The Apple Lisa operating system would release next year for free, according to the Computer History Museum. The concerned body stated that the source code of this legendary OS has been recovered, and is currently being reviewed by Apple.
Apple Lisa code under review
Al Kossow, a Software Curator at the Computer History Museum, stated that once Apple finishes reviewing the code, it will be released, probably sometime in 2018. Users may have run emulators of the Lisa operating system before, but the one being reviewed by Apple is not just some hack solution from the third-party, rather it’s the original OS that powered the Lisa personal computer.
In a Google Group post, 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.”
Apple Lisa was released somewhere in 1983, and was pretty expensive at that time, costing about $10,000 – equaling $25,000 today when adjusted for inflation. It is officially known that the name Lisa was an acronym for “Local Integrated System Architecture.” However, Steve Jobs later admitted that the machine was named after his oldest daughter Lisa Nicole Brennan, notes Gizmodo.
Apple Lisa was a groundbreaking technology featuring a graphical user interface and support for a mouse for the first time. Apple’s Lisa operating system consisted of text based Workshop for developing software and the Lisa Office system, which included seven apps – LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal.
Apple Macintosh arrived after Lisa in 1984, and turned out to be a more affordable offering from the company. It would not be wrong to call Macintosh a more improved version of Lisa. Apple Lisa could not really take off even though the company launched a different and cheaper version of the system. As a result, Lisa was discontinued after a few years.
Check out this commercial for the Lisa starring Kevin Costner.
Analysts trim iPhone X shipment forecasts
Coming back to Apple’s modern day devices, several analysts are not hopeful about the iPhone X shipments. They lowered their projections for the first-quarter of next year citing dull demand at the end of the holiday shopping season.
In a report earlier this week, Sinolink Securities Co. analyst Zhang Bin noted that the total handset shipment could be somewhere near 35 million, which is less by 10 million originally estimated by him.
“After the first wave of demand has been fulfilled, the market now worries that the high price of the iPhone X may weaken demand in the first quarter,” the analyst said, according to Bloomberg
Further, JL Warren Capital LLC believes that the shipment will drop to 25 million units in the first-quarter of 2018 from 30 million in the fourth-quarter. JL Warren Capital’s prediction is based on the reduced orders at some Apple suppliers. In a note on Friday, the research firm said the drop in the shipment reflects “weak demand because of the iPhone X’s high price point and a lack of interesting innovations.”
