It'd be like a personal computer costing $30,000+ today, in relation to those other major purchase items.

True. But the first time I saw a Mac in person, I knew it was going to change the world and I had to develop for it. I spent all my savings on a Lisa and a Mac. It's hard to describe today just how radically impressive that first Mac was.

Jeff Han's 2006 Ted Talk featuring a multitouch demo was the only other time I've seen a user interface demo and instantly knew a UI paradigm was going to be a very big deal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU

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

#69

Post by ghostcluster »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #35
eesmith wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

> Geh, in reality the Mac didn't get an operating system in the true sense of the word (proper process separation, memory protection etc.)

What? No. So DOS wasn't an operating system either then?

Lots of higher level OS features just weren't really possible with the extremely limited RAM, ROM, and complete lack of hard drive of the original Mac. That doesn't mean it wasn't an "operating system"

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

#70

Post by dukeflukem »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #40
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.

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…

GEM on Amstrad 1512 takes me back
Post reply on HN