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The History Behind the Lisa UI
DoenerMord writes "There's an interesting new piece which describes the story behind Apple's doomed pre-Mac system, the Lisa (aren't there thousands of these buried in a landfill somewhere?). It covers the UI, which influenced the original Mac, and just about every other GUI since. It also discusses a bit of the controversial Xerox fiasco. I especially like the comparative OS X Aqua pic at the bottom of the screenshots page. The more things change, the more they stay the same..." Update: 02/13 07:21 by E : The site is up again. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Damn that's funny.. who needs photos anyway when we have ascii art?
-o
They are in a landfill in Utah, supposedly for tax write-off reasons, not cause of failing hard drives :)
I ask again, who says differently? A lot of people were actually alive then (it may surprise you to konw) and they remember these events pretty clearly. Again, who ever said Windows came first? Yeesh. The flammage is bad enough without making up nonexistent arguments.
Oddly enough, there are in fact people who claim Windows came first and Apple ripped off Microsoft's ideas. I've actually encountered a couple of them. The remarkable thing about this particular species of stupidity is how completely unshakable it is; the idea that Windows-came-first seems to derive more from an adolescent worship of His Billness than from any remote link to the real world.
Even many of the Windowphiles who do acknowledge that the MacOS came first try to minimize Apple's contribution to the Windows UI. These also tend to be the same sort of folks who think that sticky menus icons are a user interface revolution, so my guess is that they simply don't realize what a big change the Mac UI was from everything else people could buy at the time.
-Mars
Actually, I think it was a bunch of malfunctioning Apple III computers that were scrapped. I'll look around a bit, and if there is a good reference, it will get posted.
Greetings! For what is worth, I found the article in the ACM Digital Library. It originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of ACM Interactions, pp. 40-53. The article includes many more graphics and photos than the article that prompted this posting on /.
I am not sure about posting this and copyright issues, though, and I'm too lazy to dig out my ACM membership to check the rules. If anyone can confirm a source where ACM says it's OK to post it I'll make the PDF file available.
For those of you who are ACM members, search for "Inventing the Lisa Interface" under title and "Ludolph Perkins Smith" under author. The PDF file is about 1024 KB.
Cheers
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
I just checked the base page at http://home.san.rr.com/ and found a list of all the users off this home page. When I clicked on a few of them I received various errors from Apache, though I was able to load some of the other member pages. Some I could load once, then not, then yes again.
I don't think the author cut us off on purpose. Based on this little experiment, I'd say they just urgently need some help in configuring their web server.
Cheers!
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
As far as I know most of the Lisa systems were later turned into the "Mac XL". It was out before the MacII, and was the first Mac that came with a hard drive (~10M). It had a somewhat bigger screen then the normal Mac, and amazingly every Mac program I tryed ran on it without problem. Of corse the finder took forever to do stuff after you had tons of docs all over the drive -- the Mac filesystem didn't support folders at that time, it was done in the Finder, but that ment it had to read directory entries for thousands and thousands of files and sort them into in-memory folders using inefficent algorithms tuned for what you would expect on a 400K floppy (i.e. maybe 100 files tops).
Most of the Lisa functionality was lost, but for a while it was the studliest Mac available.
I do expect they are mostly in landfills now. The harddrive on that one gave out not long after the MacII came to market. I would guess most of the others have stopped working as well.
P.S. I think the 68000 port of DR-DOS which became GEMDOS/TOS in the Atari ST was done on the Lisa first.
I've always wondered why 2 buttons on the mouse are "confusing" while 104 buttons on the keyboard is accepted without comment. Has anybody ever tried printing something on the mouse buttons???
If the right button said "MENU" it might have made popup menus user-friendly and we would not be wasting all our screen space today with menu bars an tool bars. Does anybody know if usability testing was ever done for this?
This just goes to show how the personal computer-buying market has shot itself in the foot repeatedly over the years.
(reminiscence on)
When I were a lad I wanted an Amiga or ST but wasn't allowed because, "what use is it if it doesn't run Lotus 1-2-3," said my dad, an IT professional at the time.
(reminiscence off)
Over the years this "it must be crap if it isn't IBM compatible becasue that's what everyone else uses, for better or for worse" attutude has prevailed, and here we are looking back to ~1983 when Apple had a machine that was about as powerful as a 386sx with a modern, innovative, easy to use UI over a technically-superior (internally 32-bit but without MMU) architecture arguably a decade ahead of the mass-market.
The lesson : the Great Unwashed (or should that be Unthinking) always screw things up for themselves, and the Market in general.
At least we have a market where competitors and innovators exist, along side a free software movement that cares more about producing powerful, useful tools to get stuff done than to conform to Joe Suit's idea of what the world "should" be.
I'm glad I left the commercial IT industry in 1996.....
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
All ][ series (and the apple I) used the 6502 or variant. THe IIgs used a 65816, which was instruction-compatible with your 8-bit 65{,C}02 found in earlier ][ models. The Apple /// used a 6502 as well.
it envolved upgrading the 68000 and a few other chips.
The enhancer kit is composed of the 65C02, new CD and EF ROMs, and a new chargen ROM (to support uppercase inverse with mousetext, right...) ... I also have an unenhanced ][e, and can't find a proper enhancer kit these days (I'm just out a couple of ROMs... but that CD and EF ROM are pretty important. But hey, with the chargen and 65C02 from a //c, I have "just enough enhancement" to run ProDOS 2.0! :o)
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Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
This is one thing I miss from Germany... you could get just about *any* car of any make with a real... uh, I mean... MANUAL... transmission. Compare and contrast to the US, where I may have to buy a sports car or a truck to get a decent vehicle with standard in it.
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Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
Don't fret - these things are all coming back from the dead :-)
Check out Squeak Smalltalk or Self (now also on the Mac besides Sparc machines). Even GNU Smalltalk has come back from the dead and will be getting great JIT technology real soon now.
Eeek! But I forgot about Slashdot's HTML 'translation'. So the spaceship operator didn't appear. Maybe one day Rob will fix the text box to handle these characters properly. Or I could use Tom's posting script.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I think that should be $a->[0] $b->[0].
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Cause it's just a link to a porn site, as far as I can tell.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
The IIe didn't use a 68000 chip -- it used the Rockwell 65HC02, which was an enhanced version of the 6502 used in earlier models.
What killed the II line was Steve Jobs. The Apple II series was still tremendously popular, and he didn't want it competing with his Macs. This is ironic, as the Apple IIgs models that were contemporary with the early Macs blew them away in terms of performance. It's also what got me to migrate over to the x86 platforms, where users weren't assumed to be drooling morons, just as the Macification of the PC with Windows is what led me to Linux.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
5 times this week, Site gets /. then goes poof!
Nuf said, Mirror it.
OpenFirmware isn't the closest thing to a CLI on a mac. There are several CLI shells available for MacOS. One's called MacShell, there's another called nshell.
OpenFirmware, which was developed mostly by Sun, isn't a shell. It's just Forth with a bunch of stuff stuck on it. It's more like a really nice x86 BIOS than anything else. Then idea with OpenFirmware is that all devices have some Forth that acts as a driver that can be used to operate the device until an OS loads a real driver. It's on all PCI Macs (There are only 3 non-PCI macs, the x100s). It's on most Suns. It used to be called "OpenBoot."
