Re: dual boot?

> There was also some desktop publishing software that added itself to the
> environments window.

Any Lisa "shell" program would appear in the Environments window at startup. A "shell" program was just a program whose name ended in .SHELL (or maybe started with SHELL). The Lisa Office System and the Lisa Workshop were shell programs. Both shared the same low-level OS and also the same file system.

A shell program had to perform several special actions relating to inter-process communication so that it could communicate with the Lisa OS which booted before any shell booted. Apple provided developers with the details in what I recall was called the Lisa shell writer guide.

Lisa Office System files actually had a special naming convention which by default the Lisa Workshop filtered from its catalogs.

The Lisa Office System documents all had a name with a format such as {T1D123} which ment this was a document for tool 1 and document number 123. The document itself provided in what was called the file label the details about the document's name as seen by users. For example, the label would say the document's public name was "My First Novel, revision 100 dated 1/19/1983", the public name could be up to 63 characters long, the private file system name was restricted to 31 characters. This label was really just a small (128 byte) resource attached to the file by the Lisa file system. Programmers could write and read this information, as the Lisa Desktop Manager (Lisa Finder) did.

This file label scheme was very elagent in my opinion since the Lisa desktop manager did not need a seperate file to map private and public document attributes, the file label handled this mapping. Also, the Lisa desktop manager allowed you to have multiple documents in the same folder with the same name. For example, you could have 3 documents named "My Document", one could be a LisaWrite document, another a LisaDraw document, and the last a LisaCalc document.

The Lisa Office System was very advanced for its time and had many features which were never really known outside of Apple. Too bad Apple gave up on the Lisa since I think that if the Lisa hardware and software were allowed to advance, we would have seen some very impressive advances in computer-human user interfaces. People such as LARRY TESLER, DAN SMITH (KELLER today), FRANK LUDOLPH and BILL ATKINSON were instrumental in creating the Lisa Office System's user interface and internal implementation.

> I don't know of Xenix can coexist with another system
> on the same disk.

I don't believe Xenix was a Lisa shell. Believe it had its own disk format and took over the whole Lisa. There was no sharing of the Lisa disk with other systems such as the Lisa OS or MacWorks.

• David Craig

  ---

> Yes, in fact I have my Lisa 2/10 configured as a tripple boot system!
>
> MacWorks can use part of the hard disk, but you must use a boot floppy to load
it.
>
> The Office System and the Workshop can both be loaded on the hard disk, and
> you can pick which one you want from the environments window. Here is a
> screen shot:
>
> http://compu85.homeip.net/stuff/Lisa/Screen%20Shots/Enviroments%20Window.JPG
>
> There was also some desktop publishing software that added itself to the
> environments window. I don't know of Xenix can coexist with another system
> on the same disk.
>
> -Jason
>
> On 4/12/07, simon <simski_at_email.domain.hidden <mailto:simski_at_email.domain.hidden> > wrote:
>
> hello all.
>
> reading some literature (especially Goodthings.pdf) i notice that i can
> setup my lisa with a portion of the internal widget drive for macintosh
> and the rest for lisa. does this mean that this machine can dual boot?
> how can this be done?
> --
>
> met vriendelijke groet
>
> Simon Claessen
> simski_at_email.domain.hidden <mailto:simski_at_email.domain.hidden>
>
>
>
>
> >

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