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| Author | Apple Lisa Source Code Released (Read 26690 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ReleaseTheGeese
32 MB  Posts: 37 Division 1 Computer Support 
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on: January 19, 2023, 23:47
Looks like Apple have been so kind to release the Apple Lisa sources: https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-lisa-apples-most-influential-failure/ Alas, it is behind an email form and long disclaimer. However the download link is available elsewhere for the reclusive. Maybe in 10 years we will see the System 7 sources. Who knows  Edit: This is cool http://revontulet.org/2023/01/19/lisadesk.png. They didn't have to do a bit of ASCII art in the comments but they did! |
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Last Edit: January 19, 2023, 23:57 by ReleaseTheGeese
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #1 on: January 20, 2023, 02:48
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Excellent read!
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lilliputian
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64 MB Posts: 68 A Good Apple!
Reply #2 on: January 20, 2023, 03:46
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Good read! And good on Apple for letting something go, if a bit late, haha.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #3 on: January 20, 2023, 10:47
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I agree it's good news not because the Lisa sources would be really helpful, but for the fact it a) means that someone at Apple is caring enough to go through the hassle of getting signatures from (probably) a gazillion on higher-ups b) as noted, it may mean they'll open source some earlier Mac OS versions as well. Crossing fingers :-)
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #4 on: January 20, 2023, 13:38
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Apple is so often reviled as being such a closed ecosystem, but overall a great deal of the underpinnings of what they build is based on open source and they contribute a good deal to the open source community. Darwin the basis of OS X is open. The BSD foundation notes that most of the Mach Kernel developers are Apple employees. Apple forked webkit from KHTM, made no efforts to lock it down and webkit has become a driving force on the internet. Webkit is used many browsers and derivatives of it power most of the web browsers today. (Ok, I suppose you can see that as a mixed blessing at best.) One also needs to keep in mind that items that are part of System 7 and other releases are bits of code that Apple has licensed from other sources, and Apple may well not have the rights to release that code. It is nice to be able to see the methodologies and behind the scenes thinking of so many of the UI elements that have become universal through out all various desktop environments that are used today. Pretty amazing to look at the first implementation of cut copy paste and undo.
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ReleaseTheGeese
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32 MB Posts: 37 Division 1 Computer Support
Reply #5 on: January 20, 2023, 21:40
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Quote from: wove Pretty amazing to look at the first implementation of cut copy paste and undo. I read in the article that the Lisa team put the document metaphor over the application metaphor. It makes sense that a universal cut, copy and paste would emerge from here. And yes, not that long ago Apple contributed a patch to OpenBroadcastStudio that allowed greatly accelerated video capture for OSX, which was a nice surprise. They also brought us CUPS, which means any *nix can print to anything "designed for iPhone". Good because unixen wouldn't get as much attention as Windows from the printer makers themselves.
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #6 on: January 21, 2023, 02:07
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There was quite a bit of interest in "documentment centric" workflows in the early-mid 80s. Motif which was proprietary was another very document centric UI. It lives on today and is somewhat popular in BSD communities. The original Windows was mostly a motif clone, that MS partly dumped over fear of itbeing sued. MS of course went on to base their UI off the Standard UI, which I believe was created at the University of Indiania. It was therefore open source/public domain. While Apple GEOS and Commodore GEOS were very Mac like, they were actually licensed from Xerox, which is probably why Apple never. tried to sue, even though they were suing outfits left and right for copying "their" UI. The Macintosh UI did of course move quite a long way from be completely document centric. OpenDoc was a very document centric approach, that did not last long. Overall to be profitable you need to have applications whose developers also need to make money, and of course to make that more likely to happen it is necessary to be application focused and not document/user focused. I am often surprised that open source embraced the application focus for most of their UIs as it seems that a document based focus is a more user friendly take on the work flow. Overall that is a huge kind of switch from the way most trades work. Generally the project is the total focus, with little thought to the brand of tool being used.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #7 on: January 21, 2023, 04:44
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Features like a universally usable clipboard need to be "dictated" by operating system's author. Commodore e.g. left all of this up to the app developers and as a result copy & paste across applications is a "hit & miss" feature on the Amiga (and none existent on the C64). If two apps just don't want to talk to each other, then so be it. A universal clipboard doesn't just "store stuff" it does it in a way that allows an(y) application to retrieve the part of the data it can use. Thus a word processor gets the whole object, including font type and size and formatting specs, whilst a simple notepad only receives the ASCII characters. That requires a structured clipboard with type specifications everyone has to adhere to. A simple "grab and run with that part of memory" approach won't do. And only the author of the operating system can "dictate" how every app developer has to access this universal data exchange store. There are lots of areas - like sharing multimedia resources, a.s.o. - where the OpSys must mandate that all apps "play nice with each other". Either that or chaos breaks lose.
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