[news] CHM MAKES APPLE LISA SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC AS A PART OF ITS ART OF CODE SERIES

[zfk]

https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/chm-makes-apple-lisa-source-code-available-to-the-public-as-a-part-of-its-art-of-code-series/

CHM MAKES APPLE LISA SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC AS A PART OF
ITS ART OF CODE SERIES

Riporto quasi integralmente:
«Mountain View, CA – Jan. 19, 2023: The Computer History Museum (CHM),
the leading museum exploring the history of computing and its impact on
the human experience, today announced the public release and long-term
preservation of the source code for the Apple Lisa, including its system
and applications software, as part of its Art of Code series. Forty
years ago today, Apple, Inc. released the Lisa computer, a milestone in
computing history for its innovative use of a graphical user interface
(GUI) in a personal computer (PC).

The Apple Lisa shipped with a suite of applications including a word
processor, spreadsheet, and charts—bundled with the system—which
discouraged third party developers from writing their own software for
it. The Lisa’s GUI was inspired by elements from Xerox PARC’s Smalltalk
system, but also included new innovations that were validated by user
testing. The Lisa sold for $9,995, two years after Xerox had released a
commercial GUI-based workstation – the Star – for $16,595, which was
similarly targeted towards office workers. The high price of both
machines compared to the IBM PC, a command-line based PC released two
years earlier and that retailed for $1,565, resulted in their eventual
demise.

Following Lisa’s launch in 1983, the Lisa 2 series was announced in
January 1984 alongside the Apple Macintosh (known today as “Mac”). The
Macintosh competed with Lisa and ultimately became the favored computer
for its lower price and open software ecosystem. Other GUI-based
operating systems like Windows were released after the Lisa and the
Macintosh and were heavily influenced by both.

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. We’re thrilled to
publicly release the source code for the Apple Lisa—for the first
time—and thank Apple, Inc. for their permission and support that led to
this release.”

For download options and more information about the release of this
historic source code, please visit the blog post here and or download
the source code here. For more information on the Art of Code series
please visit the site here.
»

link alla pagina di download, previa iscrizione:
https://info.computerhistory.org/apple-lisa-code

CYA

[Ammammata]

Il giorno Sun 22 Jan 2023 08:23:25a, *zfk* ha inviato su

Post by zfk
APPLE LISA

Apple consigned its remaining inventory to Sun Remarketing of Utah,
which had some success refurbishing and modernizing the Lisas with up-
to-date technology. But eventually this, too, came to a halt when Apple
decided to take a tax write-off on its unsold inventory. In September
1989, almost exactly a decade after Jobs had first witnessed the Alto
in action, the last 2,700 Lisas were ignominiously buried in an
unmarked grave, closing the book on the first mass-marketed computer to
use the standard on which virtually all computers would run.
--AmericanHeritage.com / Poor Little Lisa
--
https://web.archive.org/web/20080209123614/http://www.americanheritage.
com/articles/magazine/it/1999/1/1999_1_64.shtml
--Sun Jan 22 2023 12:37:09 GMT+0100 (Central European Standard Time)


peccato... ne avrei tenuto volentieri qui uno, come soprammobile :)

[Filippo Zamengo]

Troppo buffo: un commento in un thread sulle metriche linkava questo:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
che riporto integralmente:

«
**-2000 Lines Of Code**
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Date: February 1982
Characters: Bill Atkinson
Topics: Software Design, Management, Lisa
Summary: It's hard to measure progress by lines of code

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.
»

Ovunque ci si giri, Lisa spunta fuori a ogni piè sospinto... Sarà forse questo, l'Anno Del LIsa? :D
Ai posteri(ori) l'ardua sentenza... ;)

CYA

[Giuseppe³]

Post by Filippo Zamengo
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt
Nel mio piccolo mi e' successa la stessa cosa:

Ogni programma che scrivevo per un cliente, dovevo riportare quante
righe di codice erano state fatte.

Essendo i programmi di automazione sempre molto simili, alla fine si
trattava solo di fare un copia/incolla di pezzi di codice per cui non
c'era nessuna correlazione tra il tempo impiagato e il programma finale.

Ho tentato varie volte di spiegare la cosa, ma non c'e' stato verso di
far capire la cosa.
Anche perche' questo portava ad avere codice schifoso e non ottimizzato.

La cosa e' terminata quando i clienti hanno cominciato ad accorgersi del
trucco e a lamentarsi della cosa.

Ciao