[ont.events] Apple Lisa Presentation at U of T

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.