Lisa Office System prerelease builds

[andrew]

I happened to notice some oddities in the screenshots from Byte Magazine's 1983 Lisa article.
(https://guidebookgallery.org/articles/thelisacomputersystem)

First is an icon with a scissors on it labeled "tray." Naturally a scissors on an irregularly shaped piece of paper represents the action of cutting, and the clipboard window defaults to a position at the bottom of the screen, so it makes sense that the clipboard's final incarnation evolved from the trays seen in Bill Atkinson's Polaroids. I actually think this icon is pretty clever.

The other oddity is that the wastebasket isn't labeled. Perhaps they thought it didn't need one.

Seeing near-final prototypes in Apple ads and magazine articles is nothing new. But it got me wondering... how many prerelease builds of LOS ever made it out of Apple, if any? I don't think I've ever seen footage of one, but my own experience isn't exactly all-encompassing. And if someone ever found one, what are the chances it would it be runnable on a Lisa 1?

[blusnowkitty]

It's likely something made it to outside developers before Lisa's launch. The 1982 sales brochure says there's third-party applications coming for launch, and the recently rediscovered Lisa Pascal beta would support that. Whether anything outside of that made it outside of Apple, much less survived? Who knows...