Re: Lisa Programming Info 1 of 2 from David Craig on 2001-01-05 (lisalist1)

From: David Craig <dcraig_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2001 17:33:06 -0700

Larry Rosenstein made several comments about Lisa programming that I want to reply to:

Larry

"Also there were no folders in the original Lisa file system. The desktop manager, therefore, had to fake them, much as the Mac Finder did before HFS was developed."Larry is correct. It was not until Lisa Office System 3 that the Lisa file system was hierarchical. I'm not sure if the Lisa Desktop Manager ("Finder") was modified to use this new FS, but I suspect it was. The reason I'm hesitant to say it did was a) I really don't know, and b) I have a feeling that Apple may have not wanted to change this aspect of the Lisa when Apple had decided by OS 3 to cancel the Lisa and only wanted to release upgraded applications such as LisaWrite 3 and its new spelling checker. Larry is also correct about the Lisa FS supporting 31 character file names with the "-" as the file object seperator (e.g. volume-folder-file). Larry

"Lisa files did not have a resource fork, but there was a mechanism for separating the localizable strings, etc. from the application code."

I disagree with Larry on this one. The Lisa did have a "resource fork", though it was not called that.

Lisa had a 128 byte "file label" that Lisa applications could access via 2 special Lisa operating system calls (READ_LABEL, WRITE_LABEL). Every file had a file label that was reserved for application use only, the operating system did not touch it. the Lisa Office System used the file label to map high level Desktop Manager documents and folders to their low-level FS resources. Specifically, an OS document was stored on the disk with a name such as "{T1D2}" which means it is document 2 for tool (application) 1 (LisaWrite was actually tool 1). This file had a disk label containing the user's name of the document (e.g. "December 83 Budget"), the location on the screen of the document's window, and various state information such as the scrollbar settings.

The Mac's resource fork was much more sophisticated and could also be rather large. Mac's mainly used the resource fork for language localization purposes. The Lisa's lack of such an extensive feature as this resulted in localization strings being stored in "phrase" files. These were just regular files that the Lisa user never saw and were named very much like the Lisa tool program file but with a suffix like ".PHRASE".

Apple at one time seems to have wanted to add resource files to the Lisa, but that was never done. My reference here is the Lisa Toolkit source which in I believe the Dialog class section talks about this the TK team wanted to store dialog info in resources. Without resources they stored this info in the phrase files themselves.

Concerning the Toolkit in general, I think it was designed very well. I've read that compared to the Xerox Star framework library, the TK was much better (though the later MacApp was itself an improvement over the TK). This design was due to the following TK team members:

Larry Tesler (design and debugger implementation) Larry Rosenstein
Scott Wallace
Pete Young (worked on early prototypes)
Barry Haynes (debugger implementation)

> Regards,
> David T. Craig
>
> ###########################################################
> # David T. Craig -- CyberWolf Inc. -- ACI 4D Developer #5
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