Computer History Museum Releases Apple Lisa Source Code on 40th Launch Anniversary

[VulchR]

The Lisa was incredible! I had one on order with its matching external disk drive. $15K total IIRC. So glad I cancelled before the product was cancelled, though!

My first Mac was a Lisa 2 with a 10 MB Profil hard drive. My father bought it for home use and we kept it and did the Mac XL conversion, later using it for a trade-in for a Mac Plus. I’m amazed now at how much my father spent on that computer for the time.

I preferred the Lisa OS back then as it had features that Mac OS was missing until OS 7 came out.

I worked on a Lisa for a time. Honestly I didn't enjoy the experience. It was clearly aimed at business-worker-drones. I know the Mac was similar, by my impression of the MacPlus was just so much better. It looked and felt like a machine built for people rather than organisations, and I got so much more done with it.

I had one. Brand new. I had a detached retina the day it arrived. A lovely young lady read me the manual while I recovered. It took ten days.

I remember, painfully, the shelf of manuals. 😱

 

[webkit]

Tesla has done exactly the same thing with its cars. First there were the very expensive ones, and Tesla became a worldwide topic.

Same with Apple: I remember that here in Europe, none of my friends, nor I, could afford a Lisa from America, but everyone around me talked about it enthusiastically (unlike the authors at Macrumors nowadays, who immediately think of software problems and problems with floppy disks. Maybe we weren't that dogged).

So Lisa was just a flop in sales, but brilliant for preparation of the Apple brand.
For me personally, it was only out of this history that my first computer was an Apple desktop computer (after trying an early laptop, where the operating system DR-DOS was still read from a floppy disk).

Except that Apple originally started out with much less expensive computers (under $1,500). They didn't get "very expensive" until a few years later, first with the Apple III and then the Lisa and both of those were flops at least partially due to their high(er) prices.

 

[dysamoria]

And Steve Jobs copied….

Boy did he!

I spent hours reading about Lisa, Xerox/PARC, and Taligent yesterday after this thread started. It was a third time around kind of repeat exposure for me, but I had forgotten a lot of details (and never knew many of them).

It's shameful how much time and effort goes into development of things that end up being abandoned. I was stunned to read about how Lisa's OS was superior to Mac OS in several ways; things that didn't come to Mac OS until over a decade later (some of which was supposedly why Lisa was so expensive; such as protected memory hardware requirements).

I had already known about Apple's failings to modernize Mac OS, partially because I was a BeOS advocate and involved with the user community, and there was a lot of interconnected goings on back then among all of these entities... but re-reading the long story of Taligent and the associated development/companies... it's just so nutty to me.

No matter how much great stuff has come out of competing businesses, it seems like so much more has been squandered as a result of same competition, even with businesses supposedly under agreements to cooperate for the betterment of everyone. For a change, I'm not even talking about how Palm, then Access, squandered Be's IP.

Related: I am again thinking of how MIDI 1.0 is 40 years old, has had almost zero improvements in all that time (MPE being simply the formalization of existing recent new methods of implementation), and that MIDI 2.0 is still mostly nowhere and nothing... This isn't squandered development; it's a total lack of development.

 

[dysamoria]

Don't forget IE 4 on Windows 95, with its "Active Desktop". Hyperlinks everywhere, including on the now-single-click desktop icons!

YES, you're right! I corrected myself after the fact. I should have edited my previous posting to include it. I remember when that stuff came out and I was briefly motivated by its potential. Web objects embedded in the desktop... etc... seemed cool at first, especially when IE4 and the Plus Pack brought full color icons and full window dragging to Windows 95... sigh...

 

[dysamoria]

I'm waiting and hoping (against hope) that we'll get something like this for Snow Leopard. I'm not holding my breath and I know I'm way more likely to get a high-five from a resurrected Steve Jobs than it is for this to happen. But I can dream, can't I?

It would be nice, but that's too much iOS and current Mac OS.

 

[dysamoria]

XEROX gave it away because they were stupid and didn't even know what they had and Steve Jobs was brilliant enough to realize that the trash in their dumpster would change the world and it did.

Xerox didn't hand them trash. The executives did not want to market what they had, but they did use it in part of an agreement to get shares of Apple (from what I read last night).

 

[Solomani]

Was priced too high for its time.

