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Andy Hertzfeld and his merry comrades did more to invent the current gui standards than Gates or Jobs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld

http://www.folklore.org/index.py

They used a prototype 512k Mac for that demo.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Intro_Demo.txt&topic=The%20Launch&sortO rder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

I think this is actually a good lead-in to the topic of TFA -- part of the ROM contained a specific string, I think it was "Stolen from Apple Computer" that could be searched for and found in an image. So let's say you make a Mac emulator, and claim that it doesn't contain Apple's intellectual property in any way. A quick search can reveal whether it has the whole ROM image embedded in it somewhere.

Ah yes, I've read about that here. (It's got to be authentic, because nobody would think to fake that printout from an ImageWriter with a faded ribbon!)

Sounds like an old Apple approach to address piracy directly - but with a slightly different attitude now. Here's the old approach from the original Mac BIOS: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt&showcomments=1 Now they're just asking folks not to steal their stuff...

AKA turn your printer into a scanner.

Sure the concept of desk accessories seems obvious now, but how do you figure that credit can't be given? The idea had to start SOMEWHERE. Near as I can tell, the idea came from Bud Tribble at Apple in 1981. Somehow, I don't think the concept was nearly as obvious 25 years ago as it is now.

Look at the early Apple stuff: every bit of technical genius you see is from Woz alone. Really, Jobs isn't fit to polish Woz's shoes.

I didn't know that. I had always read/heard that Jobs got a tour at PARC and went back and incorporated what he saw.

Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything that says Applic licenesed anything from Xerox.

on the contrary:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_v._Microsoft

In an odd twist midway through the suit, Xerox filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming Apple had infringed copyrights Xerox held on its GUIs. Xerox had invested in Apple and had invited the Macintosh design team to view their GUI computers at the PARC research lab; these visits had been very influential on the development of the Macintosh GUI. The Xerox case was dismissed on a technicality.

If Apple had licensed Xerox GUI ideas/designs/components, why did Xerox sue?

In fact:

http://news.com.com/5208-1016-0.html?forumID=1&thr eadID=6103&messageID=38010&start=-114

Apple licensed technology from Xerox and improved on it
Reader post by: Michael Louka
Posted on: April 15, 2005, 6:14 AM PDT
Story: An early peek at Longhorn

This is incorect, based on common myths about Apple and
Xerox, which are really unfair to the true innovators. Douglas
Englebart, Xerox, and Apple all contributed to the development
of the desktop GUI as we know it today, and each of them added
significant innovations

1) The concept of the mouse-controlled UI was NOT a Xerox
innvolation. It was conceived by Douglas Englebart much earlier
(see for example http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/
1968Demo.html)

2) Xerox produced the first (very expensive) commercial system
with a bitmap GUI display with pop-up menus that used a
windowing concept and some SmallTalk niceties (that the Mac
OS did not learn from), and a mouse to control it and do stuff
like selecting text (however the mac introduced direct
manipulation of such text).

3) Apple licensed the technology from Xerox. Yes, they actually
*paid* for it. Apple is commonly accused of stealing ideas from
Xerox (like many later accused Microsoft of stealing ideas from
Apple), but Apple licensed the technology from Xerox, and it
was knowingly demonstrated to Apple, so these repeated
accusations of stealling are very unfair, especially since those
that accuse apple of stealing the interface extend the interface
concept way beyond what Xerox had, to also encompass Apple's
own innvoations, which Apple should be credited for! See http:///
www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?
project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progre ss.txt&t
opic=Origins&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=med ium

4) Apple developed the desktop metaphor (The Mac Finder with
drag and drop manipulation of files and folder, the trash can,
etc.) that most modern systems use. This was not a part of the
Xerox design and was a significant innovation by Apple that
greatly enhanced the usability of computer systems. The Star did
not even have overlapping window, which were also a Mac first.

if you are interesting in computing history and the development
of the desktop GUI as we know it today see:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt&topic=User%20Interf ace&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

I realize this is a post on a user forum and hardly authoritative, but it was the best I could find on short notice to respond to the 'nitwit' belittlement.

