Newsgroup: it.comp.retrocomputing
Titolo: [news] CHM MAKES APPLE LISA SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC AS A PART OF ITS ART OF CODE SERIES

 
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

 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 :)
 
-- 
/-\ /\/\ /\/\ /-\ /\/\ /\/\ /-\ T /-\
-=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- -=- - -=-
........... [ al lavoro ] ...........

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

 che riporto integralmente:
 
Il 23/01/23 11:24, Filippo Zamengo ha scritto:
 > 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:
 >
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