Up until the mid-90s, most desktop Macs (and Mac PowerBooks in the G3 era) were overpriced, even for the university students. I remember that my first Mac I bought for myself (in college) was one of the Performas. They were the lower-end cousins of the Quadras. That Performa cost me close to $2k (monitor was bundled in the price). HOWEVER.... I had no regrets. It got me through college. And I did not appreciate it back at the time, but those Apple desktops (Performas, Quadras) were bundled with guess what? They were bundled with small Bose speakers. Yes, they were considered among the best quality speakers of that time. Only later did I realize that Apple was selling Mac desktop bundles using some of the BEST quality OEM parts of the era.

Oh.... and speaking of the best quality parts. Did you know that my "low end" Performa was bundled (college student bundling discount) with an Apple 14" Monitor? A quick look at the backside of the monitor revealed a Sony Trinitron monitor. Sony Trinitrons....also considered one of the top-tier monitor brands of the 1980s-90s.

 

[webkit]

Up until the mid-90s, most desktop Macs (and Mac PowerBooks in the G3 era) were overpriced, even for the university students. I remember that my first Mac I bought for myself (in college) was one of the Performas. They were the lower-end cousins of the Quadras. That Performa cost me close to $2k (monitor was bundled in the price). HOWEVER.... I had no regrets. I got me through college. And I did not appreciate it back at the time, but those Apple desktops (Performas, Quadras) were bundled with guess what? They were bundled with small Bose speakers. Yes, they were considered among the best quality speakers of that time. Only later did I realize that Apple was selling Mac desktop bundles using some of the BEST quality OEM parts of the era.

With some notable exceptions, I think Macintosh computers overall were fairly competitively priced during much of the 1980s and 1990s against other desktop computers. You mentioned the Macintosh Performa which was available for around $1,200 (Performa 200) in the early 1990s. That may be high priced by today's standards but that's true for computers in general from back then.

 

[VulchR]

Boy did he!

I spent hours reading about Lisa, Xerox/PARC, and Taligent yesterday after this thread started. It was a third time around kind of repeat exposure for me, but I had forgotten a lot of details (and never knew many of them).

It's shameful how much time and effort goes into development of things that end up being abandoned. I was stunned to read about how Lisa's OS was superior to Mac OS in several ways; things that didn't come to Mac OS until over a decade later (some of which was supposedly why Lisa was so expensive; such as protected memory hardware requirements).

I had already known about Apple's failings to modernize Mac OS, partially because I was a BeOS advocate and involved with the user community, and there was a lot of interconnected goings on back then among all of these entities... but re-reading the long story of Taligent and the associated development/companies... it's just so nutty to me.

No matter how much great stuff has come out of competing businesses, it seems like so much more has been squandered as a result of same competition, even with businesses supposedly under agreements to cooperate for the betterment of everyone. For a change, I'm not even talking about how Palm, then Access, squandered Be's IP.

Related: I am again thinking of how MIDI 1.0 is 40 years old, has had almost zero improvements in all that time (MPE being simply the formalization of existing recent new methods of implementation), and that MIDI 2.0 is still mostly nowhere and nothing... This isn't squandered development; it's a total lack of development.

I was gutted that BeOS wasn't chosen for the Mac. It looked pretty good to a non-expert.

 

[VulchR]

Except that Apple originally started out with much less expensive computers (under $1,500). They didn't get "very expensive" until a few years later, first with the Apple III and then the Lisa and both of those were flops at least partially due to their high(er) prices.

To be fair I bought my first personal computer, a luggable suitcase Compaq*, just two years before I bought a MacPlus and the cost of the Compaq was thousands of dollars. The Compaq was an excellent computer, but I sold it the same day after I had a chance to sit down with a Mac. I had thought that all computers are basically capable of the same operations so OS didn't matter, but an hour experimenting with the Mac disabused me of that notion. It was QuickDraw in ROM that did it for me... I needed to make complex plots for the work I was doing in a lab. The MacPlus I bought was actually cheaper than the Compaq, taking into account the student discount for the Mac.

*The Compaq - a truly wonderful machine, just eclipsed.

Image source: link ; by Tiziano Garuti

 

[Yebubbleman]

It would be nice, but that's too much iOS and current Mac OS.

You're thinking Lion and later. Snow Leopard is very much not iOS-based and there's a ton of it that isn't applicable to the current post-10 versions of macOS.

 

[colinwil]

Oh wow... didn't know it was written in Pascal!

When the Lisa was first launched in the UK, I went on a Lisa programming event in, of all places, Bolton near Manchester in England. Lots of Apple technical guys were flown over, and some senior execs - though not Steve Jobs himself.

