[HN Gopher] Lisa Source Code Release
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Lisa Source Code Release
Author : bitsavers
Score : 132 points
Date : 2023-01-19 14:41 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computerhistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (computerhistory.org)
| fsckboy wrote:
| "False!" - Dwight Schrute
|
| >FTFA: _a majority of personal computer users interacted with
| their machines via command-line interfaces...in which users had
| to type arcane commands to control their computers._
|
| ARCANE!?!? you say!?!?!
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/arcane arcane: 1.
| Understood by only a few.
|
| the majority of personal computer users (your words, not mine)
| did understand them, in fact _it was the defining feature of
| personal computer users_ 2. (by extension)
| Obscure, mysterious. 3. Requiring secret or mysterious
| knowledge to understand.
|
| the commands were well documented and did what the documentation
| said 4. Extremely old (e.g. interpretation or
| knowledge), and possibly irrelevant.
|
| not old, it was newly invented, current state-of-the-art, and
| nothing but relevant to the tasks at hand, they were the only way
| to accomplish the tasks at hand, and nary a byte of the command
| line lacked morphologic or semantic significance
|
| The serious point I'm trying to make is, young and up-and-coming
| programmers who are learning textual programming languages (more
| or less the definition of a computer programmer at present)
| should not be scared off from learning command lines. They're
| very powerful, and not that obscure or hard. Unix had/has a
| feature that can be confusing, which is the command line is first
| processed according to the rules of the shell, and then it is
| reprocessed according to the rules of the app you are invoking,
| making command lines be a subtle mix of several languages at a
| time (by analogy, a bit like html+javascript+css). You need to
| learn how this works, despite being confusing it is the
| innovation necessary for unlocking the power of shells.
| wmf wrote:
| Arcane by today's standards I guess.
|
| Also, many people in those days never consulted the docs and
| just memorized commands without understanding them so they
| probably felt arcane.
| fsckboy wrote:
| the average person doesn't understand the ancient notation
| used for calculus; that doesn't make "calculus" arcane; and
| the article was writing in the past tense
|
| your point about those who copypasta-ed command incantations
| is reasonable, but they did get them from people who knew how
| to write them and conditions (like situational pathnames or
| dangerousness of side effects) are sufficiently variable to
| limit the scope of this style's applicability
| [deleted]
| dhosek wrote:
| Arcane not to computer users but to the general population.
| Before the advent of GUIs, computer usage tended to be very
| much a niche thing. Heck, even well into the Windows era, it
| was still niche. I remember riding the train to work in the 90s
| and overhearing a conversation where an older man engaged in
| some sort of business (no idea what), was complaining about
| having to have a computer on his desk at work.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yay! Finally! Thanks so much for this. Have been excited about
| this for years since the original announcement.
|
| Had today's date bookmarked, and was browsing around your twitter
| etc earlier looking to see if this had happened.
|
| Can't wait to look inside.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I can't believe they make you sign a fekking license agreement to
| access 40 years old source code (in a long dead language on top).
| That's so typical Apple.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah I actually haven't downloaded this yet, despite being
| eager to look, because I actually wonder if I should be cross-
| checking my employment agreement with my current employer to
| make sure I wouldn't be violating any clauses in either
| document! Highly unlikely, but still, jeez.
| abbbi wrote:
| allways good do see :-)
|
| grep -ri fuck . ./Lisa_Source/Lisa_Toolkit/TK Sources 4/LIBUT-
| UUNIVTEXT2.TEXT.unix.txt: HALT; {Die rather than fuck up} grep:
| ./Lisa_Source/Lisa_Toolkit/TK Sources 4/LIBUT-UUNIVTEXT2.TEXT:
| binary file matches grep: ./Lisa_Source/Lisa_Toolkit/TK3/TK-
| ALERT.OBJ: binary file matches ./Lisa_Source/LISA_OS/APIN/APIN-
| OFFICE.TEXT.unix.txt: fucked up if he bails out or doesn't ever
| select a disk} ./Lisa_Source/LISA_OS/LIBS/LIBDB/libdb-
| SCANCODE.TEXT.unix.txt: valid position, thus we don't fuck with
| pscantable^[scanid]^ until
| ./Lisa_Source/LISA_OS/LIBS/LIBDB/libdb-SCANCODE.TEXT.unix.txt:
| valid position, thus we don't fuck with pscantable^[scanid]^
| until ./Lisa_Source/LISA_OS/LIBS/LIBDB/libdb-
| SCANCODE.TEXT.unix.txt: valid position, thus we don't fuck with
| pscantable^[scanid]^ until
| ./Lisa_Source/LISA_OS/LIBS/LIBDB/libdb-LMSCAN.TEXT.unix.txt:
| badCheckPoint = 3424; { check point info is fucked }{##}
| ./Lisa_Source/LISA_OS/Linkmaps and Misc.
