An interesting detail is the substitute Lisa system font.
(I'd conclude, this is either a handmade drawing, or a screenshot of a prototype before Apple settled on the final font. Maybe used as a comparison showing off the use of bitmapped images on the Star, something not available on the Lisa? And/or, as indicated by another comment, comparing screen sizes?)
Also, mind the slight angle at the top edge, where the screen content and the monitor meet. I guess, this is not a screenshot but a montage.
The screenshot seems to be based on one from a Lisa brochure here: https://archive.org/details/AppleLisaBrochure/page/n12/mode/... (page 13 if link doesn't go to the right page, the LisaProject example). Seems to be some sort of remake as beyond the brochure example being very low res things like text spacing are different (circles cutting off bits of text inside them is obvious one on the Alto shot).
The Lisa was in development at the time, so apparently someone at Apple shared it. Strange thing to show off in your Xerox demo! (showing how much larger the screen was is my guess)
Lots of Lisa history on that. The only real thing if I remember correctly that Lisa copied from Star was the desktop itself after viewing a the NCC.
Software architecture wise however the two systems shared many concepts (but not tools or languages) that probably are traced back to the same roots at Xerox but otherwise were independently developed. For example Apple used Clascal (object oriented pascal) while that added an object oriented layer to Mesa. (Mesa itself was pretty much cloned as Modula 2 later if anyone wants to know more about it.)
The image of the Lisa desktop was not running on Star. Star was software, the hardware ran many different Xerox systems. It was running under some other Xerox system/OS. Hard to say what it was. Could have been XDE (unlikely because I don’t see process bar at the bottom) or Interlisp. But defiantly not running under Star.
Almost certainly not real, or at the very least not contemporaneous. The graphics shown on screen have varied pixel pitch which isn't consistent with the Star's monochrome display. Or, for that matter, consistent with the non-square pixels you would expect from a Lisa screenshot.
I was wondering why that window has a menubar at the top! I even went through the other screenshots to see if it appeared in other places--made me wonder if pull-down menus were actually also invented at PARC.
masswerk|2 years ago
(I'd conclude, this is either a handmade drawing, or a screenshot of a prototype before Apple settled on the final font. Maybe used as a comparison showing off the use of bitmapped images on the Star, something not available on the Lisa? And/or, as indicated by another comment, comparing screen sizes?)
Also, mind the slight angle at the top edge, where the screen content and the monitor meet. I guess, this is not a screenshot but a montage.
fredoralive|2 years ago
pulvinar|2 years ago
Lisa, for comparison: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10263089...
knuckleheadsmif|2 years ago
Software architecture wise however the two systems shared many concepts (but not tools or languages) that probably are traced back to the same roots at Xerox but otherwise were independently developed. For example Apple used Clascal (object oriented pascal) while that added an object oriented layer to Mesa. (Mesa itself was pretty much cloned as Modula 2 later if anyone wants to know more about it.)
knuckleheadsmif|2 years ago
They eventually had a PC add on board to the 6085 (the 8010 hardware successor) that could show a PC within a Star window.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Daybreak
My guess is that the Lisa image was an example of how something like that might work.
knuckleheadsmif|2 years ago
simondotau|2 years ago
knuckleheadsmif|2 years ago
nielsbot|2 years ago
knuckleheadsmif|2 years ago
agumonkey|2 years ago