The really slick thing about OpenFirmware is that it builds a device tree, which is what makes "hardware...a non-issue."
In closing, I would like to add that Forth rocks.
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
If you want to execute 68k code fast, the most sensible option is to make a dynamically recompiling emulator running on Alpha (or x86)
I'm not sure how true that is. I'm pretty sure PPC chips have some special instructions and such that make it possible to emulate 68k code fairly fast. It's not full hardware emulation or anything, but even old, old powermacs run 68k code at fairly suprising speeds.
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
512x384 (which is the standard 4:3 ratio) was used for the original LC series color monitor, and the Color Classic series.
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Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
But there are those of us that prefer words to pretty pictures.
:(
I for one, cannot begin to distinguish what a "pretty little icon" does until I hover my mouse over it and wait for the help text. And I have to do that repeatedly each time. Something in my brain doesn't recognize pictures, but does just fine with complex sequences of words. Button bars are useless, and are the first thing I turn *off* when I see them.
So don't be making all interfaces full of these wizzy little pictures. I'll be locked out.
And from my research, it appears that about 10-15% of the people out there are like me.
There may be thousands in some landfill, but I have one in my closet.
A few things that struck me about this article...
1) They heavily relied on usability testing to gauge how well the target audience would use the product. Aside from the research done by Englebart etc. al. at Xeros, I suspect this is the first real usability sone on the computer industry. I find it hard to believe that a lot of the early PC stuff was usability tested at all.
2) Their tests showed what people have claimed all along... that multi-button mice are more productive than single button mice. But, since single-button mice made the initial learning experience for the naive user easier (no guessing as to which button to click) that's what the Lisa, and eventully the Mac used. Twenty years later, the Mac platform still defaults to a single button mouse... all so that computer virgins won't become confused.
What probably made the Lisa fail was it was too ambitous. In 1980, trying to create a high-power GUI desktop machine with a hard drive and all the trappings was simply too much to expect. Compare the specs to the first Mac that was rolled out in 84. No hard drive and a paultry amount of memory.
The thing cost an arm-and-a-leg, and simply didn't make financial sense. Who wants to shell out big bucks that makes some secretary more productive? Not the first or last time that a company has decided to address a market that simply didn't exist (yet).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thanks for mirroring the site ! Can you mirror the screenshots too?
I dunno, I always thought that the IIgs was a cool machine, but it's existence allowed Apple to price Macintoshes in the stratosphere.
Along the way, Apple developed a Mac-like GUI for the IIgs, "HyperCard" for the IIgs, AppleTalk networking, a GUI word processor, and so on. Most of these things were developed before anything was running on MS Windows -- there were only two consumer GUI computers available at the time, both incompabible, and both from Apple Computer.
I know quite a few people and schools who invested heavliy in the IIgs -- only to be disappointed when it was dropped a few years later. Of course, it was smart to to consolidate development on one platform (Mac), rather than having double R+D costs, but it would have been smarter not to bait-and-switch with the IIgs to begin with. Most of the IIgs users I knew never bought another Apple.
I can't help thinking that history might have been different if there was a cheap, color Macintosh available starting in 1987, and if the IIgs never came into existence. -- The Macintosh would probably have quite a bit more mindshare and marketshare today, if only because an entire generation of people could have afforded one early on, when it was the only GUI system available.
(They finally got it sorta right in 1990 with the Mac LC with the Apple ][ card.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
(My experience was with DESQview, which allegedly picked up where TopView left off. I loved DESQview. Quarterdeck could hack.)
I've never used/seen/heard of TopView, so I can't really comment on its GUIness. I never used DESQview either (I wasn't more than six at the time) but I sure do remember my dad using it. IIRC, DESQview was a task-switcher, but also had some simple GUI functions built in. You could display more than one DOS box at once and move between them and copy text with a cursor controlled (I think) by the arrow keys (the cursor was activated by holding down the control key for a second or so I think which pissed my dad off to no extent). I also seem to recall DESQview being able to show along with two or three DOS boxes at the same time its own menus which combined with a cursor, seems to speak GUI.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Yeah, the whole article is password protected now.
Gee... what a great source of info that was...
pathetic....
If you didn't like that, why didn't you switch to a different view? You know, a nice by-icon view. With the small icons, you can cram an awful lot of stuff in.
And, as stated before, you can resize columns now.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
As can CLI's. I've even done a clumsy form of auto-complete in a 100 line Perl script i use.
Not much more typing with a well organized filesystem and a modern Unix shell which supports tab completion. In short, one or two letters and the tab key per directory. And tab completion will do more than just directory names, the example included with the tcsh distribution is enlightening. Some configuration and you could expect that shell to read your mind.
Which is why the key repeat rate under Unixes doesn't crawl like under MS Windows and editors like vi(m) rarely require you to actually highlight the text. The vim tutorial (listed in the help) shows how it works.
And coding isn't "normal" work. *sigh* :)
cheers,
sklein
As I recall, it was a GUI in the respect that it created frames around windows using ASCII characters. It represented drives and folders along the right side of the screen. It was probably based on XEROX, I don't know.
I don't think that it actually had the ability to run programs, as in multitasking or task switching. You could essentially view your drive contents, and use built-in programs to manipulate them. It had a word processor, spreadsheet program, calculators, ect.
Only thing I really remember is that it had alot of documentation. I tried to look it up on the internet but it seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.
V
Oh, those instructions... Er, doesn't that include just about every instruction that accesses memory? Doesn't sound practical.
Maybe they should have waited for the 68010 (& 68851) or just given up on virtual memory altogether, like they did on the Mac.
It's not like VM was really necessesary to be competitive. The only other consumer CPU around to compete with it was the 80286, and no one ever really tried to use its rather lame VM capabilities anyway, until many years later (OS/2 v1.x? (Or maybe XENIX?)).
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And how would Apple (not Mac or MAC) make money if the source code for the GUI is open? The entire Apple business model is centered around getting people to buy Apple hardware (Macs) because the user experience is vastly better than other platforms.
Before anyone points out Red Hat or other companies can give away their source code, remember that their business model is built around SERVICE. The products they are selling are fundamentally hard to use for the average person.
Anyone who doesn't believe me should sit their grandmother (or pick another computer-illiterate person in your life) down with a copy of Red Hat that's been downloaded (no manuals, remember, we're paying for that support) and then sit that person down with a Mac. See which one they get the hang of first. Imagine which one will generate more support phone calls.
The open source business model is profits through obscurity. Apple has been fighting obscure computing for 20 years. There's zero chance that Apple will open source the MacOS GUI.
Open sourcing the underlying OS (Darwin) makes sense, because it is basically Yet Another BSD Flavor. It's a commodity. Just like Linux.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
try to be a little more considerate when posting stories. it's not fair to effectively revoke this guy's home net access because he wrote a good article.
No, No, No!! It means Cannibalistic Labia incissors.
photosMy Photostream
Connie likes incense.
cold lumpy intestines
cunning little Iranians
cunnilingus, licking Irene
commatose linedancing idiots
command line interface.
photosMy Photostream
Gads man, calm down. This is the reason you don't like an operating system? When was the last time you used a Mac? I think this capability has been there since 8.0 or 8.5 atleast.
