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Source code for Apple's legendary Lisa operating system to be released for free in 2018
You'll soon be able to take a huge trip down memory lane when it comes to Apple's computer efforts. The Computer History Museum has announced that the source code for the Lisa, Apple's computer that predated the Mac, has been recovered and is being reviewed by Apple itself...
The announcement was made by Al Kossow, a Software Curator at the Computer History Museum. Kossow says that source code for both the operating system and applications has been recovered. Once that code is finished being reviewed by Apple, the Computer History Museum will make the code available sometime in 2018.
While you've been able to run emulators of the Lisa operating system before, this is notable as it's not just a third-party hack solution, but rather Apple is directly involved and the full code will be available for everyone.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday December 29 2017, @03:14AM (2 children)
This is not an old problem. I worked for a company years ago in which nobody understood the FPGA code which was still programmed into every DSP FPGA on every kind of a certain board in production. All the people who understood it were long gone and nobody bothered to try anew even though it was available and the company's own IP (the Xilinx FPGAs were factory-burned before they were placed onto the boards). The oldheads who wrote the original code were now in fat-city and not to be bothered without exorbitant consulting fees.
The company finally wised up and shelled out the dough for an EE with HDL experience to make some sense of it all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @03:25AM (1 child)
You do realize your fanciful story is hard to believe, don't you. Unemployed folks with EE experience are easy to find for peanuts because so many of them are living on food stamps and eating dog food. You're straight up lying about the fat-city of exorbitant consulting fees.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday December 29 2017, @03:36AM
Not really. I'm talking the case where the founders got bought out, for multi-millions, and of course back in the days when code was not commented well, if at all, in many places.
And Verilog/VHDL programming is unlike all your typical C-like stuff. Don't believe me? Try HDL programming yourself and tell me it's like programming a garden-variety microcontroller in C. You're going to get a major dick in your mashed potatoes.