A sidebar to the “Apple’s Lisa: A personal Office System” report published in January 1983, pp. 24.

Until recently, the “norm” in the personal computer field has been a common operating system (e.g., CP/M) under which the user could run different application programs, this sort of “open-ended” system has the virtue of making it easy for innovative software companies to develop new application programs and offer them for sale as separate packages. However, it has meant that the user has had to learn a different “user interface” for each application program he uses. And, he is rarely able to transfer data from one application to another.

In the past few months, a number of vendors have offered application programs which combine several functions into a single program (e.g., Context MBA and Lotus 1-2-3). Such “closed-end” software packages avoid the different user interfaces that result from a multi-vendor environment, and provide better integration between a restricted set of applications, but they also offer less diversity in functionality. Future enhancements, of course, can lessen this problem.

A third approach has been exposed by VisiCorp with its promised VisiHost operating system interface and Visi^ON user interface. These are supposed to provide a much more comprehensive operating environment than, say, CP/M, a common user interface for all application programs and the promise of at least some ability to transfer data between applications. The penalty for the independent software company is that it will have to learn to work within the complete Visi environment. Visi has asked prospective software vendors to discuss with Visi what they intend to do before they set off to do anything.

Lisa provides, if anything, a more complete environment than does Visi. It contains a single-user, multi-process operating system surrounded by graphic support routines, font management, and various data management facilities. The “finishing” touches are provided by office application tools like LisaCalc, LisaGraph, LisaDraw, LisaProject, LisaList and LisaWrite.

Apple is supplementing this “environment” with numerous communication facilities to expand Lisa from a “personal office system” into a “virtual office system” interconnected with other computers. Clearly Apple is serious when it says that Lisa will be the first of a new generation of products.

The Toolkit. As part of its open-ended software architecture, Lisa eventually will be able to run programs written by other software developers and users. To this end, a Lisa Applications Development Toolkit will be available in late 1983, and the price list we have included mentions the cost for the BASIC-Plus, Pascal and COBOL languages for Lisa.

An OEM box? Apple also plans to support Digital Research in its effort to bring the world of CP/M to Lisa and similarly support Microsoft in its effort to provide Xenix, its variant of the Unix operating system. It will thus be possible to run software developed for these operating systems on Lisa. However, to get the real benefit of the Lisa environment software companies would need to use the Apple Toolkit and develop programs specifically for Lisa.

Developing the Toolkit will be quite a task, so we can understand why it will not be available for a while. We still think that this is unfortunate. Lisa offers a lot of hardware and software capability and would make a marvelous OEM platform for a variety of applications.