On other topics, looks like the page has been slashdotted already. I like the other link to the Lisa page at http://galena.tjs.org/tom/. Someone mentioned they had a Lisa in a closet, anyone got one that still runs?
-doenermord
Don't blame the games, it takes a village to screw up a child.
The URL you gave (http://self.sunlabs.com/) gives me:
... any alternatives?
Connection refused
Description: Connection refused
I would love to scope it out
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Maybe /. could begin a site caching service that, when an article published a URL (that was not dependent on dynamic code) that URL was cached for the life of the article and the link -actually- sent users to this cache on /.?
/. to prevent blah blah blah ... click here to go to the original site".
Frame it with a little "site cached by
?
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Why bother with this? Everyone should be using cacheing HTTP proxies anyway, to distribute the load.
Efficient coding? On our MacOS 8.6 Fileserver/At Ease server/Web Proxy Server at work, if you simply click on the application selector in the upper right and leave that menu open, all other operations on the computer are halted until the user clicks something.. I dont consider that to be terribly efficient coding. I'm not sure but I also seem to remember if you click any menu at all it stops all background operations from continuing on.. not to mention the terrible multitasking performance of MacOS. Otherwise, it's a much better OS IMHO.. stability on that G3 server is a non-issue compared to our NT server..
Beer. The only substance that can level any playing field.
[The exclamation point after 100 is mathematical notation for factorial.]
A Command Line Interface is an outdated user interface only useful for file management, system administration, and sophisticated text processing. Every other useful desktop application is superior when developed for the more modern graphical user interface (perhaps even the above applications can be made superior also). These include word processors, spreadsheets, presentation applications, desktop publishing, computer aided drafting, and image manipulation. GNU/Linux users often prefer the command line interface because the available graphical enviroments for GNU/Linux suck real bad. Once a far superior graphical interface gets developed for GNU/Linux look for many CLI diehards to spontaneously "see the light" or become very angry that a GUI can be better than a CLI, even though the CLI is more than two decades old and limited to the ASCII and Extended ASCII character set.
Hehe. Well: "Don't drink and drive" ;). What you need is a cupholder and good timing. I do that all the time. As for cellphones, it's actually forbidden to use them in the car here in Switzerland, except if you have some sort of hands-free equipment...
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
So true, so true. Amen to that.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Ok, this is just nitpicking and doesn't add anything to the discussion, but in most of Europe, manual gear shift is the standard and will remain so for long.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
User interface is about much, much more than pretty widgets. This is something quite a few people have trouble understanding. Good UI design is hard, often harder than writing the code that the UI is designed to let the user interact with. It requires tons of knowledge about how humans think and the assumptions they make.
Go check out http://www.mackido.com/Interface for some basic information. You'll see that much more goes into designing a UI than you ever thought. (The site is somewhat Mac biased, but gives some good information.)
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
Let's slashdot the slashdot!
Duh...
Hah, looking through your collection was interesting.
Last week I set a Toshiba T5200/100 out with the rest of the rubbish.
I once had a Compaq Portable 386 but that preceded the Toshiba to the curb by a month or two.
Neither of which were all that portable if you ask me.
I had worked with some other computers before it, but the Apple IIe my parents bought in 1985 was (and is) the most fun and most hackable computer I've ever had. Within a year of getting it, for instance, I had cobbled together for a Boy Scout project a math-drill program that talked (which, given that it used the auxiliary memory solely as wave storage, was in hindsight an early example of bloatware, even though it still fit on a single 140k floppy :-) ). I haven't gotten into the Mac much since fooling around with them some in college around '89 or '90, but I've grown my collection of Apple IIs to three...the IIe my parents bought was upgraded to a IIGS, and then a IIe and II+ were added to the lineup. Fun stuff...they're simple enough that if something goes wrong with the hardware, you stand a good chance of fixing it without resorting to the modern "rip out that board and replace it" mentality. (Reseating all the chips and disassembling and cleaning the keyboard brought the II+ back to life, for instance.)
I even get some use out of them occasionally, especially the IIGS. It gets used mainly as a terminal for the Linux box here, though I still do some tinkering in BASIC or assembly language periodically. A little while back, I cobbled together some string-math routines in assembly language and used those to calculate the exact value of 100!. Running at 12.5 MHz, it finished in maybe a second or so. The same could've been done in C under Linux, Win98, or whatever, but it wouldn't have been as fun. (Why calculate 100!? Why not? :-) )
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
100 equals 100, of course. 100!, on the other hand, was (broken up to get past /.'s "lameness filter," which I didn't know even existed until now):
9332621544394415268169923885626670049071
5968264381621468592963895217599993229915
6089414639761565182862536979208272237582
51185210916864000000000000000000000000
The program's good up to 146!; after that, it runs out of digits (maximum is 256 digits) and produces garbage results.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Well ain't that sumptin'!?! I swear I never knew you could resize the columns (and more importantly, reorder them) until I tried it on a whim after reading your message.
Here I've been writing code on the Mac since '85, and this has to be the best Easter Egg of all. (And clearly, it has to be an Easter Egg because I never saw it mentioned in the docs anywhere, and of course, I always read all of the manuals. ;)
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
In any event, aside from Apple, there were a number of companies working on bringing GUIs to personal computers, including GEM, TopView, and the Microsoft/IBM collaboration that was to become OS/2 and Windows after they parted company.
TopView was a GUI? I thought it was just a task-switcher...?
(My experience was with DESQview, which allegedly picked up where TopView left off. I loved DESQview. Quarterdeck could hack.)
Of course, the beauty of the Lisa was that Apple was actually trying to give this power to the average user.
Well, the "average user" that had ten grand to blow on a new system.
cypherpunk/cypherpunk
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I'll agree with you that, in the context in which you speak, OpenFirmware isn't a shell. I said in my original post that the closest thing to a CLI on a Mac is OpenFirmware (if I said shell, I didn't mean to), to which I should have added that OF is the closest to a CLI that is built-in.
And don't forget about Mac06 (I think that's what it's called)...it aims to make a POSIX compliant layer for Mac programmers to aid in the transition to Mac OS X Consumer.
Anyway, sorry I wasn't clearer in my original post.
: What killed the II line was Steve Jobs. The Apple
: II series was still tremendously popular, and he
: didn't want it competing with his Macs.
You've got your timeline screwed up. Steve Jobs was betreyed by sculley and forced out of Apple little more than a year after the introduction of the Macintosh.
The Apple ][ series was continued for years following Jobs' expulsion, with the ][e and ][gs in production until mid-1993, MANY years after sculley' coup.
john
Imagine all the people...
Great post.
Checking out the links right now.
Long time Mac user who knows almost nothing about Lisas.
Todd Stewart
Atari ST.....now THAT was a computer. The one I had was great. Color monitor, two 3.5" floppy drives, and that sweeeet graphical OS. Put the current PCs to shame. It even had MIDI support! JW
Snorp
Anyone noticed how much the lisa 1.0 interface looks like that of the Atari ST (TOS 1.0) ? ? ? ? ?
now, who stole it from whom ?
