dw (04/19/83)
APPLE Lisa Computer Presentation
Friday 29 April 1983, 13:00-16:00
Room 1101 Sandford Fleming Building
10 Kings College Road
University of Toronto
Dr Brad Silverberg (U of T PhD in CS) and Dr. Mark Cutter from
Apple Computer Inc in Cupertino Calif will be giving a 3 hour
presentation on Apple's new Lisa computer. They will be bringing
a couple of Lisas for live demonstrations. An abstract of their
presentation follows.
Abstract
This seminar will give an overview of Apple Computer's newly
released product, the LISA Personal Office System. It will begin
with a live demonstration of the electronic desktop user
interface, followed by a three-part technical discussion of the
underlying architecture.
Demonstration of the electronic desktop user interface will
illustrate use of the mouse, multiple overlapping windows,
document filing using icons, integration and sharing of data
among the five major applications, as well as selected features
of the applications.
The first part of the technical discussion will detail the
architecture of Lisa's most distinguishing characteristic, its
innovative graphics subsystem. Two challenging problems were
meeting the speed requirements of an interactive system, and
developing a window manager that both multiplexes events and
efficiently handles non-rectangular screen updates. A variety of
graphics primitives had to be supported, as well as high-
resolution printing.
The second part of the technical discussion will cover
interesting aspects of the hardware, including constant linear
sector size of the floppy disk drives, soft power-off and disk
eject, and packaging. It will also discuss details of the in-
house developed, single-user, multi-processing operating system.
The third part of the technical discussion will describe the
Pascal-based development system used to write LISA applications.
The interchange mechanisms developed to support data sharing
between applications will be discussed, as will be the Lisa
Toolkit. The Toolkit makes it easy for third-party developers to
write software integrated into the Lisa Office System.