I looked at the empty Lisa & Mac XL section yesterday and decided it needed some content. So I released this video.

The preferences UI is really fascinating. I especially love the screen dimming options. "We'll dim the screen some time between 10 and 20 minutes."

My favorite thing about Lisa is the saving of the machine state. There's no "shutdown" command. Right in mid document, you just hit the power button, and the state of your desktop is saved and the machine shuts off.

When you power up the next time, you get right back to the same desktop - any open applications, windows, or documents are right where you left them.

The application integration was pretty amazing especially for 1983. Select a bunch of cells in a spreadsheet, paste them into a word processing document, and they were live - you could edit them right there, and the "original" spreadsheet would be updated as well - or vice versa.

Even some "simple" things. There were sliders in the spreadsheet where you could go split pane either by columns or rows. I don't think that hit in Excel for Windows or Mac until much later. I can't find a date for that via Google...

great video! very exciting and totally not boring content. ;)

I have 2 Lisa's I got a few years ago that both have the square pixel mode. meaning they CANT run Lisa OS.

They need a lot of work though. but I did pick up some advancements and parts for me to work on them. I just need to get around to doing it. lol.

>> Patrick said:

great video! very exciting and totally not boring content. I have 2 Lisa's I got a few years ago that both have the square pixel mode. meaning they CANT run Lisa OS. They need a lot of work though. but I did pick up some advancements and parts for me to work on them. I just need to get around to doing it. lol. Click to expand...

Thank you!

Yes, the anamorphic pixels of the Lisa really surprised me. When I booted it in Macintosh emulation mode, the image was all squished!

Fantastic video! I've read loads about it, but never actually seen the Lisa OS in use.

It's not the same, but I imagine there's a way to emulate a Lisa? I really enjoy playing with old OSes to see what ideas live on and which died with the machine.

(to its credit, there are very few concepts in the Macintosh OS that didn't make its way into current OSes. Very interesting to see a different approach from one of its contemporaries.)

>> Branchus said:

I looked at the empty Lisa & Mac XL section yesterday and decided it needed some content. So I released this video. T Click to expand...

This machine is absolutely amazing. It is an example of what can be accomplished when we humans are determined to evolve from the current state. While the concept of tearing off a sheet of paper sounds weird to us today, it was a great way to meet people in the office where they were. Perhaps if the price had managed to be affordable the machine would have been more profitable for Apple. Either way, I am thankful for the pioneers of this machine for the influence they ultimately had on the original Macintosh and the by extension the Mac I am using to type this post.

>> displaced said:

Fantastic video! I've read loads about it, but never actually seen the Lisa OS in use. It's not the same, but I imagine there's a way to emulate a Lisa? I really enjoy playing with old OSes to see what ideas live on and which died with the machine. (to its credit, there are very few concepts in the Macintosh OS that didn't make its way into current OSes. Very interesting to see a different approach from one of its contemporaries.) Click to expand...

LiseEm at lisa.sunder.net. Ray is a good guy and had put a lot of work into this.

I really enjoyed this vid. I too have never used a Lisa, and enjoyed the exploration aspect.
Seems like the lisa really had a lot of GUI conventions we take for granted early on!

I have a Lisa 2/10. I've turned it on, clicked on some stuff but it was so confusing, I never really learned how it worked. this video will get me to start using it.

Finally watched the whole thing! :)

A couple thoughts to maybe help clarify some things.

Lisa _is_ slow! Two reasons are the CPU is throttled a bit down to 5Mhz on most boards. Not the blazing 8Mhz of the Mac! Also, Mac had the advantage of having a lot of Toolbox code in ROM. Lisa was made to be OS agnostic, so everything had to be loaded into and handled by RAM and/or swapping from disk. The advantage of this was that Lisa could run other OS, like the Pascal Workshop, Xenix, etc. Also, neither ProFile nor Widget drives were exactly fast, though both were much better than floppy!

The reason you will see font sizes called out as "10 pitch" or "12 pitch" was to correspond to the print wheels available for the Apple Daisy Wheel printer (DWP). The DWP could also do "bitmapping" for the other fonts/sizes, but it was a slow and loud process for it to bang out all the dots line by line. If you didn't have the DWP, there would be other drivers you could load in the Preferences for your printer.

The reason you see so many documents named "Untitled" is exactly as someone said in the comments - people didn't really get the "stationary" concept. But if you think about it, you can't have documents with the same name in a folder on Mac. LisaOS allowed you to have documents with the same name in the same folder. The OS kept track of individual documents behind the scenes. Also - you zipped by it, but there was version control - you could revert to a previous version of the doc - at least in LisaWrite IIRC.

If you are interested in the Lisa/Mac transitions - or stories about the early days of both platforms, I highly recommend folklore.org for stories from the Apple people who were there.