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CLI=Command Line Interface
Simply its whats between the actual OS and the perty graphic ui. Think of the whole thing as 3 layers for a moment. On the bottom you have the most basic OS, it sits there, waiting for something to be handed to it. But for it to be handed anything, it needs a messenger. That messenger is the CLI, the CLI has a set of commands that the use can give it, when it is given one of those commands, it runs to the base and says "hey, the user says you should do this", and, normally, it does it. This is the basic funtioning of a machine, it takes commands from the user and executes them. Now the top most layer is the Graphical User Interface, or GUI. this is all them pretty colors and pictures (Lisa was the first of these). What the GUI does is sit on top of the CLI and throws messages at it. For example, lets say the user clicks on an icon (ummm... lets say this icon is set to open netscape) the user double clicks on it, the GUI says "hmmm... that user person just did somethin... oh it clicked on that icon, whats that icon do, lemme check its instructions... OH! it wants netscape, i better run to the CLI and tell him" the GUI runs to the CLI and says "Hey! the user wants $netscape" the CLI takes $netscape and relays it to the base, and the base says ok, well, i think ill open netscape", and if all goes right, the user happily gets netscape and rejoices to the gods. and thats the story of the CLI...
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
ooops, sorry, the explanation i posted explains unix-y systems relationship between the kernel, CLI, and GUI, my fault... but MacOS X DOES have a CLI (well at least the server version and because of the fact that its based on a BSD kernel (rendering it more *nix than before) it actually does function in a similar way that i explained) Im not sure but i believe MacOS functions in the same way (kernel, CLI, GUI) but its just that the CLI is hidden to the user... not sure tho, anyone know?
~~~ They call me Little John, but don't let the name fool you...in real life I'm very big.
This was a pretty cool article. It's interesting to see just how much the Lisa team put into their creation, with the work and testing. If you want to read more about the development of the MacOS, Apple Confidential is a pretty good book for it. This article though has a lot more in depth info on the process that went into the creation of the interface (which was somewhat ripped off for the MacOS, since both were in development at overlapping points).
____________________
Tension, apprehension
And dissension have begun
Just to play Devil's Advocate:
... you select it, and the look through the menus to find the command you want.
> In a good GUI, all possible operations are available using the menu bar.
>
In a GUI, all the commands VISIBLE which you have said, unlike a CLI where all the commands are usually HIDDEN. CLI's allow for very efficient commands for the power user.
> Secondly, GUI's allow for more efficient use of screen real estate and allow more rapid entry of some kinds of data
Power comes at price. Why waste valuable screen real estate when the user already knows the commands (or hotkeys)
> GUI's allow elegant setting of configuration options.
ONLY when you a small number of options ! Otherwise you have multiple 'tabs' or 'pages' of config options. Ever see a drop down box with 200 items? That's not elegant. (A country selection is one bad example.)
> For example, rearranging a file system with a CLI just can't match the simplicity of doing it with a GUI.
That DEPENDS on what you are doing.
Try moving *.bat, *.com, *.exe files into another directory. I could type: move *.bat *.com *.exe progdir
With a mouse that would take you _THREE_ operations.
> CLI's have their strengths, but there are some things that they just can't do.
And likewise with GUI's. For the advanced user, GUIs just slow the user down. i.e. if you spend a lot of time copying text, do you use the arrow keys to select the text, and then ctrl-c ctrl-v OR do you use the mouse to select the text, and then drag the mouse to make a copy?
What I really would love to see is a system that COMBINES the power and intuitiveness of CLI's and GUI's
Cheers
> Perhaps BeOS?
;-)
;-)
/s *.txt *.doc
Allmost
I have Be and it is very nice. Reminds me of the BEST of Mac and NT. Which other OS gets FASTER after every release?!
The interface is nice and clean. Normally I hate the Mac's straightjacket-you-dont-know-what-you-re-doing UI, but Be is well designed. I just wish Tog would comment on it
I was thinking more of an UI that lets you interchange command line and mouse commands.
i.e. you have a folder viewer with a mini command line at the bottom.
You want to select *.txt *doc in all sub-folders?
Thats what you type: select
then you can use your mouse to drag the selected files to a completely different path. The move command would be smart enough to recognize if you had selected sub folders and then ask you if you wanted all those docs in one directory, or preserve the tree structure.
I could even imagine doing advanced file selection like using grep to find a keyword in files then selecting those files.
i.e. grep -r "Password" * | select
Hope that made sense.
Cheers
This suggests that a GUI needs a CLI to be able to function. Where is the CLI in MacOS?
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
People have talked about doing this before...basically, most of these articles are on news sites that depend on ad revenue (most of which depends on code created on-the-fly). If Slashdot were to cache copies of these articles, you don't see the ads and those news sites lose revenue.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
> A Command Line Interface is an outdated user interface...
"PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN! THE GREAT OZ COMMANDS YOU!"
> What is a "book"?
A "book" is an outdated, obsolete user interface, useful only for, oh, this and that, boring stuff that only creeps n nerds would be interested in. It has been replaced in practical use by the "TV" which is much more effective and easier to use and which requires no mental effort whatsoever. The "TV" is my God! All hail the "TV"!
G'night, suckas! - Wkiernan@concentric.net
Thank heaven for that. Last week my car got broken into and the idiot wrecked the ignition switch trying to steal it. (He did, on the other hand, manage to overlook my laptop computer in a briefcase in the back seat.) Anyway, I got to borrow a Jeep Cherokee with an automatic for a couple of days while I was waiting for it to get fixed. It was a pretty nice car, great visibility, comfortable, rather a gas hog, but driving it reminded me how much I always disliked automatics. But it sure is hard to find a new car without one these days.
Stick shifts, CLIs, books == GOOD. Automatics, GUIs, TV == SUCK. So my prejudices say, anyway.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Does it matter? They were mentioned on /. now they are inaccessible. I just love going to my favorite news and tidbits site and not being able to get to the news and tidbits. Reminds me of the old Wendy's "Where's the BEEF??" commercials!
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
The big problems with the Lisa were hardware, not software.
When they first came out, a friend of mine worked in a group that bought a Lisa for doing graphic arts things. Everybody thought it was totally wonderful. Unfortunately, the Lisa used a weird proprietary floppy. The entire group had to share one floppy for backups. That was all they could get -- turned out Sony (the only supplier) couldn't produce them in anywhere near the required volume.
Steve Jobs is a classic example of a non-techie who is totally infatuated with New and Wonderful technology. NeXT had exactly the same problem -- built with wonderful new technology that couldn't be mass produced at the time.
Engineering is the art of ordering things out of catalogs. -- sgs
Really, the closes thing to a CLI in Mac OS (pre-X) is AppleScript. Things that non-Mac users do with a CLI, a Mac user does with AppleScript.
You can record GUI actions to a script and then tweak the script, or just start from scratch if you like. Any kind of file management that is a kludge with a GUI can be scripted and run again and again in this way.
Of course, in OS X there is a traditional command line as well as AppleScript.
Hmm. The article is there, but the screenshots are not.
I thought that was !100
Except in Deliverance
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
It seems the screenshots link has been given a password. does anyone have this and/or a mirror of the page?
>Here I've been writing code on the Mac
>since '85, and this has to be the best Easter
>Egg of all.
Another one is the ability to render PS fonts smoothly on screen without atm. I don't know when this feature was introduced, but it seems to be a egg too. No mentions about it anywhere.
That's a stupid thing to say.
A theme is not an interface. Looking sorta like a Mac (but not really) isn't the same as being like one.
