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

Finally

[MichaelSmith]

An alternative to Gnome3 on Ubuntu.

Re:Convert it to x86?

[msauve]

Oops. Apparently there are Lisa emulators, although the Wiki links don't go anywhere.

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.

Might work fine on Raspberry Pi 3

[kzwork]

Might work fine on Raspberry Pi 3

Re:Convert it to x86?

[Stormwatch]

No, "Star Trek" was a 1992 project by Apple and Novell to port System 7 to x86.

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)

Re:So much history--

[TheFakeTimCook]

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)

Thanks for this!!!

Your story comports with the many stories I have read over the years.

I have had much experience with Lisas, Apple and Sun Mac XLs, and nearly every model of the Mac from the 128k-forward. Not to mention the Apple 1 and ][ (not so much the ///, though... ;-) ).

It is so weird that Jobs considered the Lisa, and those on the Project, as second-rate; but I have heard that from many sources that were there. But you are right that it was an incredible machine, and an absolute triumph of hardware and software integration. One of the most interesting example of that was Lisa's "Request to Shutdown" switch, that most people just treated as a Power button (and in fact, that's what it later became, effectively). But in a Lisa running 7/7, you could push that switch with a bunch of Documents Open, and it would nicely close them and then shutdown the machine. THEN, When you pushed the button to turn it back on. All the previously Open Apps and Documents would Open back up, with your cursor positioned just where you left it, etc. It is fascinating that this behavior was only recently brought back to the Mac, decades later...

I also have an Apple 1 that I have owned since 1977 (one owner)...

You are absolutely right that those were some incredible times both for the computerhood in general, and at Apple in particular...

Re:Jobs would "later" claim....?

[Kjella]

There's no particular reason both claims couldn't be true. Jobs could have made a "retronym" of his daughter's name and used that to sell the name to marketing. A lot of nominal acronyms appear to actually be retronyms.

Everybody knew that Jobs had an alleged daughter named Lisa that he was denying paternity of. Nobody really thought it stood for "Local Integrated System Architecture", but that was the official story and there was no proof to contradict it. He only admitted it later to his biographer, of course it was named after this daughter. I don't think retronym is appropriate because nothing was done retroactively, it was named after his daughter from the start, he lied about that from the very beginning and most people understood he was lying.

Re:Convert it to x86?

[Crass Spektakel]

You are wrong here...

The LISA featured a propietary MMU to implement some memory protection though I think it did not offer virtual memory in todays sense. No computer today does actually "swap", they all "page" which means some hardware traps access to fixed-sized pages of memory and activating some low level memory handler. The early computer did instead "swap" what was a software based method to move memory to disk. It was more complex, higher level, pretty propietary and usually less powerful. Today we wrongly call both "swappping".

Quite a lot of old 68000 computers had some propietary MMU to increase stability and run Unix. This only fell out of favor when the cheapish 68000 home computers like Sinclair QL, Atari ST, Amiga and the NEC Town came into existance and came only back when the 68030 and 386 hit the shelves which both came with an integrated MMU.

Re:So much NeXTStep.

[Anonymous Coward]

Be nice if NeXT OS was released as well especially since the company no longer exists.

You do know that NeXT OS is still alive and well with a new name? It's called OSX. Look at the copyrights in the include files.

Re:Jobs would "later" claim....?

[MichaelSmith]

Yeah its like Git is really just Linus's name for Andrew Tridgell.

Re:Convert it to x86?

[jeremyp]

I think you are confused in your terminology. Paging refers to a virtual memory system where the virtual RAM is divided up into fixed sized pages that can be relocated in physical memory or swapped to a paging file on disk. Paging is much older than you might think - it was introduced with the Manchester Atlas. Swapping is the term used for saving the content of a page to disk and/or loading the content of a page from disk.

It was impossible to implement a reliable virtual memory system with the 68000 because it did not save enough context during a bus error to resume the instruction after the bus error had been corrected by swapping in (or allocating) the page at the location the CPU had attempted to access. This was corrected in the 68010 which was, therefore, capable of supporting virtual paging with appropriate external hardware.