Apple Lisa OS goes open source!

[anonymous74]

Saw this on another forum I'm on - Apple just open-sourced the Lisa OS for the 40th anniversary of the system's ill-fated release:
https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... ry-museum/
https://computerhistory.org/press-relea ... de-series/

I wonder if anything cool could come of this!

[src]

This is what I've been waiting to hear for a long time. I would really like to start digging into the source and see what could be done with my 3 Mac Pluses and 1 Macintosh SE that I have collecting dust in storage. I'm sure that the Lisa and the Mac are twins in terms of architecture as they share the same CPU and similar design.

[Darkstar]

Saw this on another forum I'm on - Apple just open-sourced the Lisa OS for the 40th anniversary of the system's ill-fated release:

I wonder what makes you think this is Open Source? Did you even read the license?

[PivotGuy246]

Saw this on another forum I'm on - Apple just open-sourced the Lisa OS for the 40th anniversary of the system's ill-fated release:
https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... ry-museum/
https://computerhistory.org/press-relea ... de-series/

I wonder if anything cool could come of this!

It is not open-source; it's guarded by an academic license that includes a built-in non-disclosure agreement, for some reason.

APPLE ACADEMIC LICENSE AGREEMENT
Lisa OS Software version 3.1

IMPORTANT: Please read these terms carefully as they are an agreement between you and Apple Inc. about the Apple software, fonts, interfaces, content, data, and documentation included as part of the Lisa OS software package referenced above (collectively the "Apple Software").

By using the Apple Software, you accept these terms. If you do not accept these terms, you may not download or use the Apple Software.

1. Software Use Rights and Limitations. Subject to your compliance with these terms, Apple grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable license under Apple's copyrights in the Apple Software to do the following for non-commercial, academic research, educational teaching, and personal study purposes only:
   • use, reproduce, compile and modify the Apple Software,
   • run the Apple Software and your modifications of it on your hardware,
   • copy and reference documentation that comes with the Apple Software.
   You may not and you agree not to:
   • redistribute, publish, sublicense, sell, rent or transfer the Apple Software
   • publish benchmarking results about the Apple Software or your use of it
   • use the name, trademarks, service marks or logos of Apple to endorse or promote your modifications or other materials derived from the Apple Software

[computebrute]

It is not open-source; it's guarded by an academic license that includes a built-in non-disclosure agreement, for some reason.

So it's just apple being apple? consider me very surprised.

[anonymous74]

Saw this on another forum I'm on - Apple just open-sourced the Lisa OS for the 40th anniversary of the system's ill-fated release:

I wonder what makes you think this is Open Source? Did you even read the license?

First off, no need to get so worked up about this. Second, I did not read through the whole license, just the press release. I just felt it would be something interesting to share here, but apparently not... I just did read it, and it looks they're allowing non-commercial personal use, and aren't allowed to share it. This probably means that someone can't go and make a "Lisa OS 3.0" with new features and start offering download links. Something tells me that Apple probably wouldn't go after somebody if they did, but who knows. It's 40 year old software, I don't think they'd care much. With a company this big there's probably always going to be a lot of red tape around everything, which is unfortunate. I personally still think it's better than not publishing it at all, though that's a matter of opinion I suppose. With this license I suppose that "open source" was the wrong phrase to use, "Apple Lisa OS source code released" would have been more appropriate, but I don't think it's that big of a deal.

[AlphaBeta]

I wonder why Apple opted to release an ancient OS for an ancient platform under such a strange license, though. Even Microsoft ended up releasing early versions of MS-DOS under MIT...

[lubuntut]

What a stupid license, It's already 40 years old!

[anonymous74]

I wonder why Apple opted to release an ancient OS for an ancient platform under such a strange license, though. Even Microsoft ended up releasing early versions of MS-DOS under MIT...

because they're apple I guess... either that or they just didn't bother to put much time into it and paid some lawyer who didn't fully understand what the purpose of it was to make a basic license? Who knows.

[linuxlove]

This is what I've been waiting to hear for a long time. I would really like to start digging into the source and see what could be done with my 3 Mac Pluses and 1 Macintosh SE that I have collecting dust in storage. I'm sure that the Lisa and the Mac are twins in terms of architecture as they share the same CPU and similar design.