You wouldn't know this if you're a Linux/Windows guy (two camps that are regrettably becoming way-similar in interface design philosophy, and can be lumped together in that regard, if not others), but the Mac [G]UI has, on its underside, tremendously efficient code. The whole Mac system (as of OS 9) uses less memory than GNOME alone does (on my boxes; your experience may vary). Limitations (and designed-in Windows-like-ness) of X and whatever-DE and whatever-WM, combined with their collective ever-increasing bloat, make their Mac-ness, when themed to look like one, superficial (at best). They just can't fake the (good) simplicity and (underrated) efficiency. And while the Mac code itself might not be useful, the overall design (of the whole thing, not its "theme") is something more Linux UI developers should look at. But they won't. Macs are for fags. Right?
So don't get worked up about it.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
A Document Browser
Our initial attempts at producing a more efficient human interface centered around something resembling the browser from the Smalltalk programming environment. The Smalltalk browser is a window with a top portion composed of a few panes allowing the hierarchical selection of an object and a bottom pane in which the contents of the selected object are displayed. For our model we were interested in trying to avoid a strictly hierarchical filing system. The document browser top panes contained various attributes which could be selected to narrow the choice of objects. In this model documents could be located by type of document, keyword, author, etc. The paper prototype (figure x) seemed to work well for selecting an object, but became awkward when trying to perform other operations such as moving, copying, or creating something new. It also lacked a certain approachability. It's operation was not at all obvious when first encountered.
_________________________
As a quick follow-up: Be aware of the constraints that the Apple interface developers were working with when they developed their guidelines. Think about what hardware and software was like back then, and consider whether they will scale up well to what we have today. For example, with 20 megs of hard drive, file management was as serious a problem as it is today. Also, there are more and more input and output devices today than back when the guidelines were developed. The innovations that came out of Xerox and Apple were developed by careful observation and rapid usability testing with EVERYDAY people, not just technophiles. If we want great user interfaces for Linux, then we can play catch-up with de facto standards, and at the same time try to leap-frog ahead with true innovations EXPERIMENTALLY PROVEN to work reliably with everyday people.
This happens too often. /. should mirror every article that they link to, at least all of the small, personal sites that will not stand up to the /. level of traffic. Bah
several button mice ranging from 2-5 buttons are available for Macs and have been for several years. When a Mac user is ready, they can buy their own mouse, trackball, or whatever. Just thought I'd clarify . . .
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Why don't you point us to a link that doesn't
require authentication. It sounds like a good
article, but I can't get to it.
No matter where you go... there you are.
The 2 things I remember that impressed me most were:
- you could eject the floppy
- the machine knew how to turn itself off.
Of course, at a time when Windows didn't even exist, just using the mouse was something cool !
The original Mac didn't need a hard drive. In '84, HD's were only just beginning to make their appearance in the desktop market. The Mac OS was small enough back then that it could fit on a floppy with enough room for MacWrite and a few files. By the time HD's and SyQuest carts began to take on importance in the late 80's, the Mac Plus (1996) had introduced the external SCSI port.
Around the time the Mac was in deep trouble (no hard drive, one floppy, really slow, lousy sales, no laser printer) Jobs killed off the Lisa division. This may have been done to make his Mac project look good.
I don't think so...first of all, Jobs was kicked off the Lisa project, and out of spite tried to destroy the Lisa through the success of the Mac. But he didn't have the authority to kill the Lisa project, especially after being kicked off the team.
Second, the Mac has always had an external second floppy drive available (well...at least for most of the first decade, when that sort of thing was important).
Third, the postscript laser printer was introduced by Apple in either late '84 or '85. There may have been other high-end laser printers on the market, but AFAIK, the original Apple LaserWriter was the first consumer/small business laser.
Fourth, the "really slow" wasn't the problem. It wasn't until the 90's that the megahertz race took off with a vengeance. If anything, one of the problems might have been a misconception of being slow, because PC's were still mostly running DOS and the Mac had the overhead of a sophisticated GUI to deal with (not that greasy ANSI kid stuff).
The lousy sales, I believe, were primarily related to the cost of the systems...while it was widely acknowledged that the Mac was a better computer for the then-computer illiterate market, consumers and businesses were not willing to shell out an extra grand for a Mac to save themselves the headaches of dealing with DOS. The price of a Lisa system, though, was even worse at $10k. It was the coolest thing I saw (at the time), but priced way out of the range of the average business. The Mac did, indeed destroy the Lisa because it provided most of the functionality for less than a third of the price. But, the Mac was still much more expensive than the PC, which was its doom.
I'm not sure how true that is. I'm pretty sure PPC chips have some special instructions and such that make it possible to emulate 68k code fairly fast. It's not full hardware emulation or anything, but even old, old powermacs run 68k code at fairly suprising speeds.
Actually the PPC has no instructions to help the Mac execute 68k instructions. The PPC instruction set is a super/sub-set (depending on how you look at it) of IBM's POWER instruction set, which was invented in the late 80's early 90's, long before Apple was looking at the PPC as a replacement for the 68k series. Later, when the G3 was being developed, IBM/Motorola did enhance the chip to take advantage of the way the MacOS works, but the changes were to the pipelining and instruction scheduling, not the instruction set.
The Mac's 68k emulator, implements a 68040's instruction set, minus the floating point/MMU instructions. This is why the emulator identifies itself as a 68020, because the emulator is not a true 68040.
The first generation PPC Macs, the x100's, used an instruction emulator that translated 68k instructions to PPC instructions everytime a 68k instruction was executed. These machines were slower at executing 68k code than the fastest 68k machines (840 and friends).
The second generation PPC Macs introduced the PCI bus, the PPC 604 and a new dynamic emulator that would cache 68k instruction translations. Once an instruction was translated, it never needed to be done again. The PPC 604/132 (forget the model number) was the first PPC that was actually faster at executing 68k code than a 68k machine.
Current G3/4 Macs can execute 68k code at double the speed (or more) of any 68k chip, including Motorola's replacement for the 68040, the 68060. Of course 68k speed with current Macs is really a moot point. All new apps are PPC native, and MacOS 9 is around 70% native, with MacOS X being 100% native and only allowing 68k applications to run inside the backwords compatibility "BlueBox" environment.
one more.
--
You're a cartoon of rebel! You're all like exaggerated version of yourself! - Gerard Jones
I posted a comment on the earlier news about NT and linux testing...And stated that it isn't reliable with old HW and various HW. Macintosh on the other hand, has control over both the SW and HW, therefore has the ABILITY to give a better product and not spend so much time on figuring out drivers and the like...They have a great opportunity to make an excellent system....But I guess Murphy was right =)
You really can't do anything like that and survive in this business. But they aren't really doing it right. Like I said...Linux should come out with its own HW. Then watch the rest fall like dominoes.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
I kinda agree...X just looks ghetto to me. I think they should opensource the Be GUI. I love the Be GUI, but Be only supports like 2 video cards and maybe 3 nics. Thats what i would like... Linux (ok...BSD..i would prefer BSD) with the Be GUI instead of X. That would 0wn.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
If you want to execute 68k code fast, the most sensible option is to make a dynamically recompiling emulator running on Alpha (or x86).
How about Transmeta?
"The best way to do mathematics is to be creatively lazy." -I. M. Isaacs
The site is requesting a login ID and a password. How can I read this article?
