and the code was actually too big to fit on a stock Lisa hard drive (the hard drive is 10 MB, the code is ~20 MB) so they had to hack the OS to patch in support for higher capacity drives.
Then how was it originally developed? Did Apple also patch their own OS?
Apple hooked up the Lisa to a much larger larger external hard disk, the Priam Datatower. It could hold ~84 MB. The Datatower is extremely rare and AFAIK nobody with the skills to figure out how it works for emulation or cloning has a working one with a Lisa interface card.
The OS did, but the disk driver for the Lisa ProFile hard drives (which was distributed as part of the OS) did not. All existing emulation only supports the ProFile drives, not the DataTower. If you're actually interested, I think it would be a better use of your time to look at the readme file for the repo I linked (which goes over the patch) instead of nitpicking my comments.
I didn't mean to nitpick, I was actually confused and curious. And I'm willing to believe that it's discussed in that repo, but that's a lot of text to go through.
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Then how was it originally developed? Did Apple also patch their own OS?
Apple hooked up the Lisa to a much larger larger external hard disk, the Priam Datatower. It could hold ~84 MB. The Datatower is extremely rare and AFAIK nobody with the skills to figure out how it works for emulation or cloning has a working one with a Lisa interface card.
So then the OS did support higher capacity drives, just not anything that anybody can use these days
The OS did, but the disk driver for the Lisa ProFile hard drives (which was distributed as part of the OS) did not. All existing emulation only supports the ProFile drives, not the DataTower. If you're actually interested, I think it would be a better use of your time to look at the readme file for the repo I linked (which goes over the patch) instead of nitpicking my comments.
I didn't mean to nitpick, I was actually confused and curious. And I'm willing to believe that it's discussed in that repo, but that's a lot of text to go through.