General Category > LisaList2
A Wee Cristmas Present
Al Kossow:
--- Quote from: D.Finni on December 25, 2022, 07:11:49 pm ---I saw DTC's paper on Pascal history at Apple is in that directory too.
Just a note. I saw in his paper the statement that "When Apple introduced the Macintosh computer in 1984 all Macintosh progranwning by Apple and others was done with Lisa Pascal and the Lisa Workshop."
This statement gets repeated a lot, but about a year ago I discovered that the earliest Macintosh developer documentation that was distributed to 3rd-party developers is actually centered on the Lisa Monitor development system, a predecessor to Workshop.
--- End quote ---
I wish there were more documentation on the Pascal Monitor. I've been working on a blog post to go along with the source release and the development workflows pre 1982 are not well documented. The monitor was used in lots of places, like lisatest and to bootstrap macworks. You can see in the 1982/01 pascal development system document that the earliest systems appear to have run off of Soroc serial terminals and storage devices running on Apple IIs. The 1981 Lisa hardware spec has a different serial chip and a Pippin (Profile) interface. I need to get pictures of Lisa prototype #23 boards to try to figure out where that fits in the timeline. It appears to have a 2651 Uart on the CPU board
Al Kossow:
--- Quote from: stepleton on December 26, 2022, 01:26:48 am ---
I don't have strong feelings about Pascal; it wouldn't be my first-choice language if I were starting from scratch.
--- End quote ---
That was the high level language to use in the late 70s. I'm going to make the argument in the blog post that the
Lisa software system is an evolution of the HP 300 Amigo because of all the experienced HP engineers that worked
on the project. I spent the last few days looking at the source dates, and 1982 is the earliest date in most of it.
Almost all of the system is written in Lisa Pascal. Quickdraw is the biggest assembly-language library.
I've not dug into the code generator much. DTC claimes Mac Pascal added a peephole optimizer. I wonder how much optimization exists in the Lisa compiler.
The Mar 1983 Computer Design article on the development of Lisa says the Office System is 90,000 lines of code and the development system is 100,000
The most radical change to the Pascal Development System was the adoption of the 7/7 file system in release 3.
I will probabaly have to write a much longer internals document at some point. The biggest flaw I see with the architecture is how to deal with tools that expect old versions of the intrinsics (the shared library versioning problem). I suspect that a few of the workshop tools like Basic Plus and COBOL don't work at all in Workshop 3.
It's been an interesting adventure finally getting to see the code I wasn't able to get access to in the 80s, but ultimately Apple took a very different path, much like what happened with A/UX.
stepleton:
No dig against Pascal from me. I would love to trip over a Terak someday! I've only ever seen one once.
I would be thrilled to see an internals document. I've always wondered how parts of the OS may have reflected design choices from other computer systems --- or how they compare to other design alternatives. I'm fond of A Comparison of Some Window Managers from a 1985 UK symposium on GUIs for workstations: it shows some different ways people were tackling the problem, and it's interesting to see the different lines of thought. Seeing the Lisa internals explained could help make similar kinds of inter-OS comparisons easier.
But yeah, "starting from scratch" just refers to making a compiler to BASIC for my own personal use: I may have chosen something a bit simpler if I didn't have my Clascal grammar lying around! In a way, I still am simplifying somewhat --- my implementation doesn't support record types or subroutine arguments with subroutine types, for example.
Al Kossow:
I did a bunch of digging in some Apple II pascal floppy images this morning and found a set of mid-1981 rev 8 monitor sources, along with some other work going on in the 1980-81 timeframe.
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/floppy
blusnowkitty:
Monitor 8? Isn't the earliest Lisa Pascal Monitor we had before Monitor 11?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version