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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

#71

Post by TimTheTinker »

hota_mazi wrote: post #65
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

NeXtStep was an excellent BSD-based OS, and Mac OS X, released (I believe) first in 2000 (3 years after Apple bought NeXT) was basically NeXTStep with a new UI, new graphical apps, and new APIs to bridge the gap to OS 9.

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

#72

Post by cmurf »

unadopted wrote: post #47
exikyut wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP quoted "MacOS" when the correct capitalization would indeed have been "macOS". What you're referring to is most correctly termed the Macintosh System Software, which is way too long and could also be referred to as the System Software or System. The camelCase capitalization is a 2017 thing, not a 1984 thing. I'm not sure what point MacOS got its name.

It was around the time of System 7.5 when the MacOS bootscreen was added I think. But names like “System 7.5” were also used. A confusing time!

Pretty sure it was System 7.5, and then Mac OS 7.6.

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

#73

Post by armadsen »

exikyut wrote: post #43
armadsen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS actually has stationery pads! https://www.macworld.com/article/1161619/software-utilities/... But Lisa OS was amazing, and was ahead of the original macOS in many ways: preemptive multitasking, way nicer error messages, hierarchical files system, a more fully fleshed out desktop/document metaphor, etc. I think the Lisa OS's error messages are still better than macOS's.

The GP quoted "MacOS" when the correct capitalization would indeed have been "macOS". What you're referring to is most correctly termed the Macintosh System Software, which is way too long and could also be referred to as the System Software or System. The camelCase capitalization is a 2017 thing, not a 1984 thing. I'm not sure what point MacOS got its name.

Thanks for the nitpick :). I’m usually really picky about that stuff too. I have Macs from the 128K running System 1.0 though macOS 10.13 High Sierra.

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

#74

Post by dukeflukem »

shagie wrote: post #32
yvsong wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd prefer "You won't believe which OS has now been open sourced"

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

#75

Post by osullivj »

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.

Two stack pointers! Great fir Forth impls. In the early 80s UK home micro mkt the Dragon was 6809 based.

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

#76

Post by eesmith »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #49
eesmith wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I accept your "True sense of the word", then many early operating systems, like the "SHARE Operating System" from 1959, are not, actually, operating systems. I prefer to believe that you are using a stricter definition of the word/phrase, rather one which encompasses how that word/phrase was actually used by practitioners in the field.

Sure, fine, I agree that back then the definition of OS was more fluid. Though in reality I don't think that in those early days they even called what was running on the Mac an operating system at all. The term "Mac OS" didn't arrive til much later, and it wasn't until there were later revisions that they used the phraseology "System" for it. But to the original point, my understanding is that the Lisa had a more cla…

"in reality I don't think that in those early days they even called what was running on the Mac an operating system at all"

I must live in a different reality.

The first Apple operating system, with the phrase "operating system" in the name, was Apple DOS, starting in 1978. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS . It did not have the features you require in your definition of an operating system.

Here's the summary from the bibliographic entry for an article from "Popular Computing", Aug 1984, quoting from http://www.worldcat.org/title/whenever-you-use-a-computer-yo... :

> Examines design, features, and shortcomings of eight disk-based operating systems designed for general use that are popular or most likely to affect the future of microcomputing. Included are the CP/M family, MS-DOS, Apple DOS/ProDOS, Unix, Pick, the p-System, TRSDOS, and Macintosh/Lisa. (MBR)

Several of those have the term "operating system" in the name, and as you can see "Macintosh" is described as an operating system.

Here are internal development notes from the Macintosh project, dated 1983, which shows that Apple had a "Macintosh Operating System Manual" already by that time: https://archive.org/stream/MacintoshDevelopmentNotes/Macinto... .

Chapter 1 of those notes is titled "Overview of the Operating System". https://archive.org/stream/MacintoshDevelopmentNotes/Macinto... The introduction is "There are two main groups of routines that may be called by an application program -- the MacIntosh Operating System and the MacIntosh User Interface Toolkit." (The capitalization in "MacIntosh" is theirs.)

I know what your intent is, and I think you are correct. What I disagree is your use of phrases like "True sense of the word" and "in reality" in expressing what seems much more like a personal opinion based on a shallow understanding of the topic.

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

#77

Post by Someone »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #61
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 --…

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…

Does anybody know how to make a Pascal compiler run on such a system? The executable for Turbo Pascal for x86 was 39kB and likely needed more to run on a character-based screen.

After subtracting video memory and sound buffers (combined about 22kB) and what the OS used, that 128kB Mac had, IIRC, about 28kB available for applications to use.

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

#78

Post by Someone »

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 --…

Reading https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisahManualSep82_..., that clock runs on a custom CPU that also handles the keyboard, the mouse and software power off.

”The keyboard/mouse control is performed by a dedicated slave processor, known as a COPS. It provides communication with four peripheral devices via the A port of the keyboard 6522 VIA port controller.

[…]

The COPS receives power from the backup supply. This voltage is available at all times, whether the system is powered down or even unplugged. The only time the COPS will cease functioning is if the battery is allowed to run down by having the system unplugged over a long period.”

Given that and the time, it doesn’t surprise me they weren’t over-provisioning bits for that clock.

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

#80

Post by mpweiher »

yvsong wrote: post #31
blcArmadillo wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

Submitter here.

Getting to the HN front-page has a very large random component. That doesn't mean you can't improve the odds, in this case by providing an appropriate title. To me this seemed like a story that deserved attention, and the auto-generated title from the twitter post was sufficiently useless to warrant editing the title (which I usually don't do).

Also, this happens all the time and sometimes you will be lucky and sometimes somebody else will be lucky. I've had dups of my earlier submissions go to front-page so many times I can't really keep track. But it really isn't a big deal, this isn't exactly doing years of research and getting scooped by someone else filing a patent first or publishing more quickly. It's just a submission to a web-site, effort was a few clicks.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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