Source code for Apple’s Lisa OS to be released for free in 2018

The operating system that ran on Apple's Lisa computer released in 1983 will available for free, courtesy of the Computer History Museum and Apple. The Lisa was one of the first personal computers to have a graphical user interface.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo says Al Kossow, a software curator at the Computer History Museum, recently announced that both the source code for the Lisa operating system and the Lisa apps have been recovered. The source code is being reviewed by Apple and once it is done, the museum it will be released in the public domain.

When Lisa was first released, Apple charged $9,995, for the machine aimed at business users. It featured a 5MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, 1MB of RAM, and a 5MB hard drive. Apple could only sell  about 100,000 of the Lisa computers due to the high price. Though Steve Jobs had originally denied it, he later accepted that Lisa was named for his daughter, Lisa Brennan.

Apple's Lisa operating system featured the text-based Workshop for software development and the Lisa Office System, with seven apps including LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaProject, LisaList, and LisaTerminal.

Lisa came 5.25-inch "Twiggy" floppy drives which were found to be unreliable, and a 5MB hard drive.

The Lisa was powered by a 68000 processor, but running slower than that of the original 128K Mac. It also featured rectangular pixels, as against the circular ones on the Mac 128 and future compact Macs.

The ''Twiggy'' drives were removed in 1985, and replaced with a 3.5-inch drive. The hardware got 2MB of RAM, plus a 10MB hard drive and was re-branded as the Macintosh XL. It carried a price tag of $3995.

Lisa and Macintosh XL owners got a chance to exchange the device, pay $1498, and get a new Mac Plus, and Hard Disk 20 in exchange, worth more than $4000 in total at the time.