Re: Lisa History

Steve asked ...

> Why has the Lisa team remained silent? Isn't there a book here? I'd
> personally love to have all the anecdotes and the like concerning the
> Lisa's development to read. There's a little bit about it on the Mac
> Folklore site, but everything is so Mac-centric. It would be refreshing to
> read about the Lisa from a Lisa-centric perspective.

I have a 2 CD set called LISA COLLECTED PAPERS which has such information. I created this CD set about a year ago based on many Lisa documents I've collected from 1984 onwards when I used the Lisa Workshop for Macintosh development. These CDs contain a large number of scanned documents covering the Lisa's history, development, articles, and comments by the Lisa development team themselves. Includes some very rare Lisa materials such as the original Lisa requirements document, the Lisa product introduction plan, the Lisa boot ROM source listing, and the Lisa Tool Kit application object-oriented framework listing (the Tool Kit was the predecessor to the Macintosh MacApp framework).

If anyone wants a copy of this set just send me a mailing address and I will send them.

Concerning Lisa books, KURT SCHMUCKER wrote a great Lisa book in the mid 1980s about the Lisa which I highly recommend. Called THE COMPLEATE LISA, it is out of print but sometimes a copy appeares on eBay for lots of $s.

Here's some Lisa development answers to several Lisa questions I asked from one of the Lisa developers I received just this month which may interest you:

Q: What was the hardest part about writing programs for the Lisa? I assume developing the underlying support libraries such as the event manager were the biggest obstacles. I also assume the fine tuning which occured at the end of the development to improve the Lisa's performance was difficult too.

1. We faced a number of very interesting challenges. Lack of development tools was one. We all got to be very good at crawling up the call chain by looking at the 68000 registers, and then looking for symbols in the code to find out where we were. Brainstorming one day we came up with the idea to have the compiler automatically put the name of the procedure just before the start of the code block, and then modifying the debugger to automatically display the call chain. Brad Silverberg and I also had fun developing a rudimentary set of command line programs.

Another category of challenging projects was coming up with the GUI for various apps and UI elements. It is fascinating to me how an interface that we take so much for granted today as obvious and intuitive was everything but that before we "discovered" it. Most impressive was how developers got some ideas that were different than the prevailing wisdom and did a skunkworks prototype for comparison. At times the prototype hit the target in such an obvious way that it put an end to any further discussion. Other times it didn't feel quite right but led to further refinements in a different direction.

We all built on each other's code. The first one to come up with a new kind of alert or dialog often saw their code become the standard interface for that kind of behavior in other apps as well. These early libraries got refactored as the implementation matured.

Q: Looking back at the Lisa from a 22 year perspective (1983-2005), what do you see as the best features of the Lisa? Worst?

1. The Lisa was way ahead of its time. It took the Mac more than 10 years to get similar features in the OS. However, the Mac was much more successful. The greatest contribution that Lisa made to the industry was the UI elements, libraries, and apps that gave birth to the Mac.
2. What was the hardest part about porting LisaDraw to MacDraw? I assume the memory constraints on the original Mac 128K and 512K machines.
3. Squeezing the code into a limited physical memory space was the biggest challenge. I had to factor the code into a 48KByte core and a dozen or so 16KByte overlay segments.

I will also send another email to the LisaList mailing list which details the development of the Lisa's user interface and which was written by one of the Lisa's devlopers.

• David Craig

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