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[stepleton]

On this heavy occasion it is worth pointing out that the source code to the Lisa OS and the Office System application suite is now available at the Computer History Museum website.

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-lisa-apples-most-influential-failure/

I think I recall hearing that LisaEm was helpful for its preparation, and it would be nice to hear about that if it was. Even if not, it will be a useful tool for exploring the OS in the future.

[blusnowkitty]

Thanks Al! This is going to be interesting to dig into.

Looks like the Twiggy driver was still in the source, so maybe we can run Office System 7/7 on a Lisa 1?

There's another piece of source - SOURCE-STARTUP I think - making reference to Office System 3.1 being internally versioned as 13.3.1.

SOURCE-NWSHELL looks like an interesting artifact from the early days. Anyone know anything about "UltraDOS Shell?"

The desktop shell is under /APDM and apparently was known internally as LisaDesk.

Environments window is under /APEW. Also references the Pepsi system at least once.

The OS installer is under /APIN. APIN-OFFICE.TEXT has some fun comments! Pepsi is referenced multiple times, and the comments also imply it was/is possible to restore the system from a Priam tape drive? This directory's also got a bunch of fun internal tools used to actually generate the installer disks.

/APLC and /APLD are LisaCalc and LisaDraw, respectively, and wow, these are some giant programs.

[D.Finni]

Just downloaded it too. Now we can figure out how the file systems worked. :-)

Thanks, Al!

Note for Mr. Hsu's article: the spelling for "stationery pad" is with an e in stationery.

[D.Finni]

The definition of the MDDF disk header is found in LISA_OS/LIBS/LIBOS/libos-bless.text.unix.txt

Each field name is present, with comment on its purpose.

Also check out LISA_OS/OS/source-scavenger.text.unix.txt

[stepleton]

I'd be interested to know how intrinsic libraries are created. I know there's some documentation about this if you look for it, but I don't think there's the full picture. We should now have a full example.

I wonder if there's any special reason why Apple didn't want people to know --- most likely is they just didn't get around to telling, but maybe they also wanted to avoid DLL hell.


Last one to implement a TCP/IP stack is a rotten egg!

[D.Finni]

As I click thru these mostly Pascal source files I'm blown away by how the big picture of Lisa is that it was a prototype of Macintosh. Macintosh in a large way was a refactoring of Lisa sources in Pascal to 68000 assembly. So many of the concepts are direct translations or borrows from Lisa-- far more than is common knowledge.

[blusnowkitty]

LIBHW-LEGENDS is very interesting too. Header says it's assembly glue to the keyboard. We know that there was a US, French, German, and I think one other keyboard language that was released but it seems there were at least prototypes of keyboards in UK, Italian, Swedish, Swiss German, Spanish, Dutch, French Canadian, and Danish. LIBHW-KEYBOARD also says there was a DVORAK layout?

We've known for a while that the Lisa's mouse port was wired for up to three buttons, but only one was used in the end. Someone on here wondered what would happened if you wired in the other two buttons, and according to LIBHW-SPRKEYBD, nothing will happen. LIBHW-CURSOR (or was it LIBHW-MOUSE) says you can load your own mouse driver, though.

LIBHW-SPRKEYBD also implies we could have had three Sony drives?! SOURCE-SONY implies we could have had an internal and an external drive like the Mac at the very least. Currently the ext_drive_cb struct hardcodes the Sony driver to only a single internal disk drive.

SOURCE-HDISK's header says you can have a Profile up to 32MB! And it tells you where to go (SOURCE-PROFASM) if you want to have a disk larger than that! SOURCE-FS* appears to be everything related to the Lisa's filesystems. SOURCE-FSPRIM suggests that the copy protection ("theft protection") is handled at the filesystem level?

master_machine_id, serial_no, "protected master" and the word "theft" might be good strings to grep if one wants to neuter the copy protection in software.

LIBPM-PMDOC has some interesting devices in the CONST table - apparent support for a modem, something called a Marksman that may have changed to Priam, the AppleNet card, Corvus which is also marked as may change to Priam, and a laser printer.

/LIBSB and /LIBWM may be the window manager...?

[compu_85]

Remember there's photos of a "3 Port Card" floating around.

A friend also has a card which IIRC has a Twiggy, and Sony interface on it. I'll ask him to get a photo.

-J

[blusnowkitty]

A while ago I made somewhat of a joke thread about the Lisa "Pepsi" system, and we weren't quite sure what Pepsi actually was. I think the source drop pretty much confirms that Pepsi was the codename for the 2/10. There was also this find:

./LISA_OS/OS/SOURCE-CD.TEXT.unix.txt:   iob_twiggy = -1; {Pepsi, BUT with twiggies}

Now this I'd like to see!

The Whopper, on the other hand, there are only two explicit references to the Whopper. Whopper probably never got too far away from the original Lisa design before the entire system was cancelled. I can find no references to the GLM at all with a simple grep.

[D.Finni]

To figure out what Pepsi referred to as well, and it looks like part of it is a new I/O board.

In this article I wrote that Pepsi was the code name for a Lisa 2 with Sony drive. Source code notes from today's release show that Lisa Team were working with Sony drive since at least September 1983.

[compu_85]

So, based on the license Apple put this under, if we make modifications to the code are we allowed to share them?

The benchmarking line makes me think we can't even talk about using LOS??

-J

[D.Finni]

So, based on the license Apple put this under, if we make modifications to the code are we allowed to share them?

Well, check out section 2 where it begins "If you create modifications of the Apple Software,..."

The benchmarking line makes me think we can't even talk about using LOS??

Would be good to have a clarification on this point.

[andrew]

This is especially bittersweet. Had Ray had access to this code would it have helped him with the development of LisaEm? I presume this will at least make software development for the Lisa easier in the future.

[D.Finni]

This is especially bittersweet. Had Ray had access to this code would it have helped him with the development of LisaEm? I presume this will at least make software development for the Lisa easier in the future.

It's beyond question: yes, immensely.

[blusnowkitty]

We know that the Lisa's underlying OS had a primary screen, where all of the pretty GUI magic happened, and if you installed the Workshop, you'd have a secondary screen where you could dump your debug output. At a cursory glance, it appears as if the secondary screen is in memory at all times whether or not you're debugging a program. More worryingly, it looks like every single piece of code - OS, drivers, LisaDesk/Filer, Lisa applications - just dumps loads of debug WRITELNs (pascal's printf?) to the secondary screen whenever anything happens, and none of it appears to be #ifdef'd out. Maybe that's another reason why the Office System is so slow, every time you click the mouse button it prints a debug statement to the debug screen!

Trying to find an old post of mine now, one time I had something in the OS crash so hard it printed the crash/debug messages to the primary display instead of throwing up a "The Lisa is having technical difficulties" dialog. I want to grep that and see if I can find that in the source anywhere...