So what do you think Apple will call there Macintosh project when it ships? My money's on Bicycle. :)

>> Oh please. Steve Jobs couldn't code his way out of a wet paper bag.
> And you know this how, exactly?

Don't know how Johnny knows, but Andy Hertzfeld wrote this:

Steve generally treated Bill [Gates] as someone who was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and style. Bill looked down on Steve because he couldn't actually program.

'struth

One can ask if Dashboard is a rip-off of Konfabulator and it would be a very good question. Apple swears up and down it was an independent creation...however...

"However" what? You're right, "one could ask," and the answer would be that Apple did, in fact, create widget-type applets first and independently for consumer operating systems. The year was 1982, and they were called Desktop Ornaments (later renamed Desktop Accessories) for the new Macintosh OS. As much as I used to like it despite is enormous memory footprint, I don't think Konfabulator was a gleam in Arlo Rose's eye in 1982.

Desk Accessories, launched with the Mac in 1984.

And again, he probably meant to link to this one.

Link is not quite right. Desk Ornaments.

I have never used Konfabulator but from the looks of the things Dashboard looks like a Konfabulator ripoff.

If you're going to paint it like someone ripped off someone else, then it's Konfab that ripped off Apple's Desktop Accessories, which were developed 21 years before Konfabulator.

In case you didn't get the hint, Konfabulator (now YWE apparently) predates Apple Dashboard. A lot.

I got your hint. The problem with your argument is that Apple's Desktop Accessories pre-date Konfabulator by 21 years.
If you're going to argue history, try to have your facts straight.

Oh, and if perchance you don't which game this is, check it out!

basiCreations

...that was used by a former Apple employee

For old mac people, it is something similar to Kaleidoscope, the theme utility for pre OS x Mac systems. Check http://www.kaleidoscope.net/ Really funny thing is, they are same guys coded Konfabulator which is acquired by Yahoo! I am not getting into that fight but it is widely said, the Tiger Dashboard is Konfabulator. E.g. Apple basically stole it. Fool. For older mac people, Desk Accessories. http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh &story=Desk_Ornaments.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Da te&detail=medium&search=desk

I teach at a community college and our enrollment numbers are down in our IT programs. We have found that many have the perception that there are few IT jobs.

With a tip of the hat to Alan Kay and the greats who made the IT industry, maybe you should teach your students that the best way to perceive the IT job market is to create it. One of the best things about the IT field, at least the software development side, is the low barriers to entry (a computer, internet connection, and willingness to experiment), and the relative ease and lack of startup capital required to make a good idea into a viable business. Try appealing to your students' idealistic side, get them to experiment with coming up iwth ideas and then prototyping, and encourage them to run with it.

When it gets approved, you just add the code on the back and you're all set.

Plus you could let your manager or client play with it. Put all the buttons and fields on there and set things up, then let him drag 'em around, change font sizes, etc. Sure it will probably be hideous, but he'll be happy :). They even did something like this for Steve Jobs when making the original Mac (story here at Folklore.org.)

When it gets approved, you just add the code on the back and you're all set.

Plus you could let your manager or client play with it. Put all the buttons and fields on there and set things up, then let him drag 'em around, change font sizes, etc. Sure it will probably be hideous, but he'll be happy :). They even did something like this for Steve Jobs when making the original Mac (story here at Folklore.org.)

John was more concerned with the total company operation and keeping things going while Steve wanted to keep advancing on the future, company and profits or not, in his own internally conceived directions. Actually, John Sculley promoted technologies like AppleTalk and PowerTalk and QuickTime and PlainTalk and the Newton. He was very supportive of the rare technical geniuses in the company. He was not just a "marketeer" who dressed things up in colors.

Well there's this story about Steve's argument over the PC board aesthetics:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=PC_Board_Es thetics.txt

Or there's this story about the real reasons Steve parks in the handicapped spaces:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Handicapped .txt

Really there, were you? Or just lifting stories from the original source?

