Apple’s legendary Lisa operating system is being open sourced this year. The Computer History Museum in California has planned to release the source code of Lisa OS for free. Back in 1982, the OS was a controversial project that kicked Steve Jobs out of the team.
The California-based museum has received the Lisa OS that lays the foundation for Macintosh OS. The OS was released in 1983 along with $10,000 worth Lisa computer. It was the first personal computer to feature graphic user interface and mouse. According to the reports, only 10,000 units of Lisa computer were sold.
Al Kossow, the software curator at the Computer History Museum said, “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, 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.”
The museum has recovered the OS and applications. As of now, Apple Inc is reviewing the source code. After the museum receives the final report from Apple, they will make the code available for public sometime this year.
The OS project was a big flop for Apple back in 1983. However, Lisa is an important part of Apple’s history. One of the reasons why it was a failure is it’s price tag of $10,000 back in 1983. The OS is the reason why Steve Jobs left Apple and led to a huge rift with Bill Gates of Microsoft. After leaving Apple, Steve Jobs founded NeXT computer, which was later acquired by Apple.
WIDMITS 