Early Demos (Finder, SoundLab, Sbardemo, WindowManager, IconEditor)

[slomacuser]

So here is a write up about another interesting Twiggy disc. It includes many early demos that are also mentioned in Andy's book and his web page Folklore.org.

The disc boots into Finder 2.0 (25-jul-82).

I think the most interesting early demo was an early prototype for the Finder, written by Bruce Horn and myself in the spring of 1982, and pictured above. Its window was filled with an image of a floppy disc, over which the files were represented as draggable tabs. You could select files and perform operations on them by selecting them and then clicking on command button.

[ 1 ]

The first demo app I have tried was named SBARDEMO shows a window with Bob Dylan's song. Thats all al what can you do here is drag and scroll the window.

The second app was called SoundLab.

The next day, we decided to write a demo called "SoundLab" that would let the user control the pitch and waveform of the four independent voices. You could specify or edit a waveform by drawing it with the mouse, and control the frequency of each voice with a scrollbar. The results didn't sound like music, because there was no envelope shaping, but you could make very eerie sounding noises, which we deemed impressive enough. And it was fun to be able to hook an oscilloscope up to the sound output, and then draw a waveform with the mouse and see it on the scope.

[ 2 ]

The third one was by now well know Bouncing Pepsi Caps app

The next week, Mike Murray led John Sculley around the engineering area, since Steve was out of town. He brought him by my cubicle to see the modified Window Manager demo. I opened the windows one at a time, saving the Pepsi caps and cans for last. He seemed genuinely excited to see the Pepsi stuff, but oddly cold for most of the demo. He asked a few questions, but he didn't seem all that interested in the answers.

[ 3 ]

Fourth, the IconEditor. There are no icons saved on disc so I had to draw mine.

In February 1983, I worked on putting together an icon editor for Susan Kare to use to create icons for the Finder. Inspired by the "Fat Bits" pixel editing mode that Bill Atkinson had recently added to MacPaint, it had a large window with a 32 by 32 grid, displaying each pixel at eight times its natural size, as well as a small window that showed the icon at its actual size. Clicking on a pixel would invert it, and subsequent dragging would propagate the change to the dragged over pixels.

[ 4 ]

And the last was MacPaint version 0.1. About MacPaint/MacSketch I will do another write up in another post.

Around April 1983, Bill changed the name of the program from MacSketch to MacPaint. He began to hit his stride, and started to add new features to MacPaint on a daily basis. One of the most important was "Fat Bits", a mode which magnified a small section of the document by a factor of 8, allowing the user to easily manipulate individual pixels. It was implemented by scaling the offscreen buffer as it was transferred to the screen, so all of the other tools and effects kept working in Fat Bits mode.

[ 5 ]

The discs also had its own BootScreen MacTime. Could be it put some pressure on developers as the release date was really close

By the fall of 1983, we had committed to announcing and shipping the Macintosh at Apple's next annual shareholder's meeting, to be held on January 24th, 1984. The failure of the Twiggy disk drive almost caused us to be late (see Quick, Hide In This Closet!), but it seemed like the new Sony 3.5 inch drive solved all of our problems, and the rest of the hardware was ready to go. The Macintosh ROM was frozen in early September and sent out for fabrication. All that remained was finishing the System Disk, and our two applications, MacWrite and MacPaint.

[ 6 ]

I have also post a video on youtube. I tried all this software on a real 128k Mac. The discs image was converted from Twiggy disc to 128k Mac by Matey Hybler who also made Mini vMac Twiggy emolutaion possible. The MacPaint sadly does not work on 128k Mac.

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[ 1 ]

Folklore.org: Early Demos

www.folklore.org

[ 2 ]

Folklore.org: Sound By Monday

www.folklore.org

[ 3 ]

Folklore.org: Bouncing Pepsis

www.folklore.org

[ 4 ]

Folklore.org: Steve Icon

www.folklore.org

[ 5 ]

Folklore.org: MacPaint Evolution

www.folklore.org

[ 6 ]

Folklore.org: Real Artists Ship

www.folklore.org

 

[decryption]

Pretty cool to see all the stuff used to make the Mac!

I've read about them before, but to get such nice quality screenshots is great. Have these apps been out in the wild before, or is this the first chance we have to put the apps themselves on the web somewhere?

 

[slomacuser]

Thanks. This is not available for public yet. I hope someone will continue to work on Mac Twiggy emulation where Matej Hybler left. I havent heard from him for 10 years now … but thats for another post

 

[JDW]

I hope someone will continue to work on Mac Twiggy emulation...

Indeed. And I long for the day some brilliant retro geek will pick up the torch and make the LISA emulator actually work. I never could get the existing emulator to work on any of my Macs, and then when I started asking questions about it, the community told me the developer is no longer with us. Quite sad. Both of those emulators are greatly needed. Especially so for the LISA emulator because real LISAs are so overpriced most of us will only see one through emulation. And a Mac Twiggy is even more rare than a Twiggy LISA!