Well there's this story about Steve's argument over the PC board aesthetics:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=PC_Board_Es thetics.txt

Or there's this story about the real reasons Steve parks in the handicapped spaces:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Handicapped .txt

Really there, were you? Or just lifting stories from the original source?

If you read the article or read some of the other threads here, you'd see reference to the fact that Steve's "reality distortion field" quickly wears off when he stops talking.

For the record, I love the Mac platform not because of Apple, but in spite of them. When I first got exposed to HyperCard and QuickDraw/QuickTime and the OS's prior lack of command line, the OS seems like the "OS of tommorow" to me. OS X's embracing of various UNIX and Windows technologies feels to me like going back to "primative times" to me; I'm really surprised by the cultural inertia of the command line and the flat file system. It feels like that I'm dealing with things that I'd thought I'd left behind after using TRS-80's, TI-99/4a's, and VAXen in my distant past...

I'm surprised that they've still got the resource stuff in there -- in the form of "/rsrc". But I guess you can't break all the old apps that need it.

Besides the "rsrc" path extension trick, Apple introduced the "file package" concept where a directory of files is presented to the end user as a single "file" in the Finder. Such a package can store Carbon accessable resource data as flat files easily portable to Unix/Windows systems, although they still need special treatment to read the specially formatted data within. Also, when saving Mac files on non-HFS systems, the Mac OS will create "dot underscore" files next to the original data files. This behavior drives many server admins nuts, I've been told.

it is interesting to hear your take on Quicktime.

My take's unusual because I've rarely used QT for it's "intended purpose." QuickTime is a "layer," not a "player." It's a comprehensive API and set of routines for processing media (time-based, static, and even algorithmic like sprites and MIDI) related metadata and processing. Its design intention is more encompansing of functionality than Windows Media or Real. It also, sadly, a much older procedural API, so it doesn't mesh well with Cocoa development and can feel backwords when trying to use QuickTime within a modern OOP development environment. With the fading away of multimedia CDs and what not, iTunes and the iPod are the only thing keeping QT in widespread use.

That said, my perpective may be a little off from consensus; I wasn't using them when the Macs were first released (those TRS-80's remember? (-;). You might get a better insight into what made the Mac and its surrounding culture so facinating by visiting the quasi-blog site called Folklore.org; lots of Mac development information straight from the developer's keyboards.

• Information is power.
• It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy.
• 90 hours per week and loving it.
• Real artists ship.

Yes, I noticed too and wandered if Apple was uncharacteristically drifting away from their roots.

Another good site full of first-hand descriptions of how early Apple development was done is http://folklore.org/.

I've never owned a Mac, and am too young to have been involved in earlier developments - but that site does make it all seem very impressive.

And that would be a valid point of spliting resources. If you've ever configured linux, you may have experienced the odd little things that one has to do to make the hardware fully functional. Most of the time it can be done without much effort, but the process typically reveals that developers could have spent more time working on their product compatibility (assuming that the drivers were written by the hardware manufacturer). At least, in my limited experience.

But, while in that kind of situation, I usually catch myself saying that at least something is available and I can make things work. But if we move on to the case of software, then there are scenarios where it isn't meant to work at all (and because WINE is not 100% we cannot consider it a solution, especially in the business world). The best example of this is video games typically only being supported on windows.

So, I give you a scale: 0 = Fully compatible and configured with the ease of at most a wizard, or wizard like device (I count rpms and apt-get as wizard like devices) 1 = Compatible but a little work and manual reading may be required 2 = Not compatible at all

It is my experience that anything greater than 0 will be ignored or marginalized by the public, because they don't want to RTFM, assuming they can find one that caters to their needs. The only problem is that the majority of companies will only focus on one operating system, and again, the apex of this property would be games.

So what is the advantage of only having one operating system? Simple, compatibility and ease of installation. It would be nice if companies hired on more computer professionals to implement this in all operating systems, but, depending on the project, that would cost more, and potientially not even see a return on investment.

Now, the problem with microsoft is that it uses it's power gained over the last 20 years to lock customers in, and not support other OS' (unless they don't see them as a real threat, like apple). Office being the best example. Another one can be found here. Given that they will do this every chance they get they become very dangerous in the world of standards. If you don't think they can have an impact on linux, think about the impact of "trusted computing", which at the very least is going to make the x86 architecture even uglier.

