Programmers will soon get the chance to play around with the source code for Lisa OS, one of Apple Inc.’s oldest and most infamous operating systems.

Al Kossow, a software curator for the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, announced to a mailing list that the museum has recovered the source code for the operating system and several of its original applications. Kossow said the source code has been submitted to Apple for review, and the museum hopes to make it freely available to the public sometime in 2018.

The museum’s goal in releasing the source code is to preserve the legacy of Lisa OS, which had a profound impact not only on Apple and the computer industry, but also on the digital revolution that still shapes our world today.

Lisa OS was the operating system that powered the Apple Lisa, a personal computer named after Apple founder Steve Jobs’ eldest daughter. Released in 1983, Apple Lisa was one of the first commercially available personal computers to feature a graphical user interface, which Jobs reportedly developed after witnessing a similar interface during a visit to Xerox PARC. Users previously interacted with computers entirely through text commands, but GUIs like the one found in Lisa OS established the visual point-and-click interface with which we are all familiar today.

Despite its innovations, Apple Lisa was ultimately a commercial failure for Apple. The computer suffered from unreliable hardware and numerous performance problems, and many businesses and consumers could not justify its $9,995 price. Apple tried to address these problems a year later with Apple Lisa 2 (pictured), a hardware revision that featured improved performance and a lower price tag. Unfortunately, Apple Lisa 2 never stood a chance against another Apple product that was released that same month: Steve Jobs’ new brainchild, the original Apple Macintosh.

The Mac was not as powerful or customizable as Apple Lisa, but it was also roughly half the cost of the Apple Lisa 2 and less than a quarter of the cost of the original Apple Lisa. Like Apple Lisa, the Mac also featured a GUI that relied on a single-button mouse, and some of the visual elements in the new operating system were taken directly from Lisa OS.

The source code for Lisa OS may not lead to any exciting new applications, but it may offer some new insights into a flawed operating system that helped pave the way for the personal computer revolution.

Photo: Rama, Wikimedia Commons, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, Link