Apple Lisa OS Code Will Be Made Open Source Next Year

The Apple Lisa operating system will be made open source next year, it has been announced, giving anyone the opportunity to download the code. Though Lisa was never popular, the OS lives on in the hearts and minds of dedicated fans and enthusiasts. According to a post made in a Google Group dedicated to those enthusiasts, the Computer History Museum will be releasing the code with a statement of its own in the near future.

The Google Group post reads:

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.

The "CHM" referenced in that post refers to the Computer History Museum, which will provide the code to download in 2018. Anyone can download and play with it for free, a big contrast to the Apple Lisa's original 1983 cost of $10,000.

The Apple Lisa desktop computer was brought to market in early 1983, getting the distinction of being one of the world's first computers with a GUI and many of the elements that persist into modern OSes to this day. Despite this, the high price coupled with performance concerns resulted in only about 100,000 units being sold, making it an arguable failure.

SOURCE: Business Insider