Most people who want to see windows become unpopular want it for the sake of the computing world, even if it comes at a cost to themselves. And, it's not like you're the first to sound the alarm about the loss of jobs as open source expands. But, as an analogy, what would you prefer to have: mafia protection, or no crime at all? Even if the later costs police officers their jobs.

This Xerox star picture dates from after Apple implemented the desktop metaphor in the Lisa and the Mac. The Xerox Palo Alto stuff Jobs saw was much more primitive than that. Apple actually implemented overlapping windows thinking that Xerox had it, but actually the first Xerox GUI computers didn't have overlapping windows. Just as Apple was inspired by the original Xerox work (which didn't feature overlapping windows and a desktop metaphor like in this late picture), Xerox was "inspired" by Apple's work on prototype interfaces , and Apple had a direct influence in the later Xerox Star OS.

Unlike the myth that continue to be repeated here every single day, Apple didn't "steal" the GUI from Xerox. Steve Jobs paid Xerox for the privilege of it's visit to Palo Alto, and some information was knowingly shared between the two companies while the Lisa and the Mac evolved. A couple of engineers from Xerox went to work to Apple as Xerox started to downsize it's computer research division. Many of them ended up designing the concepts behind the original Mac OS GUI. The desktop metaphor as we still see it today and on the Xerox Star picture is from Apple. And yeah some of it's elements comes from prior work from others, but the whole layout and the real-world details of it's workings. The devil is in the details as they say.

There was no consumer-targeted GUI based computer selling and documented at the time, aside from basic but sometime unpractical ideas that were experimented at a very basic level since the 60's. So the Mac and Lisa team had to "invent" many things and find ways to implement UI concepts into actual software. Microsoft on the other hand, had early access to the Mac and devkits, a near final product. Windows 1.0 was created to run cross platform applications that originated on the Mac (Word, Excel etc.). Microsoft built some byte-code-like API's that interfaced with the Mac OS in a deep way, so to run it on intel they essentially had to recreate part of the Mac ToolBox in Windows 1.0! I heard that you can even spot similar 4 letters resource types inside Win 1.0...

I'm tired of seeing people trying to dumb down the work on the original Mac OS. Go read http://folklore.org/ and try to open your mind a little. Things that are obvious now and were not obvious then. I don't think that Mac users claim that Apple invented it all, they will give Xerox and others. On the other hand, I see many people repeating falsities like "A stole it from X", and people that will invariably reply "Apple didn't invent that" at every single possible interface parts found in the original Mac system software.

See Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org for the stories about how MS got the license to the Mac UI and copied the UI.

Remember that was 20 years ago and it was John Sculley's fault.

See Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org for the stories about how MS got the license to the Mac UI and copied the UI.

Remember that was 20 years ago and it was John Sculley's fault.

And Steve Jobs invented Jeff Robbin.

Maybe so--but from http://www.folklore.org/: I Invented Burrell Author: Andy Hertzfeld Date: 1981 Characters: Burrell Smith, Jef Raskin Topics: Personality Summary: Burrell imitates Jef Revision: most recent of 1 Burrell had a great sense of humor, and he was capable of performing devastating impersonations of everybody else on the Mac team, especially the authority figures. Whatever idea that you came up with, Jef Raskin had a tendency to claim that he invented it at some earlier point. That trait was the basis of Burrell's impersonation of Jef. Jef had a slight stammer, which Burrell nailed perfectly. Burrell began by folding his fingers together like Jef and then exclaiming in a soft, Jef-like voice, "Why, why, why, I invented the Macintosh!" Then Burrell would shift to his radio announcer voice, playing the part of an imaginary interviewer. "No, I thought that Burrell invented the Macintosh", the interviewer would object. He'd shift back to his Jef voice for the punch line. "Why, why, why, I invented Burrell!"

Penguins are actual animal. Linus Torvalds did not invent them.

Al Gore invented penguins.

