On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:11:38PM -0500, Jason Perkins via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
VCFers,
I'm working on planning my exhibit for this year. To keep things not identical to last year I was thinking of showing Xenix on my Lisa. However I'm worried the exhibit won't be interesting enough to the general public (Oh look, it runs. Oh look, it's Unix. Oh look, there's a clunky menu interface you can bring up.)
My thoughts on how I might deal with this. Take what matches your interest. I vary my exhibit from crowd pleaser to what interests me. Last year was the historical context and what was special to me knowing it would get less attention. As long as you are ok with that I don't see it as a problem. I do see what I can do that will be an initial pull to get people to stop and hopefully be interested in seeing more in depth. This all assumes that Lisa Xenix was something generally available and was used. If it is a modern port or never made it past feasibility build below isn't meaningful. More directly for your proposed exhibit I would start with why Xenix. The Lisa was an integrated software and hardware solution so why would people run Xenix? I assume that would be for particular programs that only ran under it or compatibility with other machines they had and the Lisa was better or cheaper hardware to run it on. Assuming that there were particular programs that were important I would try to find a few that I could demo. One way to have a catch to bring people over would be a slide show of screen shots from the programs. That gives you a quick way to talk about what was done with the machine for the short stop people and when one of them strikes peoples interest you can then fire up the real program to go into more detail. If a program does something without interaction that also works. The games can be in the same slide show. I normally have a couple different angles to the exhibit to try to match the people who stop varying level of interest.
Of course games are always interesting... however as far as I know none were made. The system does have a Pascal compiler, so perhaps that's an option to get something new into the system?
This is a Unix system with no C compiler? I would think that the classic Unix games would have been built for it. We has them on the 3B1 last year since they were originally played on that machine. The Text tetris was popular.