The Lisa and the Mac couldn't be more different. Namely, the Lisa had an MMU out of the box, while the Mac only got support for a real MMU with the Mac II (and even then, it was an optional extra). All the 68000 Macs (128, 512, Plus, SE, Portable, Powerbook 100, Classic, Classic II) lack an MMU. The Lisa's MMU is the sole reason why it had a Unix port since day one (the Mac didn't get A/UX until the Mac II and you also had to buy the optional MMU to go with it), and is also how you were able to run Mac OS through MacWorks.

Video and floppy timing are also way different, which is why the Lisa runs at 5MHz where the 68000 Macs run at 8. The Mac also lacks the Lisa's parallel port and the Office System doesn't speak SCSI; the Lisa's SCSI card was only for use with MacWorks. Oh, the Lisa's keyboard and mouse run through a dedicated microcontroller (which also provides time-of-day) which was totally absent from the Mac.

There's plenty of other differences too but those are the big ones that sprung to my mind. Really, it comes down to that the only thing the Lisa and the Mac have in common are the 68000 and the floppy controller chip.

[MyFaceNeverWhen]

This is what I've been waiting to hear for a long time. I would really like to start digging into the source and see what could be done with my 3 Mac Pluses and 1 Macintosh SE that I have collecting dust in storage. I'm sure that the Lisa and the Mac are twins in terms of architecture as they share the same CPU and similar design.

The Lisa and the Mac couldn't be more different. Namely, the Lisa had an MMU out of the box, while the Mac only got support for a real MMU with the Mac II (and even then, it was an optional extra). All the 68000 Macs (128, 512, Plus, SE, Portable, Powerbook 100, Classic, Classic II) lack an MMU. The Lisa's MMU is the sole reason why it had a Unix port since day one (the Mac didn't get A/UX until the Mac II and you also had to buy the optional FPU to go with it), and is also how you were able to run Mac OS through MacWorks.

Video and floppy timing are also way different, which is why the Lisa runs at 5MHz where the 68000 Macs run at 8. The Mac also lacks the Lisa's parallel port and the Office System doesn't speak SCSI; the Lisa's SCSI card was only for use with MacWorks. Oh, the Lisa's keyboard and mouse run through a dedicated microcontroller (which also provides time-of-day) which was totally absent from the Mac.

There's plenty of other differences too but those are the big ones that sprung to my mind. Really, it comes down to that the only thing the Lisa and the Mac have in common are the 68000 and the floppy controller chip.

Is it possible to emulate or integrate an MMU into Macintoshes pre-II. though?

Offtopic Comment

Welcome back

[anonymous74]

There were so many 3rd party upgrades made back in the day that if there was a way to do it, someone probably would have. I mean, people got 040s inside the SE/30! And got grayscale running on the internal screen and so much more. PowerPC Q700 anyone? Too many core architectural changes between the Lisa and Mac for a port to be done in any practical way. Implementing SCSI support on its own would probably be monumental.

[AlphaBeta]

This is what I've been waiting to hear for a long time. I would really like to start digging into the source and see what could be done with my 3 Mac Pluses and 1 Macintosh SE that I have collecting dust in storage. I'm sure that the Lisa and the Mac are twins in terms of architecture as they share the same CPU and similar design.

The Lisa and the Mac couldn't be more different. Namely, the Lisa had an MMU out of the box, while the Mac only got support for a real MMU with the Mac II (and even then, it was an optional extra). All the 68000 Macs (128, 512, Plus, SE, Portable, Powerbook 100, Classic, Classic II) lack an MMU. The Lisa's MMU is the sole reason why it had a Unix port since day one (the Mac didn't get A/UX until the Mac II and you also had to buy the optional FPU to go with it), and is also how you were able to run Mac OS through MacWorks.

Video and floppy timing are also way different, which is why the Lisa runs at 5MHz where the 68000 Macs run at 8. The Mac also lacks the Lisa's parallel port and the Office System doesn't speak SCSI; the Lisa's SCSI card was only for use with MacWorks. Oh, the Lisa's keyboard and mouse run through a dedicated microcontroller (which also provides time-of-day) which was totally absent from the Mac.

