7 ms·

In the earliest days of the Mac (1984) you had to have a Lisa to develop for the Mac, because that was the machine the Pascal compiler ran on. I bought a Lisa a

In the earliest days of the Mac (1984) you had to have a Lisa to develop for the Mac, because that was the machine the Pascal compiler ran on. I bought a Lisa and a Mac for this reason. It'll be fun to see the source code.

beamatronic 9y ago
Wasn't that enormously expensive? Was it purely for fun or did you recoup your investment?
- armadsen 9y ago
  It sure was. The Lisa originally sold for $10,000 in 1983. The price dropped to about $5k (IIRC) for the Lisa 2 which came out the same day as the original Mac, but that was still very expensive. 128K Mac ($2500) + Lisa 2 ($5000) = $7500 in 1983 (~$18,600 in 2017 dollars).
  - adventured 9y ago
    To put that into perspective, in the early 1980s the average new car was around $7,000 to $8,000 and the median new home price was ~$75,000 in 1983. It'd be like a personal computer costing $30,000+ today, in relation to those other major purchase items.
    - dreamcompiler 9y ago
      True. But the first time I saw a Mac in person, I knew it was going to change the world and I had to develop for it. I spent all my savings on a Lisa and a Mac. It's hard to describe today just how radically impressive that first Mac was.
      - GeekyBear 9y ago
        Jeff Han's 2006 Ted Talk featuring a multitouch demo was the only other time I've seen a user interface demo and instantly knew a UI paradigm was going to be a very big deal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU
  - GeekyBear 9y ago
    In comparison, the Xerox Star was a mere $16,500, which would be a bit more than $40,000 today.
  - flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
    Jesus, that's as much as I paid for my brand new car recently...
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  Yes! But I was a student at UT Austin, which had a special student purchase agreement with Apple. Steve Jobs even came to campus and gave us a pep talk about it. So I got my whole setup for something like half price.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
userbinator 9y ago
In the earliest days of the Mac (1984) you had to have a Lisa to develop for the Mac Looks like the concepts of strictly separating users and developers, as well as paying extra to develop for the platform, have been with Apple for a very long time. From what I've read, even developing for and on the Lisa itself was a huge hassle. The other concept which Apple might've pioneered with the Lisa is forced obolescence --- the software as well as the custom RTC chip were designed to not handle dates beyond 1995, less than 15 years after it was released: https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/01/lisa_clock_date-100023037-orig.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/01/lisa_cloc... (In contrast, while the original IBM PC didn't have an RTC, DOS was able to handle dates up to 2235. Plus, for better or worse, users and developers were considered simply different extremes of the same demographic for much of the PCs early history --- computer magazines would print Asm listings or hexdumps to be entered in DEBUG, essentially letting users gradually become developers too.) I certainly agree the Apple Lisa was "ahead of its time"... but not in a good way.
- ancarda 9y ago
  >the software as well as the custom RTC chip were designed to not handle dates beyond 1995, less than 15 years after it was released Why did they do that? Did they have an explanation that doesn’t just boil down to “we wanted customers to keep upgrading”?
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    The year was stored as a 4-bit integer > we wanted customers to keep upgrading After 15 years? Who was going to be seriously using a 5 MHz Lisa in 1995 (yes you can spare me the "this broke school district is still using an Amiga to run their HVAC!" stories)
    - userbinator 9y ago
      The C64 was introduced in 1982, discontinued in 1994, and remained in widespread use for several years after that.
  - 9y ago
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
Funny enough the Lisa ended up being used to develop a competitor's OS as well... Digital Research used the Lisa to develop its initial versions of GEM (the GUI that ended up on the Atari ST and on some MS-DOS systems and was the underpinning behind the Ventura Publisher DTP system) and GEMDOS and I believe also CPM 68/K. As the sources for GEM were open sourced years ago, so was the build environment and images for getting it running on the Lisa. I wasn't able to get them to boot on any of the Lisa emulators out there though.
- dukeflukem 9y ago
  GEM on Amstrad 1512 takes me back
yuhong 9y ago
Of course, part of the reason is the only 128K of RAM. It was only one year later that 64K and 256K DRAM prices fall fast, leading to US makers leaving the market and dumping charges.
tzs 9y ago
A friend of mine started a company in 1983 to develop Mac software. They didn't want to go the Lisa route for a couple of reasons. First, they wanted to write in C, not Pascal. Second, they wanted several developers working simultaneously and could not afford to get a Lisa for each. They knew that MacFORTH was going to be available pretty much concurrently with the release of the Mac. They knew they could use that to write programs on the Mac to explore and reverse engineer things. They bought a Callan Data Systems Unistar 200 Unix workstation [1], which was a 68k based all-in-one non-graphical Unix workstation. They also got a bunch of serial terminals (ADM3a's, if I recall correctly) and hooked them up to the Callan, and gave each developer a Unix account on the workstation so that several developers could be working at once. The idea was to write in C on the Callan, use its compiler and assembler, and then somehow turn that object code into code that would run on the Mac. They had the Callan connected to the Mac over a serial port, and a program in MacFORTH that would accept object code from the Callan and invoke it. With this setup, their developers could start working on parts of the product, with test harnesses in MacFORTH to let them test on the Mac. My memory is getting fuzzy, but I think somewhere in there they wrote a Mac linker on the Callan that could generate Mac executable files, which they could send to MacFORTH on the Mac and have it write them to floppy. [1] I was a systems programmer at Callan, and was able to get my friend a nice discount. I think it came to $5000 for a nicely configured workstation.
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  I used Mach II Forth as well as Pascal. Mach II was a great resident compiler on the Mac and it was a joy to use. IIRC, MacForth was interpreted but in any case yes, several other languages were resident on the Mac before the "official" Apple Pascal was available.