| 3.0/TKALERT.TEXT.unix.txt: if not fcheckhz(hz,i) then
| writeln('heap big fuckup 1'); ./Lisa_Source/LISA_OS/Linkmaps and
| Misc. 3.0/TKALERT.TEXT.unix.txt: if not fcheckhz(hz,i) then
| writeln('heap big fuckup 2');
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| No email form: https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/source/lisa-
| source.zip...
| [deleted]
| IncRnd wrote:
| I didn't turn on JS for the form to be shown, either.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Very neat code and somewhat legible for a non-Pascal speaker.
|
| Curiously, it doesn't credit authors in the headers as I've seen
| in sources from the same period.
|
| I also wonder how much of the core OS code made it into Macintosh
| System 1.
|
| Also, nice styling here:
| http://revontulet.org/2023/01/19/lisadesk.png. They didn't have
| to do ASCII art in the comments but they did!
| fexecve wrote:
| > You may not and you agree not to:
|
| > publish benchmarking results about the Apple Software or your
| use of it
|
| Damn, there goes my Apple Lisa vs Amiga comparison video! I was
| going to get so many YouTube views! Meh, maybe I'll make it
| anyway. So sue me!
|
| > the Apple Software may not be exported or re-exported (a) into
| any U.S. embargoed countries
|
| I'm sure keeping Iran from getting this valuable software from
| 1983, which runs on a completely dead CPU architecture that Linux
| doesn't even support anymore, is very important!
|
| (But seriously, as a license geek, and not a lawyer, the wording
| of this license is really interesting. It seems to have
| completely different disclaimers than you usually see in open-
| source licenses...)
| easton wrote:
| I'm guessing, although I don't know, that they probably had an
| academic license laying around for another product that they
| cleaned up for this. A "it's our source, you can use it for fun
| but not for money" license. Microsoft has shared source
| licenses for academics/bigcos that need to see the source for
| Windows or whatever.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It took them 4 or 5 years just to do this release, since it
| was first announced. I feel like _" they just dusted off an
| old license"_ is not a likely explanation.
|
| Probably took 5 years just to get through all the lawyers at
| Apple, and this is what we ended up with.
|
| Remember, the default answer to almost any question poised to
| a lawyer is "No."
|
| :-(
| astrange wrote:
| That's because you're not supposed to ask the lawyer if you
| should do something. You ask their boss if you can do it
| and ask them them how to do it.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > completely dead CPU architecture
|
| Hey, take that back! 68k/ColdFire ISA is actually pretty well
| supported these days by compilers. Better than it was a few
| years ago. There are 68k backends for both GCC (again) and LLVM
| (maybe not as active).
|
| It's probably the best supported "retro" architecture at this
| point.
|
| Rest of your points are valid though ;-)
| monocasa wrote:
| The LLVM code is fairly active for a retro arch. It just got
| accepted into mainline less than a couple years ago. I
| remember it because the m68k folk are pretty active about
| maintaining support for their arch in the Linux kernel, and
| for a while the lack of m68k support in LLVM (and therefore
| the lack of m68k support in Rust) was seen as a potential
| blocker for mainline Rust support in the kernel.
| purututu wrote:
| The ZIP file contains two folders: 1. Lisa_Source
| 2. __MACOSX
|
| Looks they already planned for macOS/X 40 years ago! That is,
| macOS/X is much older than we thought! What an archeological
| sensation!!!
|
| /irony off
| purututu wrote:
| And there's also a `.DS_Store` in every folder of that 40 years
| old software code. How futuristic!
| lordfrito wrote:
| You are the wind beneath my wings
| _boffin_ wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. awesome article.
| programd wrote:
| Lovely bit of history, but I laughed out loud at this bit of
| legal WTF in the license agreement you must agree to before
| downloading the software:
|
| "You may not and you agree not to: ...publish benchmarking
| results about the Apple Software or your use of it"
|
| Perhaps 40 years later Apple is still embarassed about the
| performance of the Lisa?
|
| So, maybe somebody here can emulate a Lisa and run Geekbench :)
| [deleted]
| msie wrote:
| I'm still learning Swift (forever) and looking at the source code
| I wonder if Swift is getting too complicated to read now. I'm
| having a hard time reading simple snippets of Swift but the Lisa
| source code seems so comforting to read in comparison. Anyways,
| I'll soldier on.
| [deleted]
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I know what you mean regarding Swift.
|
| In recent decades different languages have introduced
| interesting patterns, interesting notations. Swift seems to
| have adopted about all of them.
