Lisa history - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 Nov 2006

...
  I'm curious why Larry Tesler and his team from
Xerox Parc picked Pascal as
 the language to build Lisa on...esp. considering the Alto was a BCPL machine
 (forerunner of C). 
...
  I know Apple was an early adopter of USCD Pascal...I
wonder if had any
 influences.   

The original Lisa was going to be a 2901 based machine running a variant of
P-Code. This died off pretty quickly once the 68000 was announced.

I assume David Craig has this all documented somewhere. I heard the early
history from Paul Baker. Lisa had been going for a while before Larry came
over from PARC. Just before Larry left Apple, there was an internal talk on
Lisa history which gave a chronology of events. Maybe Larry has written this
all up somewhere.

...
  Did Apple write their own compiler? 
See the previous message. It was written by Silicon Valley Software