No... no... Jef Raskin invented them!

This is quite a step up for relations between Steve Jobs and Sony... It seems like just yesterday when Steve's approach meant you needed to hide the Sony Rep in the closet

Apparently Steve wanted the Twiggy drive. Someone (not sure who) was doing the 3.5" drive development on the sly without letting Steve know about it.

Quick, Hide in This Closet!

Excuse me, but you have no clue what you are talking about. Cookies to doughnuts you weren't even born when the original Lisa came out, either, which migh explain your apparent ignorance.

First, Apple paid Xerox to be able to use the *ideas and concepts* for their own products.

Second, Apple developped these ideas further than Xerox did, to the point that comparing the Xerox Star/Alto (it's been 25+ years, I am allowed to forget the exacts specifics at my age) to the Lisa and/or the Mac is like comparing a Ford model T to a modern-day Acura. Anyone who actually used one of the Xerox boxen knows how the UI was primitive compared to what Apple came out with.

If you want to know how much of the modern GUI Apple actually invented, check out any issue from Byte, circa 1983-84, as well as the early issues of MacWorld and MacUser (not sure about MacUser, though). Apple went about the whole thing fair and square, going from demonstrations of lab/demo, barely beyond prototype machines (i.e. not really mass produced & sold) to a much more refined and actually sold to the masses product.

If anyone stole anything from anyone, look at M$. They had actually no f**king clue how to implement a GUI and because they gained insider knowledge of the workings / implementations of the Macintosh OS, they stole Apple's ideas and implementations to create what came to be Windows. This is not like reverse engineering, where at least you spend time & effort devising a new implementation of an idea, this is litteral theft of other's work because you can't come up with something yourself. See Andy Hertzfeld's folklore website:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt&charact ers=Bill%20Gates&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail =medium

As for how M$ dealt unfairly with Apple, here's another example:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=MacBasic.txt&characters=Bill%20Gates&so rtOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

So, please, stop spreading the myth of Apple stealing from Xerox and get informed instead.

Thank you.

Excuse me, but you have no clue what you are talking about. Cookies to doughnuts you weren't even born when the original Lisa came out, either, which migh explain your apparent ignorance.

First, Apple paid Xerox to be able to use the *ideas and concepts* for their own products.

Second, Apple developped these ideas further than Xerox did, to the point that comparing the Xerox Star/Alto (it's been 25+ years, I am allowed to forget the exacts specifics at my age) to the Lisa and/or the Mac is like comparing a Ford model T to a modern-day Acura. Anyone who actually used one of the Xerox boxen knows how the UI was primitive compared to what Apple came out with.

If you want to know how much of the modern GUI Apple actually invented, check out any issue from Byte, circa 1983-84, as well as the early issues of MacWorld and MacUser (not sure about MacUser, though). Apple went about the whole thing fair and square, going from demonstrations of lab/demo, barely beyond prototype machines (i.e. not really mass produced & sold) to a much more refined and actually sold to the masses product.

If anyone stole anything from anyone, look at M$. They had actually no f**king clue how to implement a GUI and because they gained insider knowledge of the workings / implementations of the Macintosh OS, they stole Apple's ideas and implementations to create what came to be Windows. This is not like reverse engineering, where at least you spend time & effort devising a new implementation of an idea, this is litteral theft of other's work because you can't come up with something yourself. See Andy Hertzfeld's folklore website:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt&charact ers=Bill%20Gates&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail =medium

As for how M$ dealt unfairly with Apple, here's another example:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=MacBasic.txt&characters=Bill%20Gates&so rtOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

So, please, stop spreading the myth of Apple stealing from Xerox and get informed instead.

Thank you.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt&topic= Origins&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

Desk Ornaments

I'm sure the success of Konfabulator does play into Dashboard's existance and current , but I do remember this story on folklore.org about some early ideas for MacOS. It may have been someone at Apple looking at Konfabulator and saying "hey, this is actually doable now."

For some interesting anecdotes involving Alan

was under the impression that MFS was used even on the first Mac HDs.

