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bmwcyclist:
Ironically, I am planning on using my LISA (when I get it fully running and outfitted) to write security blogs on things like IOT devices.

thanks for the heads up!!!

sigma7:

--- Quote from: bmwcyclist on March 10, 2025, 01:40:17 pm ---using my LISA ... to write security blogs

--- End quote ---

Interesting! If you proceed with that you may be one of the few using a Lisa for actual productivity/work.

I don't recall specifics as to when the first viruses appeared for the Macintosh, but I'm confident the Mac Plus could be infected, which means that if you're using MW+/II you're vulnerable.

I presume some other vintage Mac forum has info about those early viruses... something to watch for when testing old software if you depend on your Lisa for work.

Lisa2:

--- Quote from: Kelly king on March 10, 2025, 06:30:32 pm ---Here is a Pascal code snippet for Lisa Workshop that enables the use of a SCSI hard drive with Lisa OS 3.0.1:
This is AI written wonder if it would work?

--- End quote ---

A basic example, Yes.  Also very high level.

My low level HI (Human Intelligence) predicts this will not work... calling a SCSI manager that does not exist in the Lisa OS.

bmwcyclist:

--- Quote from: sigma7 on March 10, 2025, 02:30:36 pm ---
--- Quote from: bmwcyclist on March 10, 2025, 01:40:17 pm ---using my LISA ... to write security blogs

--- End quote ---

Interesting! If you proceed with that you may be one of the few using a Lisa for actual productivity/work.
If you're using MW+/II, you're vulnerable. This is something to watch for when testing old software if you depend on your Lisa for work.

--- End quote ---

I hope I am successful!

If I do run into one, it is not likely to get far as the O/S is contained to SD cards and floppy images....

stepleton:

--- Quote from: Kelly king on March 10, 2025, 06:30:32 pm ---Here is a Pascal code snippet for Lisa Workshop that enables the use of a SCSI hard drive with Lisa OS 3.0.1:
This is AI written wonder if it would work?

--- End quote ---

(What is Lisa OS 3.0.1?)

As Lisa2 has pointed out, this program is bogus. The AI has done what they usually do when they don't know what they're talking about, which is to give you an attractive-looking lie.

The program does appear to be valid Pascal syntax, so that's a good start. What it seems to want to do is use some built-in SCSI functionality to mount a SCSI drive. The Lisa OS doesn't have any SCSI functionality at all, so this program is trying to use something that doesn't exist. And the way it uses its made-up functionality --- mount a drive --- is probably something that you could do with the Preferences program or the Workshop shell if that functionality did exist. In other words, if this program worked, there probably would not be a need for it...

The way the program is trying to invoke that functionality appears to be through a library called "SCSI" (see under "USES"). There is no SCSI library in the Lisa OS: this is something we would have to write. The library would probably make use of a SCSI device driver (or a stack of them: one for SCSI, one for storage that uses SCSI), which is also something we would have to write. The device driver manual that I linked to earlier would probably help out a lot with that, but it would still be an ambitious undertaking!

The program also appears to be using a library called LisaTypes, which I don't remember existing either. Presumably this is where the SCSIdevice record type would have been defined.

For programs that you build with the Workshop, all but the most fundamental libraries have to be listed alongside a special comment that tells the compiler where to find the library. This comment takes the form {$U library_file_name.OBJ }. You can see some of these in a real Workshop Pascal program here: https://github.com/stepleton/LisaMandelbrot/blob/master/Pro/MANDELQD.TEXT#L81

The rest of the program goes on to use the made-up SCSI library in a made-up way. Pure imagination can never be right or wrong, so there's not much to say about what you see here, other than that it won't be very helpful in getting SCSI in the Lisa OS in real life. As one final nit, though, Workshop Pascal files usually have the extension .TEXT, not .PAS.


Doing this development for real will be a big lift for a human or an AI. Despite what I've said here, I do think generative AI systems could play a role here: used well and with appropriate hand-holding, they're pretty good at writing code. But I don't think they're going to know how to write Lisa device drivers "out of the box". At a minimum, I think you will need to use a model with a big context window and provide useful resources within that context window, like that device driver manual and perhaps even some of the source code for the libraries that the example code in the manual uses. You will also need to provide low-level information about the SCSI card that you'd like the driver to use, potentially including the datasheet for the SCSI IC that it employs. Ultimately, by the time you've given the AI everything it needs to do the job, you may find that you can do a lot of the job on your own anyway...

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