LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Daryl Tester <dt@picknowl.com.au>
  To  : linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
  Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 22:54:01 +0930

Re: More space required

David Newall wrote:

> System clock ran at ... goodness me, I'm scratching to
> recall whether it was 5MHz or 8MHz.

The magic "4.77 MHz".

> It's competitors at the time were the Apple ][, which used a RISCish 8 bit
> CPU (6502),

The 6502 was pretty minimal, even for RISC.  An 8 bit wide stack pointer
(hardwired to page 1), and from memory 3 other 8 bit registers (X, Y
and accumulator?).

> There is no question that the Lisa had an operating system which was ten
> years (or more) in advance of the IBM PC.

And then some - most of the Lisa's design was ripped off of Xerox PARC
workstations of the time (the name of which escapes me), which had been
around since the late 70's (which is why it was so ironic when Apple
sued Microsoft over WIMP interfaces, when they themselves had stolen it).
The stuff that Xerox produced was amazing, even more so when they failed
to capitalise on it (consider: WIMP interface, SmallTalk (an OO language
in common use in the 70's!), Ethernet & networking).


Regards,
  Daryl Tester

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