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Office System DDK?

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blusnowkitty:
I've seen in Office System 3 that there's an option to install device drivers in Preferences. It comes with a few printer drivers, and there's an option to insert a disk and install a new driver. Was there ever a driver development kit for Office System, or would you just have used the normal Workshop? Can Office System even talk to anything that isn't a disk drive or a printer?

stepleton:
There is a fairly extensive manual for device driver authors, including full source code for a device driver (for a disk, if I remember right). I don't know if a standard install of the Workshop would have the files that would allow you to compile the source code, though.

The Priam drive includes a built-in tape drive, so it seems probable to me that there's driver support for that (unless the tape drive operates independently of the computer somehow).

I assume that when Apple folks were designing the driver framework, they were probably thinking about supporting things like the AppleNet card as well. I've never heard of an AppleNet driver for the Lisa OS, though.

blusnowkitty:
Thanks for that, this will prove useful.

Something else I've noticed in reading this document and some early software documentation on Bitsavers is the presence of an underlying "Operating System" that, seemingly, the Office System builds upon. Am I correct in thinking that perhaps the Office System runs in much the same way that UNIX/Linux + X11 and Windows NT work - in that, there is an underlying kernel with its own native API that you don't necessarily interface with, but rather the graphical environment on top? Sort of like how the Windows NT kernel has a native kernel-mode NTAPI, but you really should use the user-mode Win32 API.

Interestingly the early software documents also state that the Operating System loads the SHELL file, which can be deleted and replaced at will. I wonder if that's how the Lisa development team were able to so quickly go from a text-based environment to a graphical one in Busy Being Born.

Come to think of it, I wonder if this is what the Workshop is - access to the underlying Operating System, but with a graphical shell loaded in on-demand...

rayarachelian:

--- Quote from: blusnowkitty on August 01, 2020, 09:00:54 pm ---Thanks for that, this will prove useful.

Something else I've noticed in reading this document and some early software documentation on Bitsavers is the presence of an underlying "Operating System" that, seemingly, the Office System builds upon. Am I correct in thinking that perhaps the Office System runs in much the same way that UNIX/Linux + X11 and Windows NT work - in that, there is an underlying kernel with its own native API that you don't necessarily interface with, but rather the graphical environment on top? Sort of like how the Windows NT kernel has a native kernel-mode NTAPI, but you really should use the user-mode Win32 API.

Interestingly the early software documents also state that the Operating System loads the SHELL file, which can be deleted and replaced at will. I wonder if that's how the Lisa development team were able to so quickly go from a text-based environment to a graphical one in Busy Being Born.

Come to think of it, I wonder if this is what the Workshop is - access to the underlying Operating System, but with a graphical shell loaded in on-demand...

--- End quote ---

That's exactly what it is, I just wish it was less... lame. There's an "EXEC" command language for it also. Not quite a shell script language. More like expect, but, um... lamer. It's too bad it's not more like an IDE. If you install LPW on top of LOS, you can use the Environments window to switch between the two.

patrick:

--- Quote from: rayarachelian on August 01, 2020, 10:20:00 pm ---That's exactly what it is, I just wish it was less... lame. There's an "EXEC" command language for it also. Not quite a shell script language. More like expect, but, um... lamer. It's too bad it's not more like an IDE. If you install LPW on top of LOS, you can use the Environments window to switch between the two.

--- End quote ---
Three. There was a tutorial called LisaGuide that came with its own shell. In the Environments window you can chose between Office System, Workshop and LisaGuide.

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