Exactly why I want it...!!!!The idea of someone using a Lisa to run Cobol programs in the "Workshop" environment is so utterly mind-boggling it sort of hurts. But is also sort of awesome.
The idea of someone using a Lisa to run Cobol programs in the "Workshop" environment is so utterly mind-boggling it sort of hurts. But is also sort of awesome.
I don't think I'd go that far. While it's true that COBOL development systems existed for most larger 8 and 16 bit Microcomputers I don't think Cobol applications were ever particularly widespread outside of a few specialized areas. (For instance, Tandy sold a line of accounting/business management software written in RS-COBOL for the TRS-80 Model 2/12/16/6000 series that were shovelware ports of older Minicomputer software.) So far as I can tell the Macintosh got along fine without one. Casually searching Google/Macintosh Garden for a Cobol compiler turns up zero hits.Anyway a cobol compiler was mandatory for a business oriented computer (at least until around 2000)
I think the ambition to make the Lisa a "business supermicro" really reflects an important original goal of Apple's Personal Office Systems division---note that the Lisa project was well underway before the decision was made to give it a GUI.[1][2]
That is terribly sad yet hilarious at the same time.It's hard not to imagine the disappointment! Look at page 23 of the Dialog Building Block chapter in the ToolKit documentation
Yesterday I randomly looked up details on the MMU (because "virtual memory" was mentioned above and, so far as I was aware, the Lisa didn't actually support virtual memory in the "transparent demand paging" sense) and frankly the patent description and the documentation in the Lisa hardware manual left me scratching my head. As you note the 68000 doesn't support restarting from a page fault... but beyond that, it doesn't seem like even the prospect of demand paging is brought up. (By comparison, the documentation for the MMU in the roughly contemporaneous SUN-1 makes a big point of talking about how the MMU *will* support it when the CPU does and, indeed, the Sun-2 uses almost exactly the same design with the substitution of a 68010.) It's... weird, frankly. The Lisa isn't a multi-user machine, and if you *just* want hardware protection for supervisor-verses-user code anyway you can still manage that with a significantly simpler design. Do the Lisa OS/applications actually leverage the multiple virtual address space context feature in any meaningful way, or does the MMU just get set up once when loading LOS and is mostly left alone at that point?my point of view is that the hardcoded mmu is the major flaw of lisa because 68000 is not restartable processor
The thing I guess I'd point out about that is that swapping chunks of code and data back and forth to disk by no means relies on having an MMU if you're willing to live with the limitation of having to rely on making a system call to make sure that what you actually want is there before you touch it. (Which it sounds like the Lisa *kinda* does.)I have to admit that I'm mostly taking it on faith that the Lisa is using demand paging (for pete's sake, what on earth could the thing be doing as you stare for seconds at a blank LisaWrite window with the ProFile blinking away furiously :lisa2: ).
What's really tragic, of course, is in the end the last gasp for the Lisa hardware involved being dumbed down to emulate a Macintosh, a machine missing all the "real computer" bells and whistles they worked so hard to build.Perhaps if you have this mindset, it becomes easy to add on additional supporting justifications---like, who knows how complicated this GUI stuff is going to be, we'd better design the hardware defensively so we don't let the software folks down...
That was the point of MacWorks.Figuring out some way to merge the two into a "family" of upwardly compatible systems might have helped both,
In my opinion the Mac's #1 problem in 1984 that could have caused it to fail wasn't the RAM size or disk drive, it was the lack of software. A drought. Same as with Lisa, you could argue. Read any Mac magazine or newsletter of the time and you will see this plea in every one of them: where is the software?considering how the Mac itself almost failed because many of the potential business customers couldn't take a 128k floppy-only computer seriously.)