Kind of like a WWDC.

We had several hands-on sessions, getting to know the new variant of Pascal they'd created. I seem to remember it being a kind of 'object pascal'. But looking at the source code now, it seems to be just regular Pascal - kind of like Turbo Pascal - complete with units, and ability to link in modules in native assembly.

The thing that really blew me away at the time was the 5MB Profile 'winchester' hard disk. 5MB seemed almost infinite back then!

 

[_Spinn_]

Very cool piece of history.

 

[Wildkraut]

Due to the innovative mind of Steve Jobs, Microsoft copied Apple by implementing a GUI and a user-friendly skeuomorphic design first popularized by Apple with the Lisa and the Macintosh.

Due to the mediocre mind of Tim Cook, Apple copied Microsoft by implementing a user-unfriendly flat design first popularized by Microsoft with the Zune, Windows Phone 7, and Windows 8.

Yep, the funny thing is, that now Microsoft is slowing surpassing Apple in UI design and UX.

Sure, Microsoft still have a lot of older UI based OS components, but the newer ones shines.

Even their Hardware looks good and is clever stable designed with nice materials, e.g the stand of the surface pro, or the lifting stand of the surface studio.

 

[webkit]

To be fair I bought my first personal computer, a luggable suitcase Compaq*, just two years before I bought a MacPlus and the cost of the Compaq was thousands of dollars. The Compaq was an excellent computer, but I sold it the same day after I had a chance to sit down with a Mac. I had thought that all computers are basically capable of the same operations so OS didn't matter, but an hour experimenting with the Mac disabused me of that notion. It was QuickDraw in ROM that did it for me... I needed to make complex plots for the work I was doing in a lab. The MacPlus I bought was actually cheaper than the Compaq, taking into account the student discount for the Mac.

*The Compaq - a truly wonderful machine, just eclipsed.

The Compaq Portable was an interesting device and pricing could vary widely depending on how it was equipped.

It's also worth noting in discussions about computer prices in the 1980s and 1990s that discounts could be pretty generous back then, especially education discounts. Discounts of 25% to 50% off retail were common even on the newest machines.

 

[dysamoria]

I was gutted that BeOS wasn't chosen for the Mac. It looked pretty good to a non-expert.

The explanation I read was that BeOS was too underdeveloped, and Be Inc wanted too much money… but I’ve seen this claim countered by claims that the final cost of NeXT, combined with the time it took to make NeXT Step into an acceptable Mac OS X, far exceeded what would’ve been required if Apple had gone with Be.

But then, NeXT was Steve Jobs; I think his reality distortion field was still quite effective, and he had a history with Apple that was more interesting than Jean Louis Gasse’s.

 

[dysamoria]

You're thinking Lion and later. Snow Leopard is very much not iOS-based and there's a ton of it that isn't applicable to the current post-10 versions of macOS.

You misunderstand me: iOS came OS X. It was the result of optimizing Mac OS. Leopard, I think it was. That’s why Snow Leopard was so efficient; all the optimizations done to make iOS work in a tiny computer.

What came after is still very much the same OS, but with more iOS-friendly services tacked on top. There’s no way that Snow Leopard would ever be open sourced due to everything in it that’s proprietary Apple development used in iOS devices today (at least, the parts that are closed-source; some of the core of OS X used to be an open source Unix, but the project hasn’t been maintained in ages).

 

[Yebubbleman]

You misunderstand me: iOS came OS X. It was the result of optimizing Mac OS. Leopard, I think it was. That’s why Snow Leopard was so efficient; all the optimizations done to make iOS work in a tiny computer.

What came after is still very much the same OS, but with more iOS-friendly services tacked on top. There’s no way that Snow Leopard would ever be open sourced due to everything in it that’s proprietary Apple development used in iOS devices today (at least, the parts that are closed-source; some of the core of OS X used to be an open source Unix, but the project hasn’t been maintained in ages).

Snow Leopard doesn't share enough with modern iOS. That's not to say that Apple would agree with me on that. But to say that it has the commonality with early iOS versions that, say macOS Big Sur through Ventura has with iOS/iPadOS 14-16, would be wrong. Yes iOS is compacted macOS. For sure. But Snow Leopard otherwise doesn't share as much with iOS 3, let alone iOS 14-16. Plus, open sourcing iOS 3 has nowhere near the utility that open sourcing Snow Leopard would have.