learning from Lisa

[riffraff]

These are just a few things that Apple's Lisa computer had (remember, this was back in 1983):

• pre-emptive multitasking
  
• a graphical user interface
  
• an intuitive document-oriented system (as opposed to today's application-oriented computers)
  
• automatic saving of changes
  
• versioning (in fact, "saving" merely created new versions)
  
• persistence (turn the

Comments

[jerronimo]

let's also not forget the "innovation" that came with a recent OS X version, which moved some finder/gui/graphics processing off onto the video card... AKA Quartz Extreme... that was pioneered by the Amiga back in 1985... which did have fully pre-emptive multitasking, in 4 colors.

Personally, I think that we've taken multitudes of steps back.

Think about what we had back then... I'll use the Amiga since it's what I know best from that era.

Out of the box:
7.16 Mhz, 256k ram, (up to 8.5 megs) 256k rom (loaded via floppy at bootup), full windowing GUI system, pre-emtpive multitasking, color display (4 color for workbench/file manipulations, 4096 colors for other apps), icons, basic drag-and-drop... 4 channels of 8 bit 32khz audio.
fast forward to 1987, and you get fully autoconfiguring hard drives, ram, and other hardware.

The average application was between 200 and 600k.

All of this was *FAST* on a 7.16 mhz 68000 cpu.

Why are current operating systems sluggish on a 2ghz multi cpu system? Everything, all of the hardware, firmware, etc... is faster, and yet the systems overall are not.