There's plenty of other differences too but those are the big ones that sprung to my mind. Really, it comes down to that the only thing the Lisa and the Mac have in common are the 68000 and the floppy controller chip.

That's such an Apple thing to do.

[src]

This is what I've been waiting to hear for a long time. I would really like to start digging into the source and see what could be done with my 3 Mac Pluses and 1 Macintosh SE that I have collecting dust in storage. I'm sure that the Lisa and the Mac are twins in terms of architecture as they share the same CPU and similar design.

The Lisa and the Mac couldn't be more different. Namely, the Lisa had an MMU out of the box, while the Mac only got support for a real MMU with the Mac II (and even then, it was an optional extra). All the 68000 Macs (128, 512, Plus, SE, Portable, Powerbook 100, Classic, Classic II) lack an MMU. The Lisa's MMU is the sole reason why it had a Unix port since day one (the Mac didn't get A/UX until the Mac II and you also had to buy the optional FPU to go with it), and is also how you were able to run Mac OS through MacWorks.

Video and floppy timing are also way different, which is why the Lisa runs at 5MHz where the 68000 Macs run at 8. The Mac also lacks the Lisa's parallel port and the Office System doesn't speak SCSI; the Lisa's SCSI card was only for use with MacWorks. Oh, the Lisa's keyboard and mouse run through a dedicated microcontroller (which also provides time-of-day) which was totally absent from the Mac.

There's plenty of other differences too but those are the big ones that sprung to my mind. Really, it comes down to that the only thing the Lisa and the Mac have in common are the 68000 and the floppy controller chip.

Thanks for the reality check, it's kind of hard to find any information about the Lisa online and I didn't want to get my hands dirty on leaked code either.

[anonymous74]

That's such an Apple thing to do.

Well, they weren't exactly meant to be compatible, and interoperability between platforms was a wish at best for the whole industry. Just ask Commodore, who had the: PET, VIC-20, C64, C128, PLUS 4, and Amiga systems. Besides the 128 being able to go into C64 mode to run 64 programs, they were all completely incompatible. It wasn't until the IBM PC that backwards compatibility became a real common thing.

[yksoft1]

To this day, the most complete ancient source code released by Computer History Museum is still Word for Windows 1.2.
That release got everything includes its toolchain with proprietary CSL compiler, made it fully buildable (under OS/2 for Debug builds and under DOS with large EMS memory for Ship builds).
The Lisa OS source package seems to lack an environment for building it.

[vbdasc]

The Lisa and the Mac couldn't be more different. Namely, the Lisa had an MMU out of the box, while the Mac only got support for a real MMU with the Mac II (and even then, it was an optional extra). All the 68000 Macs (128, 512, Plus, SE, Portable, Powerbook 100, Classic, Classic II) lack an MMU.

Classic II wasn't a 68000 Mac. Just sayin'.

[vbdasc]

That's such an Apple thing to do.

I'd say it was a Jobs thing to do. In the beginning, Lisa and Mac weren't so different. Things started to change when Steve Jobs joined the Mac project and gradually took over it.

[linuxlove]

The Lisa OS source package seems to lack an environment for building it.

From my understanding, the build tools for the OS all ran under the Lisa Monitor, a very basic text-mode OS designed specifically for the low-level OS development of Lisa. (I think MacWorks and the LisaGuide also run under the Monitor.) The applications all seem to be designed for the Lisa Pascal Workshop, the next step above the Monitor which is what Apple sold to the all of 3 third-party developers.

Until mid-2022, there was a major bug in LisaEm that prevented the Pascal compiler and assembler from generating code. If you look at the file modified dates, they're all from 2017: this is when it was announced that the CHM would be releasing the code before it got bogged down in legal issues. If the source was released then, the only way to compile would have been to actually buy a Lisa and type in all of the source files by hand into the Monitor and Workshop. Even though the code compiling bug in LisaEm is fixed now, the situation still isn't much better since it's not exactly easy to get the files into LisaEm. I think there are some tools included with LisaEm that let you inject files into the emulated hard drive image. Unfortunately, the main developer of LisaEm died at the beginning of the year...