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Pioneering Apple Lisa goes “open source” thanks to Computer History Museum [arstechnica.com]:

As part of the Apple Lisa's [arstechnica.com] 40th birthday celebrations, the Computer History Museum has released the source code [computerhistory.org] for Lisa OS version 3.1 under an Apple Academic License Agreement. With Apple's blessing, the Pascal source code is available for download [computerhistory.org] from the CHM website after filling out a form.

Lisa Office System 3.1 [toastytech.com] dates back to April 1984, during the early Mac era, and it was the equivalent of operating systems like macOS and Windows today.

The entire source package is about 26MB and consists of over 1,300 commented source files, divided nicely into subfolders that denote code for the main Lisa OS, various included apps, and the Lisa Toolkit development system.

First released on January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa remains an influential and important machine in Apple's history, pioneering the mouse-based graphical user interface (GUI) that made its way to the Macintosh a year later. Despite its innovations, the Lisa's high price ($9,995 retail, or about $30,300 today) and lack of application support held it back as a platform. A year after its release, the similarly capable Macintosh undercut it dramatically in price. Apple launched a major revision of the Lisa hardware in 1984, then discontinued the platform in 1985.

The Lisa was not the first commercial computer to ship with a GUI, as some have claimed in the past—that honor goes to the Xerox Star—but Lisa OS defined [howtogeek.com] important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts [howtogeek.com], control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch [macworld.com] automatic system shutdown.

With the LisaOS source release, researchers and educators will now be able to study how Apple developers implemented those historically important features four decades ago. Apple's Academic license permits using and compiling the source code for "non-commercial, academic research, educational teaching, and personal study purposes only."

The Computer History Museum had previously teased the release [arstechnica.com] of the code in 2018, but after spending some time in review, they decided to hold back its release until the computer's 40th birthday—the perfect gift to honor this important machine's legacy.

← Previous story [arstechnica.com]Next story → [arstechnica.com]

You can grab this $30,000 computer’s source code for free [digitaltrends.com]:

Apple computers have a reputation for being expensive, but even the most decked-out MacBook Pro [digitaltrends.com] has got nothing on the Apple Lisa desktop, which has just turned 40 years old. If you wanted a Lisa back in 1983, it would set you back a cool $9,995 — roughly $30,000 today.

To mark the computer’s 40th anniversary, the Computer History Museum (CHM) is releasing its source code for free [computerhistory.org]. The move comes as part of the organization’s Art of Code series, which is aimed at preserving code from important milestones in the history of computing.

The CHM is also hosting a 40th birthday celebration [computerhistory.org] for the Lisa at 7 p.m. PT on Tuesday, January 31. The event will feature former Apple engineers talking about their time working on the Lisa project, as well as a demonstration of a working Apple Lisa.

Speaking of the source code release, Hansen Hsu, Curator of the Software History Center at the Computer History Museum, said, “The release of the Apple Lisa was a key turning point for the history of personal computers. Without the Lisa, today’s computers might not use mouse-driven GUIs, and perhaps the Macintosh, and even Microsoft Windows, might not exist either.”

A brilliant flop

It’s certainly true that the Apple Lisa pioneered a bunch of features we take for granted today. One of its biggest selling points was its graphical user interface (GUI), which used icons and windows to let people visually interact with their computers. This came at a time when almost every other computer relied on an opaque text-based command line that was impenetrable to all but the savviest tech wizards.

Thanks to another innovation — the humble mouse [digitaltrends.com] — you could move a pointer around the screen and open apps, move windows, and manipulate text. Apple didn’t invent these ideas, but it was one of the first companies to take a punt on them and introduce them to a wider audience.

The problem, though, was that eye-watering price. Charging $10,000 meant the Lisa was aimed at businesses rather than homes, but its hardware quirks and lack of software limited its appeal even further. Just a year later, Apple launched the Macintosh — the first Mac — which contained many of the Lisa’s greatest hits for a much lower price.

While it may have been a commercial failure, the Lisa showed that concepts like the mouse and the GUI were great ideas worth pursuing — ideas that inspired its rivals and got the ball rolling on what would become the home computing revolution [digitaltrends.com].

If you want to see what made the Lisa tick under the hood and catch a glimpse of its intricate source code, the announcement from the CHM will be of interest. Even if you’re not swayed by the source code, it’s worth checking out the birthday celebration to learn how Apple’s expensive failure altered the course of computing.

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Apple Lisa: 40 Years Later, Now Open Source [itsfoss.com]:

Apple's Lisa computer [wikipedia.org] was one of the most influential computing systems in the history of personal computers. It was one of the early systems that bought a graphical user interface (GUI) to the masses.

The concept of a GUI existed well before the launch of Lisa. Initially developed by Xerox PARC [wikipedia.org] in the 1970s, it never caught on.

It was when Steve Jobs and a delegation from Apple Computer saw a demonstration of Smalltalk [wikipedia.org] on the Alto system by Xerox that led him to think that all computers should work this way.

He was quite impressed with the potential of this way of interacting with a computer and wanted Apple to be at the forefront of this innovation.