|
| I have been told by teammates that I don't write "Swifty" Swift
| code, instead writing something more like an "Objective-Swift"
| style.
|
| Oh, and they say that like it's a bad thing.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > I have been told by teammates that I don't write "Swifty"
| Swift code, instead writing something more like an
| "Objective-Swift" style. Oh, and they say that like it's a
| bad thing
|
| Depending on what they mean by this, I agree that it can be a
| bad thing.
|
| Years ago, in the days when Swift was still pretty green
| (around 2.x or 3.x) I knew someone who liked to try to write
| "Objective-C in Swift" -- that is, they'd try to ignore the
| type system and optionality entirely, with lots of forced
| casts, forced unwraps, shipping data around in [String:Any]
| dictionaries, etc... constant fighting with the compiler that
| made SourceKit very unhappy and crashy and the app we were
| working on more crash-prone than it would've been had it been
| written in Objective-C.
|
| On the other hand, if it's just a more verbose style that
| favors clarity and avoids e.g. unnamed closure arguments and
| breaks more out into well named variables and functions, I
| don't see anything wrong with that at all and in fact have
| been leaning further in that direction as time goes on.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, yeah no I would never force a cast, I always unwrap
| optionals...
|
| As an example, I was slow to adopt _guard_ statements
| generally, preferring to strictly use them only for
| parameter checking (thus only at the top of functions).
|
| Then there are crazy ways that _case_ statements can be
| used in a _switch_ that I still don 't understand.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Downloaded the code and I'm not really sure what I'm looking at.
| What language is this, and how would someone build/load it?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Clascal, the predecessor from Object Pascal, used on Mac OS.
|
| Apple was also a precursor in using safer systems languages for
| OS development.
|
| Even when MPW later replaced Object Pascal, the major
| frameworks were based in C++, not C.
| ajross wrote:
| Most of the Mac OS ROM was still in assembly (there was a
| story on the front page last week detailing a time bug owing
| to a misfeature of the 68k DIVU instruction, even). It wasn't
| about "safety", just productivity.
|
| And C wasn't chosen because Apple had made an organizational
| bet on Pascal years earlier with the Apple II. C in the early
| 80's was still a niche "new vogue" kind of thing from
| academia[1]. Apple's roots were older, they didn't get the
| Unix bug until decades later.
|
| [1] c.f. Sun Microsystems, founded by Stanford and Berkeley
| geeks, launching its very different 68k products
| concurrently.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I understand the app source code is in there too - it would be
| nice to know what the directory names refer to -- which
| directory corresponds to which app, etc.
| octetta wrote:
| The files I've looked at are Pascal (the article talks about
| Apple's object-oriented varient). I suspect there's 68000
| assembly language there too, but I'm just getting started.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Under the OS section, there are some files with assembler in
| it.
| LastTrain wrote:
| I see assembly and pascal files. According to this[0] article,
| the development was done on Apple II's and Mac development was
| done on Lisa!
|
| [0] https://macgui.com/news/article.php?t=518
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Fun story, development of Digital Research's CP/M68k and
| GEMDOS/GEM GUI on the 68k was also done on the Apple Lisa
| (and I think some VME 68k boxes from Motorola?). So, a
| competitor to the Mac (albeit not a successful one) developed
| on the Lisa, too.
|
| And in fact, fun people have gotten GEM/GEMDOS to boot and
| run again on Lisa emulators and real Lisas.
|
| Computer archeology.
| snewman wrote:
| I can confirm this regarding Mac development. I was part of
| the team that built FullPaint
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FullPaint) back in 1985. We
| had just a few Lisas to work with, and they were considered
| sacred.
|
| Testing code required copying it onto a floppy disk and
| popping it into a Mac. We probably would have been a lot more
| productive if any of us had ever heard the words "unit test".
| (We were a young team, everyone in their early 20s or even
| late teens.)
| jchw wrote:
| Oh, how I wish I could've been involved in the halcyon days
| of the computer industry. I'm sure it's all rosey looking
| from the perspective of someone who wasn't there, but the
| scrappy young development teams, humble small
| organizations, mail-order software, and general naive
| optimism of the preceding era seems like it was so much
| fun. Probably very challenging, and I'm sure frustrating,
| but I can only imagine the satisfaction of having worked on
| the Macintosh and breaking so much new ground.
|
| I was born in time to experience the internet when it was a
| lot more fun and experimental, which I definitely am
| grateful for. I hope there are more "moments" like this in
| the future, though I can't help but feel they're mostly
| over when it comes to computers and technology. Things just
| can't stay scrappy and experimental forever.
| Fr0styMatt88 wrote:
| If you haven't read Masters of Doom before, I highly
| recommend it! Your comment reminded me of it.
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(page generated 2023-01-19 23:00 UTC)