Re: Lisa Toolkit

From: David Craig <dcraig_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2001 16:15:32 -0700


Concerning Larry Rosenstein's comments about the Lisa Toolkit and other Lisa technical things:

About Lisa documentation ...

> I didn't realize Stanford had a copy

Stanford has lots of neat Apple info. You can see what they have at the following web site:

        http://www.oac.cdlib.org/dynaweb/ead/stanford/m1007/

The "Container List" item on this page shows you their archive catalog.

I corresponded with their archivist recently and got some prices for copies of Lisa materials such as the Lisa programmer's guide that Apple's Lisa applications teams created to document the Lisa's internal "desktop libraries". Unfortunately, the copying prices are rather high, 25 cents per page, which makes documents with hundreds of pages rather expensive (at least for me). If others on this list are interested in getting stuff from this archive, would anyone be interested in dividing the copying costs so each person pays a small amount yet still gets the documents they want?

About object-oriented programming and method knowledge inundation ...

> This is an issue with object-oriented frameworks in general. (MacApp
> > had a similar problem.) Since the Toolkit was the first one Apple
> > ever did, we didn't have any experience with the best way to document
> > it. This is also one reason why the Toolkit shipped with source code.
>
MacApp also came with source code so it seems that though Apple improved the general framework architecture from the Lisa Toolkit days, MacApp programmer's still needed to know some of the internal info.

> an A-Line instruction on the 68K was only
> > 2 bytes. I think an IUJSR "instruction" was probably a particular
> > 2-byte A-Line instruction followed by 4(?) bytes that specified the
> > routine being called.
>
I would trust Larry's description here over mine since he was involved with the Lisa's development. What he says sounds reasonable to me, I should check a real Lisa object file at home and see what it produced. Overall, this is rather escoteric stuff and I'm sure 1000's of people need to know this :-)

> Apple was looking at a "stable and
> > extensible library mechanism" that would allow existing apps to work
> > with updated system libraries but that this never was finished.
>
This feature and many others that were never finished by the Lisa team is a shame in my opinion. For example, there was some work done on a Lisa 3 model that would have improved the hardware and I believe was to use a 68020 chip which would have been faster than the original 5MHz 68000 chip. There was also some work done on a color Lisa which produced color video output using a card (Mike Dhuey at Apple did this work with about a handful of cards actually being produced). Apple also had extensive plans for an "AppleBus" network that evenutally was turned into AppleTalk (I've heard that Apple had a rather extensive internal network of Lisa functioning, around 100, that used 3Com ethernet cards).

> Regards,
> David T. Craig
>
> ###########################################################
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