This consequently led to the development and launch of Lisa.

But, when it launched, it didn't garner that many sales due to its high price and was considered a commercial failure.

What it succeeded in was that it paved the way for the Macintosh operating system [wikipedia.org] which later took the computing world by storm.

It offered many innovations, with a good GUI being one of the main highlights.

Now, in a recent announcement [computerhistory.org].

After 40 years of Lisa's release, the Computer History Museum [computerhistory.org](CHM) has made the source code open.

Source Code Available to the Public

The CHM teased the release [arstechnica.com] back in 2018, but it was subject to a review process.

The source code was sent to Apple [apple.com] for review, but there was not much news after that. Until now, that is.

It turns out, the CHM had decided to hold back its release to align it perfectly with the computer's 40th birthday.

So, what does it contain?: The source code of the operating system as well as its suite of applications that include a word processor, spreadsheet, and charts.

Can you get access to it?: Yes!, to get access to the source code. One needs to fill out a form [computerhistory.org] on the CHM's site and get the download link.

But there's a catch.

The code is freely available for you to see and use. But there's a software license agreement in place that you have to agree to before you can download the source code.

One of the terms that caught my eye was:

Scope of License. The Apple Software is only licensed (not sold) to you for the non-commercial purposes stated above and may not be used for any other purposes without Apple's prior written permission.

Apple and Apple's licensors retain ownership of the Apple Software and reserve all rights not expressly granted to you. If you create modifications of the Apple Software, you hereby grant to Apple a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable, assignable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publicly display, distribute, make, have made, import and sell your modifications.

This is Apple's Academic license that allows you to use the source code for "non-commercial, academic research, educational teaching, and personal study purposes only"

With that in mind, it is good to see code for older systems being made open (with some restrictions for its usage of course). Tinkerers who love retro computers will have a field day with this.

💬 What do you think? Should companies be more lenient with their old proprietary software and hardware products?

Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on [arstechnica.com]:

Forty years ago today, a new type of personal computer was announced that would change the world forever. Two years later, it was almost completely forgotten.

The Apple Lisa started in 1978 as a new project [lowendmac.com] for Steve Wozniak. The idea was to make an advanced computer using a bit-slice processor [wikipedia.org], an early attempt at scalable computing. Woz got distracted by other things, and the project didn’t begin in earnest until early 1979. That’s when Apple management brought in a project leader and started hiring people to work on it.

Lisa was named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, even though Jobs denied the connection and his parentage. But the more interesting thing about the Lisa computer was how it evolved into something unique: It was the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI).

The vision takes shape

GUIs were invented at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center [arstechnica.com] (PARC) in the early 1970s. The Alto workstation, which was never sold to the public, had a bitmapped screen that mimicked the size and orientation of a piece of paper. PARC researchers wrote software that displayed windows and icons, and they used a mouse to move a pointer on that screen.

Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote the manual for the Apple ][, had visited [goodreads.com] PARC in 1973. He believed that GUIs were the future. Raskin managed to persuade the Lisa project leader to change the computer into a GUI machine. However, he couldn’t convince Jobs, who thought Raskin and Xerox were incompetent.

Raskin altered his approach and got graphics programmer Bill Atkinson to propose [goodreads.com] an official tour of PARC in November 1979. Because Jobs thought Atkinson was great, he agreed to come along. Jobs’ visit to PARC became the stuff of legend [youtube.com], a tale of a brilliant visionary seeing the future of computing for the first time. But in reality, Atkinson was already working on LisaGraf—the low-level code that would power the Lisa’s GUI—months before Jobs saw the PARC demo.

The Lisa’s hardware changed as well. The team abandoned the bit-slice processor and adopted Motorola’s new 68000 CPU. The 68000 was a 16/32-bit chip and used a 24-bit address bus, giving it a maximum of 16 megabytes of memory. This was fine, as memory prices were still sky-high in 1980, and most computers of the day had a maximum of 64 kilobytes of RAM.

In January 1981, senior leadership at Apple got tired of Jobs’ constant interference and micromanagement of the Lisa project and officially removed him from the team. Jobs seethed, then took over a smaller skunkworks project being run by Raskin. This would become important later.

By early 1982, the Lisa hardware was mostly finalized. However, the software was still in flux. A team of designers—including Larry Tesler [arstechnica.com], who had left PARC to join Apple—had been busy doing tons of research, prototyping, and testing. The main question they had was: How should the Lisa’s GUI actually work?

In an article [acm.org] in Interactions magazine, designers Roderick Perkins, Dan Smith, and Frank Ludolph described how the Lisa’s interface changed from early prototypes to a familiar desktop with icons, then away from that model, then finally back to an icon-based, document-centric approach. The goal was to make the Lisa powerful and fun to use.

At long last, the Lisa was ready to be unveiled to the public. On January 19, 1983, Apple announced the computer, which it accurately described as “revolutionary.”

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Journal Reference:
Inventing the Lisa user interface, Interactions (DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/242388.242405 [doi.org])

Original Submission