--Ford Prefect
First, I'd have to agree on the BeOS. It's great - I use it when I get frustrated with X or NT.
Secondly, I like the concept of a combined GUI, only I'd do it with function keys, i.e. F2 for select, F3 for grep, etc. Then to do a grep Password * | select, i'd hit F3 Password F2. Did that make no sense? Good.
Thirdly, I think there is already a file manager for X that does it. emelfm, anyone? It'd be in the GNOME software map. It looked promising.
Lastly, is anyone going to see this? It's too far down in the nesting chain. Bump it up a point if you see it.
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
Er. There are a few things you have to remember: MacOS is fast because of a clean, efficient UI, *not* because it has pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, etc.
MacOS is, at its core, a windowing UI designed to run on 8 mHz 68000 chips on a 512x382 monochrome screen.
Look at it this way: The user is writing a document in AppleWorks or something, and pulls down a font menu to select Garamond. Given, all background tasks cease... but does the user care?
His MP3 player has at least 30 seconds of music already to the sound chip, his downloads are going to recieve all those packets as soon as the menu is released. Ok, fair enough, your 3D rendering program is going to lose the amount of time the menu was held down... what, 10 seconds? 30, max.
(In fact, OS 8+, as I recall, will 'unlock' locked menus after 15 seconds.)
In reality, though, (and try explaining this to a Windoze user), menus are a LOT quicker when you don't lock them down. One click instead of two.
MacOS may have terrible multitasking performance, but it's always been responsive to my commands, and isn't that what is more important? (Actually, OS 9 seems *less* responsive, and I can't figure out why...)
But my main selling point on MacOS is this. My computer is a old PowerMac 4400/200 upgraded to a G3. It has 64 MB of RAM. At this exact moment, I am running AIM, Claris Emailer, Claris Homepage, Finder, MacAmp Lite, Netscape, Rapscallion, and Word, and I'm not even close to dipping into virtual memory.
The most common complaints about MacOS are these:
1) Poor multitasking/poor response. (Solved by programmers using the proper WaitNextEvent delay time! Ugh. I hate people who code it wrong, think their application should get more than its fair share.)
2) Lack of protected memory. (Look, my Apple machine goes at least double the time between reboots as my Win98 PC. That's good enough for me. Plus, this is also solved by good coding practices... you don't need protected memory to bail you out of errors if your program has no errors.)
3) Lack of a second mouse button. This one really gets me... First of all, MacOS is more efficient in general with one mouse button than Windoze or X will ever be with two. Secondly, there is no "Golden Law of Macintosh" that says you can't buy and use a mouse with two buttons. I have a perfectly fine two-button mouse, with full contextual menu support in all applications.
Excuse me for the half-rant. I'm sick of people arguing that technology is the only thing that makes an OS more efficient or 'better' than another.
Comment of the year
This is exactly why so many hardcore mac fans are upset about what they've seen of aqua. It seems that apple is starting to forget about how people work, and are just trying to look pretty. Here's to hoping it's not as bad as it seems.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
You clearly have not programmed for the mac. It is as much spleen as brain. Perhaps more so.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I find it exceptional that many of the UI widgets (even down to the button bar at the bottom), the left-hand scrollbars, the grouped arrow controls, the tab window decorations, and many other things are reminiscent of Steve's later accomplishment, NEXTSTEP.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Umm, the IIe didn't have a 68000 in it. If memory serves, it was a Zilog 80.
Death gnoll? Huh? The Apple machines and the Mac/Lisa evolution were two very separate timelines.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
No.
Woz didn't, he doesn't own it, he doesn't work for apple.
Who cares?
Not that kind of browser.
------------
Who out there is a fan of miller columns?
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Heh. Ignore that. It's a 6502.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
The other cool thing is that if you have the programming spleen to make your way through the toolbox with any facility, you'll be able to take on just about any task.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Good thinking, let's ignore reality.
Everyone should have a quintuple T3 line, and a separate Beowulf cluster server for their personal web pages. Everyone should storm their ISP's that don't support HTTP cacheing with torches and pitchforks, and it's their own fault that they don't.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
One minute I was reading away
.oO0Oo.
the next poof! gone.
I guess I'll have to wait a few days
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I just got my Mac working. It's an old Mac Laptop (got it cheap). I love it. It's really funny because I'm fairly decent on an NT system (administrator/programmer) but every time I use my Mac or FreeBSD box (where my experience is next to nil, but I can do more, faster and easier) I find it harder to come back to NT.
I was writing some code on the Mac and realized that output to a second screen was just another handy option in the menus. I don't seem to recall seeing this in my M$ compilers (now I could be wrong and it could be very well hidden). I was blown away. Now I've just got to get a second monitor for that system. Why does M$ have to take so long to get everything ? (I was going to say right but I realized that they never have).
Many people dump on Apple machines (I'm sure lots of you will flame this article) but they really are cool! Apple computers made me want to program and have fun with them. I remember the first PC I tried programming and I gave it up. Apple ]['s and Mac Classics are definitely way more fun than a PC any day.
Command Line Interface
And I think they are great if you know what you are doing. If you don't know the command you can be hooped but really does make life easier in the long run to learn it. Plus when stuff goes wrong with video it is much easier to know what to type at the command line than to guess where you are clicking on the screen and just how far to move a mouse you can't see down to the option you want. CLI forever!
It was the slashdot effect...
Poor guy, I hope they don't yell at him (the road runner user) too much.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
No shit! I always thought so.
You can't handle the truth.
Guys, what Linux needs is a better approach to it's GUI. It would be great if we could use Mac's code. They should release their code as an open source product. I believe that MAC is taking their user interfaces seriously and that this is something that Linux is missing. Go Open Mac!
You can't handle the truth.
This guy supports my theory that people who say stuff like Macintrash or Macrohard are nothing but trolls.
Whatchew talkin' bout, Willis?
I own two Lisas, a 2/10 and an original Lisa 1. I have never experienced an operating system crash, and the only time I have seen the office system tank (office system = finder and integrated office apps) was when a bug in one of my programs started eating up too much memory. When this occured, the Lisa put up a polite dialog box, saved everything in running apps, and rebooted itself. Beats a BSOD any day.
<OSFLAME>
Yes, the Lisa was a doomed project, but it wasn't poor design that made Apple take it off the market - not by a long shot. Here were the strikes against Lisa in 1984:
- Cost. The Lisa started out costing $9,995 US, and prices never really dipped beneath $4,000 in later models. It should be noted that this price does not include the $3,000 ProFile external hard drive (5 MB!) for the Lisa 1 and Lisa 2/5.
- Macintosh. Apple was making a cheaper, yet incompatible machine that was perceived as a 'baby Lisa' by many onlookers - and even Apple said that it had 'Lisa Technology' (i.e. a WIMP interface and 'Visual Fidelity' - IMHO a much better term for WYSIWYG). It was hard for buyers to justify the extra $3,000 or so.
- Poor developer support. Apple sold Lisa language Workshops, where language includes Pascal, Clascal, C, BASIC, and COBOL. Unfortunately, the Workshops did not initially have support for Lisa Office System apps - their programs would have to be run from the Workshop or as their own shells (a shell is an operating environment run on startup - the Office System was a shell, as was the Workshop). Thus no office app integration or standard GUI for anything but Apple programs. Apple never did quite get around to finishing up the Lisa Toolkit, the programmers' library of standard Office System routines.