It was. MFS did waste some space with the resource fork, but not too much. HFS, OTOH... (Another poster pointed out that HFS became the standard on 800K disks. That's not necessarily a good thing.)

I don't know if modularity would have been practical (having not studies OS design), but if it had been, the ability to swap out just the lowest level of the system and gain PE MT would have been very nice. Maybe modularity like this is even more resource-intensive than a monolithic PE MT design, I don't know.

Modularity is as much as you define it. For example, a separate graphics file is more modular than embedded drawing code, but you pay the cost in memory. Instead of machine instructions to draw the image, you now need data for both the drawn and empty parts as well as a method of identifying the image size, color pallete (if any), and other information that must be accounted for. Not to mention the code necessary to identify, load, parse, and render the file.

The same sorts of issues exist with modular code files. Class files, DLLs, Java Code Files, and other forms of modularity all come at a cost that couldn't be afforded back in 1984. We think nothing of these things today, but then again we don't code glorified calculators either. ;-)

What you have to understand about the method of loading these old computers was to simply load a code listing into an area of memory. To access the code, an application would do one of two things:

1) Pop your current address onto the stack and execute a JMP instruction to the correct address. Then hope that no one has overwritten that memory, and that the jumped code correctly restores the address from the stack.

2) Hook into a software interrupt so that the processor would automatically redirect execution to the correct instruction upon the invocation of the interrupt. An IRET instruction could then be used to automatically return control to the program without any direct manipulation of the stack. (This stuff was the height of technology at the time!)

Here's an interesting article for you. 24K was the original goal for the Finder code. 64K ended up barely being enough.

But did the hardware have to be built to boot exclusively from ROM?

Yes. Hardware always boots from ROM because that is the only memory location the processor can be sure is valid. What you see in modern PCs is more sophisticated ROM chips that understand how to read a disk drive, and can be programmed via flash ROM with rules as to how to handle the boot situation. AFAIK, the concept of sophisticated boot ROMs didn't come about until after Microsoft started selling MS-DOS to IBM Clone manufacturers. (IBM placed part of PC-DOS into ROM. The PCjr I had could boot directly into DOS, BASIC, and even a cutesy video game without a floppy disk.)

Couldn't there be a switch built into firmware somehow, without that much extra work?

Ok, you just said something you you should be kicking yourself for at the moment: "Firmware". Firmware didn't exist at the time. If you wanted a new ROM, you popped out the PROM and popped in a new one. (Didn't you watch Real Genius? ;-)) Flash Memory was invented in 1988 to solve this issue.

It would have made the hardware more flexible down the road.

Hardware flexibility was not a concern at the time. The OS code was just a minor abstraction from the disk drives. (And graphics hardware in the case of the Mac.) If you wanted to run another OS on a PC of the time, all you needed was a COM or EXE file that implemented that OS. The loader part of the executable could happily overwrite the memory, relink the interrupts, and completely take over the machine. (FYI, this is exactly w

The first image that was displayed on the very first macintosh at Apple was one of Scrooge McDuck.

That's Apple's fault: they are putting roadblocks in the way of people trying to do a better job with X11 integration on Macintosh.... There is no technical reason why X11 couldn't be as smoothly integrated into OS X as Carbon and Cocoa are....they probably are afraid that if X11 becomes well enough integrated so that people can write applications with a native L&F, it would become the predominant API on OS X.

The OOo developers got so annoyed with Apple's behavior that they stopped working on Macintosh integration.

X11 should... run automatically on every Macintosh

Apparantly Steve Jobs is quite demanding on how a motherboard should look, read this link.

I guess the final product will look a lot better.

I think a computer is more like a bicycle. Well, they are...
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=Bicycle.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date& detail=medium&search=bicycle

Reading sites like this one, it seems pretty clear that while LISA was a flop in and of itself, the original mac would never have been a success without it. This is both in terms of personnel (several key people were involved with both) and ideas - there was a lot of cross-pollination (though it doesn't sound like the LISA people were happy about that). So as a product, LISA was a flop, but as an investment by Apple, I'd think it should be considered wildly successful.