A complete working emulator of the Lisa for Mac OS X has been developed by the Lisa Emulator Project. Ted Hodges described his experiences with the emulator on Tuesday at The Low End Mac.
The emulator requires a copy of the Lisa ROM and a copy of the Lisa OS. After that, one can boot up the virtual Lisa and explore life in Appleis first true preemptive multi-tasking OS.
Mr. Hodges wrote," Another thing is Lisa had was preemptive multi tasking, so you could hold a menu open and the rest of the system wouldnit stop. Thatis right - preemptive multitasking was a standard feature on the Lisa in 1983. (It wasnit a feature on the Mac until OS X arrived in 2001.)"
While the Lisais black and white display, which was intended to mark it as a serious business tool, as opposed to a colorful game machine back in 1983, may look seriously outdated, the introduction to the Lisa emulator serves to remind all in the Macintosh community about the Macis origins and how Apple got where it is today.
Since this is am emulator, it requires a really fast Mac. Ray Arachelian of the Lisa Emulator team said that the next version will run much faster on a G4.
The story has plenty of screen shots which convey the look-and-feel of Appleis US$10,000 business computer, the Lisa, circa 1983.
Note: the story mentioned that the Website lisa.sunder.net is down for maintenance on Tuesday.
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