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[stepleton]

That file browser is nice. Looking through one of the files reminds me of another problem I've had with the Monitor disk images on Bitsavers: not being able to run Editor.obj. The error message mentions something about a font file, if memory serves. It's been a while...

Like everything Monitor, this feels fixable with some hacking. Even the fact of not being able to boot off the hard drive feels negotiable. The format document you've provided says "Blocks 0 and 1 are the boot blocks", and that ought to be plenty to fit a bootloader that can read the simple filesystem. We have source code for Monitor 11.6, and this might provide hints that would indicate what other changes should be made to the Monitor "kernel" itself (I don't think it calls itself that) so that it's happy to start on a hard disk.

A good reason to do this would be to make a convenient standalone Monitor drive image that can boot the Smalltalk environment that you find on one of the Bitsavers disks. Right now you need a Lisa 1 to run it --- the Monitor in one of the drives and the Smalltalk disk in the other. It's nice if you're patient. (For anyone who feels like trying this: Smalltalk won't run under the version 12 Monitors; I've always run it under 11.6.)

Speaking of bitsavers --- that useful second document you found made me head back to http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/ to see where you'd extracted that text from. I came up short! Do you have a link to the original somewhere? I probably have just not done a good enough job of scanning the PDFs, but I'm curious to know if there are Monitor docs in a different directory that I may have missed.

[D.Finni]

Speaking of bitsavers --- that useful second document you found made me head back to http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/ to see where you'd extracted that text from. I came up short! Do you have a link to the original somewhere? I probably have just not done a good enough job of scanning the PDFs, but I'm curious to know if there are Monitor docs in a different directory that I may have missed.

I may have misspoken the source. It's from Apple Macintosh developer documentation. It's from the early version of Inside Macintosh, distributed to developers in fall 1983 or spring 1984. It just tells you how to set up Monitor to use for developing Macintosh applications.

[rayarachelian]

That file browser is nice. Looking through one of the files reminds me of another problem I've had with the Monitor disk images on Bitsavers: not being able to run Editor.obj. The error message mentions something about a font file, if memory serves. It's been a while...

Just ran across it here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/The_Pascal_Development_System_Manual_Feb82.pdf page 62:

Code: [Select]

The Pascal Development System Manual THE EDITOR File needed:
  EDITOR.OBJ
  LISA:EDITOR.FONT
  LISA:EDITOR.MENUS
  LISA:SYSTEM.FONT

And on page: 64

CUSTOMIZING THE EDITOR
The editor uses whatever font it finds in the file LISA:EDITOR.FONT to display the folder contents. The suggested fonts are:

TITLE12R12S.F  20 lines x 82 chars
SARA8.F             26 lines x 83 chars
TlLEX.F               32 lines x 82 chars (default)
TlLE7R15S.F      32 lines x 94 chars
TlLE5R18S.F      37 lines x 132 chars


[D.Finni]

Here's another little tidbit I came across today:

The Filer will create a volume with a large directory, capable of storing 786 file names, so long as the volume size is greater than 2048 blocks (1 MB).

Also, I have a possible reason why the Monitor did not automatically boot from the ProFile. It's because the Lisa developers also had Lisa OS installed in another partition on the ProFile, and they wanted LOS to boot from it instead of Monitor. And they did not yet have a way to pick which OS to boot from the ProFile.

[rayarachelian]

Also wondering, how did one transfer files from Monitor to LOS? Did LOS 1.x understand the Monitor file system or vice versa?