29 Jun
2007
29 Jun
'07
10:52 a.m.
given the historical importance
Preservation of Lisa software is a particularly sore spot with me.
I tried to find someone who would permit releasing it for many years
while I was there. It is dead, dead, dead. People who worked on it
didn't really want to admit they even worked on it. Any hope of it
ever being released died when Steve came back.
29 Jun
29 Jun
11:08 a.m.
Can you blame them??? I mean, there's that secret Steve Job's memo
that says "any former L-Project member who brings up that name, is to be
taken behind R&D and have thrown at them all of the returned Apple ///'s
until he/she submits and only says Macintosh"
;-)
Curt
Al Kossow wrote:
given the
historical importance
Preservation of Lisa software is a particularly sore spot with me.
I tried to find someone who would permit releasing it for many years
while I was there. It is dead, dead, dead. People who worked on it
didn't really want to admit they even worked on it. Any hope of it
ever being released died when Steve came back.
7:38 p.m.
Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
Can you blame them??? I mean, there's that
secret Steve Job's memo
that says "any former L-Project member who brings up that name, is to be
taken behind R&D and have thrown at them all of the returned Apple ///'s
until he/she submits and only says Macintosh"
Then couldn't someone have preserved all of the software one can run on
a Macintosh XL?
Peace... Sridhar
30 Jun
30 Jun
6:48 a.m.
I'd just like to do some fun stuff with it... LIke write a few
applications or something.
Being able to see the source to the OS would be nice... and helpful
considering the almost complete lack of documentation.
I'd like to write a driver for the asanti scsi enet card and a tcp/ip
stack. Of course, being a stupid database programmer guy, I'd have
no idea how to do it, but learning would be fun!
I also learned to program in Oregon Software Pascal II (on a
decwriter hooked up to a pdp 11/70) so seeing a whole OS written in
Pascal (and assembly I bet) would be really interesting.
I think you'd have better luck asking Woz. But I bet they wouldn't
let him do it. ...
I'll start an online petition. Anyone want to help with the
resurrect lisa website? Oh God, not again. So many projects, so
little time....
On 30 Jun 2007, at 03:38, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are
not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed"
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Can you blame them??? I mean, there's that
secret Steve Job's
memo that says "any former L-Project member who brings up that
name, is to be taken behind R&D and have thrown at them all of the
returned Apple ///'s until he/she submits and only says Macintosh"
Then couldn't someone have preserved all of the software one can
run on a Macintosh XL?
Peace... Sridhar
3 Jul
3 Jul
2:52 p.m.
New subject: [Somewhat OT] Extra-terrestrials and 1980's printers
Here's an odd one for you:
Coast To Coast AM (UFOs, Ghosts, ETs etc.) has been running a story
about strange spacecraft buzzing around (where else?)
California. Recently somebody claimed to have spent the 1980's
working at a secret lab in Palo Alto trying to "commercialize" the
extra-terrestrial technology:
http://isaaccaret.fortunecity.com/
Now, veracity-wise, these photos and "documents" have problems:
- Nobody is coming forward and identifying themselves.
- In the top-left and top-right photos, if the camera exposed the sky
for a neutral blue, the underside of the craft would be very
under-exposed (almost black) like the middle photo and the underside
of the leaves and power pole.
- If the lab was as secure as the author claims it is, "TOP SECRET"
or somesuch classification would be clearly stamped on every(!) page.
- The final problem is with the look of the documents. While there
are some nice touches (three-hole punch marks on the cover...remember
those ubiquitous binders?) the documents have nice fonts and
formatting, and look laser-printed.
Now, in 1986, the number of systems available capable of producing
such documents "in house" was fairly limited. You did have the
LaserWriter, but it had just come out and the document doesn't look
like it's using one of the original LW fonts. The other options were
Scribe, TeX, Xerox, maybe InterLeaf...and not much else. Integrating
a digital photo into a document was a royal pain back then, and
scanners were still exotic equipment.
I'm curious - does anybody recognize which system produced the
documents? I'd be impressed if hoaxers went to the trouble of
tracking down vintage equipment to produce them.
Overall the story the web page tells is pretty entertaining. One
wonders if this is a viral marketing campaign for a sci-fi movie next year.
Cheers,
jp
5:13 p.m.
New subject: [Somewhat OT] Extra-terrestrials and 1980's printers
"J. Peterson" wrote:
Here's an odd one for you:
Coast To Coast AM (UFOs, Ghosts, ETs etc.) has been running a story
about strange spacecraft buzzing around (where else?)
California. Recently somebody claimed to have spent the 1980's
working at a secret lab in Palo Alto trying to "commercialize" the
extra-terrestrial technology:
http://isaaccaret.fortunecity.com/
damn. I've been trying to find Chad and Jenna for years. Please
tell them to email me if you find them. I still have Chad's car keys.
-brad
10:03 p.m.
New subject: [Somewhat OT] Extra-terrestrials and 1980's printers
Now, in 1986, the number of systems available capable
of producing
such documents "in house" was fairly limited. You did have the
LaserWriter, but it had just come out and the document doesn't look
like it's using one of the original LW fonts.
The body font is Palatino, and specifically, it is a digital version rather
than a metal or photo version, as distinguished by the serifs on "E",
"p",
"q", and "y". The original Laserwriter had only the "base
13" fonts (Times,
Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol). The Laserwriter Plus (1986) did include
Palatino (and I could be wrong, but I think that was the first appearance
of the digital version); however, one of the documents is claimed to be
from 1985.
I'm not sure what the heading font is, but it's plainly not Helvitica,
which was the only text sans-serif available on the same device as digital
Palatino until the appearance of third-party Postscript fonts.
You'd think people would have learned something from Dan Rather.
--
Kevin Schoedel <schoedel at kw.igs.net> VA3TCS
2:56 p.m.
Hi,
I also learned to program in Oregon Software Pascal II
(on a
decwriter hooked up to a pdp 11/70) so seeing a whole OS written in
Pascal (and assembly I bet) would be really interesting.
You should track down one of the Apollo DOMAIN workstations (c.
1981-1990). Their OS was originally written in Pascal, and in some
ways more extensive and robust than the Lisa OS (real VM, networked
filesystem, etc). Towards the end more parts of it (e.g., the TCP/IP
stack) were implemented in C as Unix began encroaching on it. By the
end of the decade, Unix was the only way to survive in the Workstation biz.
The DOMAIN OS sources were released outside of Apollo to certain
favored customers (we had a copy of it at our university). Apollo
was acquired by HP in the early '90s, so any official release would
need to come from there.
FYI,
jp
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7 comments
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participants (7)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
brad＠heeltoe.com -
curt＠atarimuseum.com -
pdp11＠saccade.com -
pdp11_70＠retrobbs.org -
ploopster＠gmail.com -
schoedel＠kw.igs.net