Lisa, one of the first personal computer of Apple which had brought a graphical users interface, mouse, and a file system and ran on Apple’s legendary Lisa operating system will be soon available for free. It seems unbelievable as Apple is now offering something without any charges. But it is true. The source codes of Lisa OS will be released by the company in 2018 publicly. All thanks to the Computer History Museum and Apple who have taken this step. It was named after the daughter of Steve Jobs, Lisa Brennan.
As per the report, a software conservator at the Computer History Museum named AI Kossow has informed that the sources codes of the Lisa OS and the applications have been recovered successfully. Now, Apple is examining the source codes. After the verification, the source codes will be announced publicly.
AI Kossow said that he has been converted the source codes to Unix end of line conventions and spaces for Pascal tabs. The files were recovered with the help of Disk Image Chef. After that, CHM will do an @CHM blog post about the historical significance of the software and the code that is cleared for release by Apple will be made available in 2018. He further informed that the LisaWrite might not come with the American Heritage dictionary for the spell checker as it will not support this.
It may be noted that the Lisa was released in the year 1983 and was priced at $9,995. But the company was only able to sell 10,000 units. It was designed for business users. The Lisa computer had a Motorola 6800 CPU, and it was giving 5MHz of clock speed. It was equipped with a 1MB of RAM and was offering 5MB of disk space capacity. It had only seven apps, i.e., LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal. Later, Apple had launched more versions of the Lisa computer, but the company had discontinued it after some years.
Source:
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/27/lisa-source-code-free-release-2018/