- Speed. The Lisa was slow - it ran at only 5 MHz so that video accesses to memory could be interleaved with CPU accesses; it used a subset of the 68K instruction set to facilitate virtual memory and multitasking; and the OS and Office System (i.e. almost everything but the ROMs) was written in Pascal. Even writing a letter with a Lisa requires patience.
But the Lisa had these attributes in its favor:- Memory protection/preemptive multitasking/virtual memory. These are exciting new technologies that will finally reach mainstream Mac users in sum with the release of MacOS X. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html
- Robust file system. Inspired by the one at Xerox PARC, the Scavenger program automatically detects FS damage and fscks the disk. This may be part of the reason that my Lisa media has lasted so long.
- Data sharing between Office System apps. By later versions of the Office System, graphs could be placed in text documents, terminal data could be pasted into spreadsheets, flowcharts could be copied into draw documents, etc. This is not news now, but in 1984...
- Modular construction - all the low-voltage components of a Lisa (well, except for the speaker) can be accessed without a screwdriver.
- Other niceties - soft power off, software contrast control, privacy dimmer (hit option-shift-keypad 0 to blank the screen), screen dimming after a preset time, session management (all open windows are noted at power off and restored at power on), and more.
So the Lisa was not at all a poorly designed machine.Some sites for learning more about Lisa:
http://galena.tjs.org/tom/
http://galena.tjs.org/lisa/ (many screenshots here, and tour of the Lisa's guts).
--Tom Stepleton
MAN SHOOTS ROVER!
Should Slashdot mirror every document that they link to locally from now on? Let's vote...
............ no.
a problem getting in?
The real mnf999 always posts as anonymous coward
wow! no way dude!
The real mnf999 always posts as anonymous coward
What if god is one of us? Just a one eyed one of us... trying to make its way home...
I am marc, son of suden.
mard
The real mnf999 always posts as anonymous coward
Moderators: please raise the level on this posting for maximum visibility in the hopes that someone could actually post it! Thanks!
You do both at once? I can't see how that would work. Try using a cupholder and a hands-free kit, and not endangering the lives of other road users..
The Master Of Muppets,
CAPTAIN: TAKE OFF EVERY "SIG"!!
No. What was added, under OS 8.5, was the ability to antialias TrueType fonts; PostScript ones still need ATM. As for a "mention": Try the Fonts tab in the Appearance control panel.
Once again this just goes to show how totally cool the Woz is if he can lay the basis in 1980 for all of the Mac OS's to come. Let's here it for the WOZ!
I ran an old Apple IIe for years. Bought it in the early eighties, right before the Macs started coming out. I remember the old 68000 chips that were used too. When I got my IIe, it didn't have the "e" or enhancement option installed yet. If memory serves, it envolved upgrading the 68000 and a few other chips. We're quite literally talking EPROMS and DIPS, pulling them with a puller and installing new ones. I remember the fuss of the time with IBM vs. Apple quite well, and the problems getting the Lisa GUI into production may very well have been the death gnoll of the Apple line.
You're probably right that a GUI has it's advantages. But you can flatten the learning curve of a CLI if you use things like command completion and context sensitive help.
Have a look at cisco IOS. Command completion works for the whole command (not only the for command name, but for the options, too), and you can always get help by appending '?' and pressing enter.
Of course IOS is a different situation than a general purpose CLI like bash - but I hope some day bash will have some of these features of IOS (needs help from the binaries, though. Or some kind of automatic man-page-parsing to get context sensitive help?)
FYI: for those that care about getting detailed info on the Lisa, you might want to take a look at lisa.sunder.net
'Nuff said.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
A properly designed GUI could take advantage of the flexibility you get from a higher resolution display and non-keyboard input, even if you end up using it just for shoving bits of text around. Unfortunately, most of the GUIs are horribly designed; I'm rather disappointed at how frequently I wish the developer had included a SQL query tool as it would be easier to use that than fight a constricting interface.
Well you can now.
Since...what OS 8.1 or was it 8.5? And wern't there shareware/freeware extensions that allowed you to do this all the way back to 7.5?
Sounds like a really nitpicky problem to me.
I use OS X Server at work and I really dislike the NeXT browser in there.
It wasn't just that the slowness was only by comparison to
dos; the perception was wrong.
The mac was generally faster than pc/xt class machines. At one point,
we had my 128k mac next to the pc of someone convinced that his
was faster and better. They were running identical BASIC code.
Well, almost identical--it was a numerical integration program,
and we stripped the point-by-point graphing from the version on
the PC. It was still substantially slower than the mac.
The Self page has moved to http://www.sun.com/research/self/index. html. (Actually, the entire 'SunLabs' tree has moved to http://www.sun.com/research, it appears.) The project is described as no longer being active, although the last release of Self, 4.1, was last month.
Actually, there are those who say its appearance was derived from the (for the time) nearly ubiquitous IBM terminals that littered desks throughout corporate america. This was to make sure it was "immediately recognizable as a computer."
Furthermore, there was no real standard for microcomputer appearance at the time -- the IBM PC slab was not yet universal -- many businesses had Apple II's, Radio Shack Model II, III, and 12's, and Sol-20's, none of which were necessarily computer-ish looking. (Most people in the early 80's thought of computers as huge things (PDP-11, HP-3000, IBM 360) with spinning (reel-to-reel) tape drives.)
Um, the target market was Business. It has only been in the last 10 years that color has started to become an important part of business computing; hard copy is still mostly black and white. Perhaps you are thinking of video games?
I know that at the time, I was recommending avoiding color monitors (CGA) for business use as the resolution was terrible (320x240, iirc) as compared to Hercules monochrome (720x?)
Sure, it was slow, as were most personal computers then. The Lisa was trying to do an awful lot with the limited hardware available. And yes, like the rest of the personal computer industry in those days, it was not the epitomy of reliability. (Like that has changed much...)
Excuse me, but do you expect a first-time user to be able to do anything at all with Unix/Linux the first time they sit down in front of it? With a GUI, the user can at least move the mouse, notice a correlation between its movement and the movement of something on the screen. When the Lisa was introduced, most people had no experience with a computer at all. The Lisa was intended to get them up to speed in the shortest possible time. The first 10 minutes might have been sheer hell, but after that it would make sense.
(This, of course, is where the MacOS succeeded and Windows failed -- there is one key combination, for example, that will close any program on the Mac. (Command-Q, iirc) Under Windows, you might have Ctrl-Q, Ctrl-X, Alt-F4, or something completely different. On the Mac, once you knew one program, you kinda knew them all. Not so under Windows.)
For new users, there was nothing to remember. No secret incantations to be typed. Click on a menu, then select a option. Click on icons. It's all there. With CLI's, you need to remember the commands, the options, etc. Much more efficient in the long run, but not easy to use at first.
We'll never really know for sure, but the reasons I've heard (with reasonable credibility) include internal politics and competition with the Macintosh group.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
A Command Line Interface is an outdated user interface only useful for file management, system administration, and sophisticated text processing.
Except everyone I know who seriously uses AutoCAD is constantly going to the keyboard. Once you become an expert on a complex program's functionality, a command line is much faster than a GUI.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
In a GUI, all the commands VISIBLE which you have said, unlike a CLI where all the commands are usually HIDDEN. CLI's allow for very efficient commands for the power user.
