Re: Status of Lisa 7/7 source release

From: Shirl Casner <shirlgato_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2018 21:19:18 -0700

Tom,

> could you conceivably build the OS and apps yourself?

I suspect building the Lisa apps from the sources would be a non-trivial exercise.

I say that since I suspect there may be certain dependencies on the internal Lisa intrinsic libraries that are installed and there may be some special development tools or steps that either don't exist anymore or are not documented. Also, the development environment may not be consistent within the different app groups. Apple originally used the MONITOR development system and then for the most part used the WORKSHOP development system. But I recall (?) that some of the developers preferred the MONITOR to the WORKSHOP for speed reasons. This means some of the apps may need the MONITOR system and I suspect that is not archived with the rest of the Lisa sources.

The Lisa development teams worked very closely together and may have known what to do without telling outsiders. This mean, no development building documentation. The building control files (called EXEC files in Apple parlance and MAKE files elsewhere) may not have been archived by each app group.

There may also be disk device setup issues too such as hard drives attached to developers machines. These setup details may not have been documented. For example, Apple used the CORVUS hard drives for Lisa development since these drives tended to hold a lot more that Apple's ProFile drives (5MB generally - remember this is 1980 and drives with GBs of storage were unheard of then).

This is just an educated (half?) guess on my part, but who knows ...

Attached in separate emails are some Lisa development materisl that may be of some interest to LisaList members.

Hope this info + history helps in some small way.

PS: Enjoy the Lisa cartoons

===

> On December 24, 2017, at 12:01 PM, Tom Stepleton <stepleton_at_email.domain.hidden> wrote:
>
> Wow, what fantastic news! Many questions about what's included in the source code (could you conceivably build the OS and apps yourself?), but I guess I'll just wait to see. Thanks to everyone involved!
>
> --Tom
>
> On Sunday, December 24, 2017 at 3:49:23 PM UTC, Al Kossow wrote:
> Just wanted to let everyone know the sources to the OS and applications were recovered, I
> converted them to Unix end of line conventions and spaces for Pascal tabs after recovering
> the files using Disk Image Chef, and they are with Apple for review. After that's done, CHM
> will do an @CHM blog post about the historical significance of the software and the code that
> is cleared for release by Apple will be made available in 2018. The only thing I saw that
> probably won't be able to be released is the American Heritage dictionary for the spell checker
> in LisaWrite

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Received on 2018-01-07 23:27:16

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