From: lwilton@BIX.com (Loren Wilton)Reply-To: lwilton@BIX.com (Loren Wilton)Newsgroups: comp.sys.beSubject: Re: It's a shell! It's an editor! It cores apples (Re: [OS] Terminal requDate: 25 Feb 1996 06:20:36 GMTOrganization: News CorporationMessage-ID: <4gov3k$27h@merlin.iguide.com>References: <4f7mob$647@crucible.powertools.com> <4fa09i$eia@valour.pem.cam.ac.uk> <4fb4vp$793@crucible.powertools.com> <4fq8k2$flu@staff.cs.su.oz.au> <eric.kidd-1402961809310001@atgw2-kip-2-252.dartmouth.edu>In article <eric.kidd-1402961809310001@atgw2-kip-2-252.dartmouth.edu>,
eric.kidd@dartmouth.edu (Eric M. Kidd) wrote:
>In article <4fq8k2$flu@staff.cs.su.oz.au>, gary@cs.su.oz.au (Gary Capell) wrote:
>(*) The geneology of the BeBox, and what a Lisa has to do with anything:
>
>The BeOS was bootstrapped onto the PowerPC microprocessor using Metrowerks
>CodeWarrior on a Macintosh, as far as I know. The MacOS was bootstrapped
>using a cross-development environment on the Lisa.
>
>The Lisa's operating system was written on the Lisa, using a port of the
>UCSD Pascal byte-code interpreter. (The Lisa, for those who aren't
>familiar with it, was Apple's first attempt at a GUI computer. It
>initially cost more than $7000, but it had a meg of memory, true
>multitasking, and a system object model in SmallTalk. Kinda like the
>BeBox, but *way* ahead of its time. =)
>
>The port of the UCSD interpreter was prepared on an Apple // series
>computer. The ROM for the Apple // was allegedly written by hand in
>hexadecimal, and the original Apple // DOS was built on an HP machine of
>some sort.
>
>Does anyone want to correct or ammend this history?

I knew a couple of the people that went to Apple and worked on the Lisa; your
description of that and where the Mac came from seems reasonably close to
what I remember (or at least think I remember).

However, I flatly assure yoy that *NO* code rom of any size on any machine
has ever been cut in hex by hand! Possibly something like the printer driver
rom on the Apple [] may have been cut by hand, since it was only 256 bytes
max. Even there, I would bet it was first done with an assembler and then
modified by hand, if necessary. I've done roms. It is far easier to modify
the assembler (or write one from scratch in Fortran) to generate the shape
code you want, than it is to try to make any significant amount of code work
by hand in machine code.

Of course, it is quite possible that *parts* of a rom might be cut by hand,
and roms of things like translate tables were pretty commonly done by hand.
But no rom on the order of 4KB or larger was likely to have been done by
hand.

The HP machine would likely have been an HP 1000 series micro. (Or what we
would call a micro these days. It was a department-server sized mini in
those days). Frankly though it is more likely that the HP would have been
used for Lisa development. I wouldn't be too surprised in the Apple [] code
was simply modified Apple I code, and quite possibly compiled on an overblown
Apple I itself.

Loren

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