Did you know? The Apple Lisa carried a price tag of $10,000? That’s twice the price of the iMac Pro base model
A piece of computing history is going to be available for all those who can learn to take advantage of it, or not. Apple Lisa, the $10,000 computer that was supposed to change the face of the computing industry will have its source code available real soon.
Al Kossow, a Software Curator at the museum, recently announced that the source code for Lisa’s operating system and applications have been recovered and a conversion of the code is currently under review by Apple. He has written below that after the review is done, the museum will release a text on the significance of the Lisa project and make the code available for all in 2018.
“Just wanted to let everyone know the sources to the OS and applications were recovered, I converted them to Unix end of line conventions and spaces for Pascal tabs after recovering the files using Disk Image Chef, and they are with Apple for review. After that’s done, 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. The only thing I saw that probably won’t be able to be released is the American Heritage dictionary for the spell checker in LisaWrite.”
Apple Lisa at the time was a brilliant piece of hardware; a cutting-edge machine and one of the first to offer consumers a GUI, mouse, and file system. Unfortunately, that steep $10,000 price tag, which if adjusted for inflation will cost you an outright $25,000 will certainly turn people away rather than forcing them to reach for their wallet.
We will see soon, what developers will be able to figure out with the source code once it is available.
