Hi Jason:

So like I said on the maillist, I think this is cool. I look forward to

seeing it.

I've been trying to work towards some Xenix representation in my

collection.

Nothing there yet... I thought I might get a TRS-80 Model II there but its a big undertaking. For the me fact that in the face of Linux it appears its one of the mistakes of Microsoft to not stay involved with the Unix OS is historically very interesting. Now on the Lisa... wow... a foreshadow of NextOS and OSX too! Is there any testimony supporting that this could have been a seed for Job's job's to look to Unix as the basis of NextOS after leaving Apple? :O

I usually try to convey some historical significance in my exhibit... and had to with my past "Spread Sheet" exhibit. Spreadsheets have NO flash. I sidestepped that reality with the "what if spreadsheets had come to us on a Cosmac ELF" Hope the ideas help you see some other ways to consider the "interestingness" of what you have there.

-DC

I think you are onto something interesting with an exhibit of the milestones that lead up to the Next OS, but you'll find that its path did not much involve the Lisa. Attempts to connect a hacked toether Lisa Xenix to the Berkley BSD variant that became the Next OS is a bit of history in hindsight. Even if you have Xenix running on the Lisa what about networking to do something useful with it, using what was available at the time, without having to develop something new? I think Lisa Xenix was an afterthought OS not what the manufacturer intended, kind of like efforts to put MS DOS on the Commodore B Series machines by adding an 8088 coprocessor. For this increasingly hypothetical Next OS exhibit, one could walk through dev milestones that lead to the Next OS as the end point. Show a Next Cube plus one or two earlier BSD UNIX micros, workststions, minis if you coukd find them. What the Next OS represented was a cheap UNIX machine, less than $10,000 was a pretty big deal at the time. Problem for exhibit...The early UNiX workstations are very rare, few have caught on yet that these are worth saving, many have been trashed. A Perq would be nice or an early Motorola mini. This is an area that deserves more attention. Bill