Apple To Release Lisa OS For Free As Open Source In 2018 (iphoneincanada.ca)

New submitter Jose Deras writes: Nearly 35 years ago, Apple released its first computer with a graphical user interface, called the Lisa. Starting next year, the Computer History Museum will release the Apple Lisa OS for free as an open-source project. According to a new report from Business Insider, the Computer History Museum will release the code behind the Apple Lisa operating system for free as open source, for anyone to try and tinker with. The news was announced via the LisaList mailing list for Lisa enthusiasts.

"While Steve Jobs didn't create the Lisa, he was instrumental in its development. It was Jobs who convinced the legendary Xerox PARC lab to let the Apple Lisa team visit and play with its prototypes for graphical user interfaces," reads the report. "And while Apple at the time said that Lisa stood for 'Local Integrated System Architecture,' Jobs would later claim to biographer Walter Isaacson that the machine was actually named for his oldest daughter, Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs." "Then-Apple CEO John Sculley had Jobs removed from the Lisa project, which kicked off years-long animosity between the two," continues the report. "Ultimately, a boardroom brawl would result in Jobs quitting in a huff to start his own company, NeXT Computer. Apple would go on to buy NeXT in 1996, bringing Jobs back into the fold. By 1997, Jobs had become CEO of Apple, leading the company to its present status as the most valuable in the world."

Comments

If Only They Had Done That While I Had A Mac XL

[crunchygranola]

The very first computer I ever bought was Macintosh XL -- a Lisa that was loaded with a (lousy) emulation of the Macintosh.

Before buying it I had a long list of questions (more than a dozen) that I took to the Apple store and posited to the top tech guy there - since I had lots of concerns about whether this was functionally equivalent to the Macintosh.

I bought it after getting his answers, every one of which was wrong.

It was a flakey system that crashed constantly doing ordinary tasks. I might have kept it if they had released the Lisa software and I could run it as a Lisa -- at that time they had stopped selling the Lisa so denying the ability to run the OS on the Mac XL did not advantage Apple in any way.

Instead I sold it to a guy who had a start-up turning Mac XL/Lisas into engineering workstations so that I could buy a real Macintosh (512). I still have that and it boots, but is not valuable as a collector's item since I went through a couple of rounds of board and case mods to upgrade it.

Re:If Only They Had Done That While I Had A Mac XL

[HiThere]

Sorry, the Mac XL *was* a Macintosh computer, not a Lisa. The OS of the two was quite different, and had different hardware requirements.

This doesn't mean the tech guy didn't give you the wrong answers, that's hard to say since you didn't say what the questions or the answers were, but the two were vastly different machines, and the form factor was the smallest part of it.

FWIW, I used most of the models of Mac up through the Mac II, none of them were like the Lisa, which I only used at demonstrations. E.g., the tracking of the mouse was quite different between the Mac and the Lisa.

P.S.: The Mac XL was not inherently flaky. That you got a lemon isn't reason to criticize the entire model. Some modified versions had heat issues, but I never had a problem with that. Those who did commonly solved the problem with a chimney...and I think that didn't usually happen unless the machine had already been modified. It did, however, have limited air circulation, and this was a mistake of the design, but rarely caused problems...it just pushed things closer to the edge than they should have been. A more common problem, however, was people putting things on top of the computer and blocking the air flow.

P.P.S.: Some people who modified the machine would also add in a fan to increase the air flow, but this was only needed if you had already modified the machine. And, of course, if you were in the habit of obstructing the air flow, even a fan wouldn't reliably help.

All that said, there were occasional lemons.

So much history--

[sillivalley]

So much history (and transition of Apple as a company) involved in Lisa...
68k with custom memory map, two very funky disk interfaces (twiggy and pippin), big bitmapped display (rectangular, not square like the Macintosh)
As much as possible written in Pascal, designed and documented!
I'll call it the first large scale Apple project designed and built by engineers, particularly software engineers (the design part is important)
Yes, Apple /// SOS was designed and built by software professionals (Tom Root, Bob Etheredge, and many more), but not at all the scope of Lisa which went from the core OS out to the document model
Such incredible effort went into Lisa -- the origins of Quickdraw graphics (Atkinson), modeless text editing (Tesler), software design on a large scale, a document model rather than an app-centric model

Of course some issues (problems), such as applications software tied to the serial number of the machine, not enough RAM, not enough disk space, not enough CPU horsepower
And even though many of the foundations for the Macintosh came from Lisa (mouse, bitmapped screen, Quickdraw, overall engineering rigor), with very few exceptions, if you worked on Lisa, Steve considered you to be second rate (a view not shared by most of engineering)
Lisa also lead the way in other ways -- the locked-down, invitation only secrecy and internal isolation that was anathema to the Apple ][ and Apple /// worlds of that time, but which has come to define the current Apple.

Lisa was an amazing development, particularly at that time in Apple's history. I have so much respect for those people, and for the Apple /// team as well. At the time, the biggest knock both these projects took was not matching the (incredible for the time) sales volume of the Apple ][.

I saw this happen from across the street in Bandley 3... An incredible time at Apple, and in the computer racket.
(Apple Employee 1xxx)