Juan Vuletich wrote:
> BTW, in the interview it was said that the Lisa was a Smalltalk machine. 
> I looked a bit in the web and could find nothing about this. Perhaps 
> this was a mistake, and the Lisa OS and dev tools were Pascal based?

See the "Smalltalk machines" on page 5 of the "orange book". On the top
left you will see the Lisa.

> http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv.pdf

Xerox licensed Smalltalk to Apple, Tektronix, DEC and HP (the one that
they couldn't remember in the interview) under very generous terms in
exchange for them helping make it ready for general release by having
local teams do a port and debug the "blue book" as a result.

A special object-oriented Pascal was developed for the Lisa. Much of
that software was rewritten in 68000 assembly language for the Mac.

> Another note on the Lisa. The chief designer was Larry tesler, right? 
> The "don't mode me in" guy. However, the Lisa had eight modes. The 7/7 
> applications and the dev environment... If it had been a Smalltalk 
> machine, it could have been modeless.

There were applications that ran side by side on the same screen and
even the notion of applications was partly hidden behind prototype
documents. So it was a bit more modeless than the Mac.

History is a complicated thing. Jef Raskin liked to say that he pushed
Steve Jobs to make that visit so he would get a clue and quit trying to
kill Jef's graphical Mac project when the Lisa was a text-only
minicomputer. Bill Atkinson said "I think mostly what...what we got in
that hour and a half was inspiration and just sort of basically a
bolstering of our convictions that a more graphical way to do things
would make this business computer more accessible."
(http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html)

The Xerox Star came out about the same time as the IBM PC (way before
the Lisa and the Mac) and was described in detail in at least one Byte
magazine article. So I was very familiar with it back in 1982 and was
using these ideas in my own designs, but it seems that nobody at Apple
knew anything at all about it. If the people who were there can't agree
on what happened, we certainly will never know for sure.

-- Jecel