Pioneer Apple Lisa goes “open source” thanks to Computer History Museum.

As part of the Apple Lisa’s 40th birthday celebrations, the Computer History Museum published the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under an Apple Academic License Agreement. With the blessing of Apple, the Pascal source code is available download from the CHM website after filling out a form.

Lisa Office System 3.1 dates back to April 1984, during the early Mac era, and was the Lisa equivalent of today’s operating systems like macOS and Windows.

The entire source package weighs around 26MB and consists of over 1,300 annotated source files, nicely divided into subfolders denoting the code for Lisa’s main operating system, various included apps, and the Lisa Toolkit development system.

First released on January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa remains an influential and important device in Apple history, pioneering the mouse-based graphical user interface (GUI) that made its way to the Macintosh a year later. Despite its innovations, 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 dramatically undercut it in price. Apple launched a major overhaul of the Lisa hardware in 1984 and discontinued the platform in 1985.

The Lisa wasn’t the first commercial computer to ship with a GUI, as some have claimed in the past – that honor goes to the Xerox Star – but the Lisa OS Are defined important conventions that we still use in Windows operating systems today, such as B. Drag-and-drop icons, floating windows, the recycle bin, the menu bar, pull-down menus, Copy and paste linksControl panels, overlapping windows and even a touch automatic system shutdown.

With the LisaOS source release, researchers and educators can now examine how Apple developers implemented these historically important features four decades ago. Apple’s Academic License permits use and compilation of the source code for “non-commercial, academic research, teaching, and personal study purposes” only.

The Computer History Museum had previously teased the code’s release in 2018, but after spending some time reviewing it, they decided to delay its release until the computer’s 40th birthday – the perfect gift to celebrate the legacy of this important one honor machine.

This article was previously published on Source link