henry (04/20/83)
>From uucp Tue Apr 19 16:40:24 1983 >From dw Tue Apr 19 15:30:08 1983 remote from utcsrgv To: msgs Subject: Apple Lisa Presentation Cc: hcr!mike utcsstat!bob uteecg!news utzoo!henry 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.