 

[slomacuser]

Indeed. And I long for the day some brilliant retro geek will pick up the torch and make the LISA emulator actually work. I never could get the existing emulator to work on any of my Macs, and then when I started asking questions about it, the community told me the developer is no longer with us. Quite sad. Both of those emulators are greatly needed. Especially so for the LISA emulator because real LISAs are so overpriced most of us will only see one through emulation. And a Mac Twiggy is even more rare than a Twiggy LISA!

I had it working on mine Intel iMac "21 from 2010. You also need ROM files etc anyway I lost interest in Lisa because there is no software to be used except 7/7 Office and maybe some applications and Xenix and you can install Atari TOS too ... well I have sold mine Lisa 2 last year and I do not regret ... yet ... Mac is so much more to explore and more interesting stories and development history behind.

 

[JDW]

...I have sold mine Lisa 2 last year and I do not regret ... yet ...

The LISA 2 is in many ways like a bigger screen Mac, yet slower (at 5MHz), so it's understandable you have no regrets. They take up a lot of space too. But I suspect if you had a LISA one with dual Twiggy Drives, you'd probably be holding onto that for dear life!

 

[JDW]

For now, I'm content to fiddly with this browser-based LISA:

https://alpha.lisagui.com/

No way to set the speed to simulate that slow 5MHz processor though. But maybe that's a good thing. Even so, the major apps you'd want to try out like LISA Paint and the office suite are not available. With that said, it is pretty impressive, especially when you fill your entire 27" iMac's screen with the LISA display! Wow.

 

[slomacuser]

Yes. You will get much better experience with this web Lisa emulation than with real machine

 

[andrew]

Thanks for the kind words about LisaGUI. To be clear, it was never intended to be a replacement for LisaEm. It's more of an overall tribute to the Lisa, classic Macs, and emulators. As a personal project, it has served to sharpen my own software engineering skills.

Ray Arachelian's passing was tragic, especially because it happened right before the Lisa's source was released. The silver lining is that steady development is continuing on a fork of LisaEm which can be found here: github.com/arcanebyte/lisaem

 

[JDW]

Excellent work so far on your LisaGUI, @andrew !

Because I will never own a LISA I, a personal goal for me is to be able to at least emulate the experience, which of course includes the LISA Office System software. I never had success with LisaEm running on any of my Macs, but it is interesting to hear that some folks are continuing work on it. Even so, I see from your github link they still haven't gotten the Office System to work...

But Office System aside, your excellent LisaGUI solution provides me (and countless others) with a first look at the LISA. That's something I never had access to before, and it's quite exciting. The LISA is in many ways like the Mac, yet also quite different. Exploring how the LISA works is where the fun happens. So thank you for investing so much of your time and effort into bringing that joy to all of us!

 

[andrew]

I think it depends on which version of the emulator you're using and which system you're running. For me, v3.1 of the office system works fine... mostly..... The really hard and annoying part has always been getting the emulator configured properly, and dealing with bugs and all the usual troubleshooting.

LisaEm is definitely far from perfect and isn't bug free, but it's absolutely made my life much easier while developing LisaGUI, and has saved me from having to needlessly boot up my 2/10 all the time. The version I have working right now is 1.2.7-RC4_2022.04.01 on an intel MacBook Pro with Sequoia 15.5.

 

[andrew]

Even so, the major apps you'd want to try out like LISA Paint and the office suite are not available.

That's because I haven't written them yet, because LisaGUI isn't a Lisa emulator at all and involves none of Apple's code and no hardware emulation... the whole thing is a modern software system written from scratch in vanilla JS.

Recently I "released" "LisaType" which is my knockoff of LisaWrite, so that's 1/7. If you have an "installation" of LisaGUI already, there's a "spare stationery" disk in the clock menu. Choose that menu option, then open up the disk and drag the LisaType stationery pad into your "hard disk". Double click it to "tear-off" a new document, then open that document and edit it. There's still some bugs I need to fix and features I need to add, but it mostly works as a fully functional word processor.

There was no paint program for the Lisa, as much as I wish there was... LisaDraw exists, and is a vector graphics program very similar to MacDraw. The next app I plan to write for LisaGUI is a sort of "what-if" version of "LisaPaint" which will be an attempt to recreate MacPaint, except with the Lisa's UI elements and its rectangular pixels... which should be interesting.

 

[JDW]

The next app I plan to write for LisaGUI is a sort of "what-if" version of "LisaPaint" which will be an attempt to recreate MacPaint, except with the Lisa's UI elements and its rectangular pixels... which should be interesting.

So basically you're working on a revamped version of SketchPad of sorts, at least on a concept level when it comes to implementing a bitmapped paint program on the LISA. Neat!

 

[andrew]

Well I haven't actually started it yet. I guess you can frame it that way but I was thinking more like "what if someone back-ported MacPaint to the Lisa."

...Right now I'm just working on the calculator.

 

[JDW]

Be it a paint program or a calculator, I think everything you're working on right now is an incredible feat! Truly fantastic!

 

[andrew]

Be it a paint program or a calculator, I think everything you're working on right now is an incredible feat! Truly fantastic!

Thank you very much!

One thing relevant to this thread is that I added the title bar text borders from the twiggy Mac system software as an option. I thought the similarity to the Lisa's title bars was interesting if not unexpected.

(I had to shorten the pattern slightly to get it to fit)