beamatronic 9y ago

Wasn't that enormously expensive? Was it purely for fun or did you recoup your investment?

armadsen 9y ago
It sure was. The Lisa originally sold for $10,000 in 1983. The price dropped to about $5k (IIRC) for the Lisa 2 which came out the same day as the original Mac, but that was still very expensive. 128K Mac ($2500) + Lisa 2 ($5000) = $7500 in 1983 (~$18,600 in 2017 dollars).
- adventured 9y ago
  To put that into perspective, in the early 1980s the average new car was around $7,000 to $8,000 and the median new home price was ~$75,000 in 1983. It'd be like a personal computer costing $30,000+ today, in relation to those other major purchase items.
  - dreamcompiler 9y ago
    True. But the first time I saw a Mac in person, I knew it was going to change the world and I had to develop for it. I spent all my savings on a Lisa and a Mac. It's hard to describe today just how radically impressive that first Mac was.
    - GeekyBear 9y ago
      Jeff Han's 2006 Ted Talk featuring a multitouch demo was the only other time I've seen a user interface demo and instantly knew a UI paradigm was going to be a very big deal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac0E6deG4AU
- GeekyBear 9y ago
  In comparison, the Xerox Star was a mere $16,500, which would be a bit more than $40,000 today.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 9y ago
  Jesus, that's as much as I paid for my brand new car recently...
dreamcompiler 9y ago
Yes! But I was a student at UT Austin, which had a special student purchase agreement with Apple. Steve Jobs even came to campus and gave us a pep talk about it. So I got my whole setup for something like half price.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

userbinator 9y ago

In the earliest days of the Mac (1984) you had to have a Lisa to develop for the Mac Looks like the concepts of strictly separating users and developers, as well as paying extra to develop for the platform, have been with Apple for a very long time. From what I've read, even developing for and on the Lisa itself was a huge hassle. The other concept which Apple might've pioneered with the Lisa is forced obolescence --- the software as well as the custom RTC chip were designed to not handle dates beyond 1995, less than 15 years after it was released: https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/01/lisa_clock_date-100023037-orig.jpg https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/01/lisa_cloc... (In contrast, while the original IBM PC didn't have an RTC, DOS was able to handle dates up to 2235. Plus, for better or worse, users and developers were considered simply different extremes of the same demographic for much of the PCs early history --- computer magazines would print Asm listings or hexdumps to be entered in DEBUG, essentially letting users gradually become developers too.) I certainly agree the Apple Lisa was "ahead of its time"... but not in a good way.

ancarda 9y ago
>the software as well as the custom RTC chip were designed to not handle dates beyond 1995, less than 15 years after it was released Why did they do that? Did they have an explanation that doesn’t just boil down to “we wanted customers to keep upgrading”?
- kalleboo 9y ago
  The year was stored as a 4-bit integer > we wanted customers to keep upgrading After 15 years? Who was going to be seriously using a 5 MHz Lisa in 1995 (yes you can spare me the "this broke school district is still using an Amiga to run their HVAC!" stories)
  - userbinator 9y ago
    The C64 was introduced in 1982, discontinued in 1994, and remained in widespread use for several years after that.
- 9y ago

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

Funny enough the Lisa ended up being used to develop a competitor's OS as well... Digital Research used the Lisa to develop its initial versions of GEM (the GUI that ended up on the Atari ST and on some MS-DOS systems and was the underpinning behind the Ventura Publisher DTP system) and GEMDOS and I believe also CPM 68/K. As the sources for GEM were open sourced years ago, so was the build environment and images for getting it running on the Lisa. I wasn't able to get them to boot on any of the Lisa emulators out there though.

dukeflukem 9y ago
GEM on Amstrad 1512 takes me back

yuhong 9y ago

Of course, part of the reason is the only 128K of RAM. It was only one year later that 64K and 256K DRAM prices fall fast, leading to US makers leaving the market and dumping charges.

tzs 9y ago

A friend of mine started a company in 1983 to develop Mac software. They didn't want to go the Lisa route for a couple of reasons. First, they wanted to write in C, not Pascal. Second, they wanted several developers working simultaneously and could not afford to get a Lisa for each. They knew that MacFORTH was going to be available pretty much concurrently with the release of the Mac. They knew they could use that to write programs on the Mac to explore and reverse engineer things. They bought a Callan Data Systems Unistar 200 Unix workstation [1], which was a 68k based all-in-one non-graphical Unix workstation. They also got a bunch of serial terminals (ADM3a's, if I recall correctly) and hooked them up to the Callan, and gave each developer a Unix account on the workstation so that several developers could be working at once. The idea was to write in C on the Callan, use its compiler and assembler, and then somehow turn that object code into code that would run on the Mac. They had the Callan connected to the Mac over a serial port, and a program in MacFORTH that would accept object code from the Callan and invoke it. With this setup, their developers could start working on parts of the product, with test harnesses in MacFORTH to let them test on the Mac. My memory is getting fuzzy, but I think somewhere in there they wrote a Mac linker on the Callan that could generate Mac executable files, which they could send to MacFORTH on the Mac and have it write them to floppy. [1] I was a systems programmer at Callan, and was able to get my friend a nice discount. I think it came to $5000 for a nicely configured workstation.

dreamcompiler 9y ago
I used Mach II Forth as well as Pascal. Mach II was a great resident compiler on the Mac and it was a joy to use. IIRC, MacForth was interpreted but in any case yes, several other languages were resident on the Mac before the "official" Apple Pascal was available.