Interesting news to start the week, and this is the source code of the hon Apple Lisaa technical phenomenon of its time, but not a commercial one, as it ended in sales failure, was published by the Museum of Computer History on the fortieth anniversary of its establishment.

In particular, the Apple Lisa celebrated its fortieth anniversary on January 19, although its development dates back to 1978. However, its business cycle has lengthened from 1983 to 1986 after selling approximately 10,000 units. Its prohibitive price, an insane starting price of $9,995, was its big handicap.

All in all, the Apple Lisa was something unusual in its day, so it deserves some context and history. This is how Wikipedia describes the famous Apple Lisa:

The Apple Lisa was a computer designed and manufactured by Apple Computer in the early 1980s and the second computer with a graphical user interface. Although it was not a commercial success at the time and disappeared a few years after its launch, it was a very advanced microcomputer for its time. a pioneer in integrating a set of technological advances at the hardware and software levels which eventually became standards in the computer industry, such as the mouse, GUI (graphical user interface), bitmap system, white background screen with WYSIWYG print preview, hard disk, microfloppy, virtual memory, multitasking capability, overlapping task windows, and office software package as a built-in package, based on seven compatible and self-integrating utilities with mathematical and financial charting capabilities.

It’s worth reading the whole article, especially the history, hardware and software; especially the story, more extended in the English version and with a lot of crumbs for those who are interested in, for redundancy, the history of computing that took place in those years. But now we’re talking about software.

From the version Smooth OS 3.1the computer’s operating system, written in the Pascal programming language, as well as the suite of basic applications it was distributed with, including a word processor, spreadsheet, and graphics application.

Of course, when we say that the Computer History Museum has opened the Lisa OS code for study, we mean exactly that. So it is not a release for use as open source software, but a relicensing under Apple’s own academic licensewhich allows the codex to be compiled and used only for “non-commercial academic research, educational teaching and personal study purposes”.

If you are interested, take a look, here it is.