:)
On a Mac, all of the menu items (along with a clock and a task switcher) are in the menu bar, which eats only about 20 pixels. The commands themselves are hidden until one needs them, and 20 pixels is a trivial amount of screen space.
Power comes at price. Why waste valuable screen real estate when the user already knows the commands (or hotkeys)
Two reasons. First, like I said you're only losing a strip about 20 pixels high. More importantly, there are very few power users who actually memorize the keystrokes for every possible operation. A well-designed GUI will provide keystrokes for frequently used ops, but having them in the menu bar makes it easier to learn what they are.
ONLY when you a small number of options ! Otherwise you have multiple 'tabs' or 'pages' of config options. Ever see a drop down box with 200 items? That's not elegant. (A country selection is one bad example.)
What's the alternative. A CLI will likely have a list of country codes, which is going to be every bit as cumbersome. And GUI's can do free-form text completion boxes. In fact, they can do some kind of out-complete feature, so I can type "bra" and have the "zil" added automatically.
That DEPENDS on what you are doing.
Try moving *.bat, *.com, *.exe files into another directory. I could type: move *.bat *.com *.exe progdir. With a mouse that would take you _THREE_ operations.
It does depend, but even in your example I prefer a GUI. In the Finder, you would switch to list mode, sort by kind, and then rubber-band to select the files. Yes, you'd have to do it 3 times, but you get better feedback, and it still isn't much slower than a CLI. And that's a simplified case. What happens if you want to move several files with different types to a directory several folders away? That requires a lot more typing.
if you spend a lot of time copying text, do you use the arrow keys to select the text, and then ctrl-c ctrl-v
You select text with the arrow keys? If it's just a couple of words, I can see that, but if you're selecting whole sentences, arrow keys are slow. Besides what you just described can be done in a GUI as well as a CLI.
What I really would love to see is a system that COMBINES the power and intuitiveness of CLI's and GUI's
Sure, which is why I have a dual-boot machine. When I want to get normal work done, I run Mac OS. When I have coding to do, I boot into Unix.
"pretty little icons" are a Microsoft "innovation" that has unfortunately taken over the GUI world. However, if you are taking Windoze as a standard for GUI's, then of course you are going to come to the conclusion that they are useless.
GUI's have three major advantages over CLI's. First is that it dramatically reduces the learning curve for new apps. In a good GUI, all possible operations are available using the menu bar. Thus if you want to do something to a piece of data, you select it, and the look through the menus to find the command you want.
Similarly, GUI's allow elegant setting of configuration options. Command-line switches simply can't match the simplicity and usefulness of a preferences dialog, and it doesn't require wading through man pages to use.
Secondly, GUI's allow for more efficient use of screen real estate and allow more rapid entry of some kinds of data. Windows and scrollbars allow you to fit multiple apps on the screen, and to use as much or as little space as needed for a given window. Doing this with a keyboard would be a nightmare. And imagine web surfing without a mouse.
Finally, GUI's allow you to do things simply and elegantly which cannot be done without a lot of grief with a CLI. For example, rearranging a file system with a CLI just can't match the simplicity of doing it with a GUI. And graphics and word processing would be a nightmare if we still had to do that without a mouse.
CLI's have their strengths, but there are some things that they just can't do. It's too bad that Microsoft did such a lousy job implementing their GUI, because not all GUI's are that bad.
Re:CLIs vs. GUIs (Score:1)
:)
by sklein (sklein@mint.net) on Tuesday February 15, @01:16AM EST (#245)
(User Info) http://members.mint.net/sklein/
And GUI's can do free-form text completion boxes. In fact, they can do some kind
of out-complete feature, so I can type "bra" and have the "zil" added automatically.
As can CLI's. I've even done a clumsy form of auto-complete in a 100 line Perl script i use.
What happens if you want to move several files with different types to a directory
several folders away? That requires a lot more typing.
Not much more typing with a well organized filesystem and a modern Unix shell which supports tab completion. In short, one or two letters and the tab key per directory. And tab completion will do more than just directory names, the example included with the tcsh distribution is enlightening. Some configuration and you could expect that shell to read your mind.
Sure, with a lot of practice one can make a CLI match the speed of a GUI. But only a small fraction of users would actually have the patience to learn how to do this, and even then CLI's don't have a compelling speed advantage, just not much of a disadvantage.
Which is why the key repeat rate under Unixes doesn't crawl like under MS Windows and editors like vi(m) rarely require you to actually highlight the text. The vim tutorial (listed in the help) shows how it works.
I use vi extensively, and with a lot of practice, you can do a lot of things efficiently. But I can select an arbitrary piece of text in a word processor in under 2 seconds. No matter how fast vi is, it isn't going to match that. And this is assuming that we're editing plain text. If one is editing formatted text, then the only way to do it with vi is to use something like html, in which case you need to have Netscape open in a seperate window to make sure everything looks ok.
vi is great for editing code, because it gives you precise control over formatting and allows you to work without taking your hands off the keyboard. But for writing papers and such, there's just no comparison with a good word processor.
And coding isn't "normal" work. *sigh*
By "normal work" I mean writing papers, surfing the web, using email, ICQ, tracking finances, etc. Yes, you can do this in Linux, but most of the tools are GUI's anyway, and most Linux GUI's are attrocious. The Open Source movement has yet to produce a desktop environment that approaches the care, attention to detail, consistency and style that goes into the Mac OS. Linux makes a great server and a decent workstation, but its user interface still needs a lot of work.
>Guys, what Linux needs is a better approach to it's GUI. It would be great if we
n %20interface%20guidelines&num=50">Apple Human Interface Guidelines</a> that were developed in large part as a result of Jobs bringing all those Xerox people over to Cupertino. They were academics and serious about these issues, so they diligently tested and honed their principles. As a result the Mac interface is clean and usable, in many ways just hte opposite of the Microsoft marketing-driven Windows GUI, where everybody is supposed to follow the rules but Redmond (MS programmers are notorious for having side-by-side widgets with entirely different interface approaches). The original HIG were excessively rigid (i.e. requiring only ONE way to do something, which meant you couldn't have keyboard shortcuts -- but those were introduced later), but by being based on principles they remained a useful foundation for interface design right up until recently.
>could use Mac's code. They should release their code as an open source product.
>I believe that MAC is taking their user interfaces seriously and that
>this is something that Linux is missing. Go Open Mac!
Linux DOES need a better approach to its GUI(s). Let's not oversimplify, though.
The power of the Macintosh GUI isn't in its code, per se, but in the <a href="http://google.com/search?query=apple%20huma
The sad part is that Apple has apparently abandoned these principles; the new MacOS X interface is a graphic designer's wet dream, and a horrifying sight to usability people like <a href="http://www.asktog.com/">Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini</a> who was on the original team. If you need to know what the new Mac will look like, check out the Quicktime client; the new philosophy seems to be to make every application like a little handheld Sony appliance, common interface elements and mouseable operation be damned.
Thus, what I believe the Gnome/KDE folks should do is carefully read those Apple Human Interface Guidelines from 15 years ago, and apply as much of that as they can to building a proper usabile interface for Linux that doesn't feel like a crazy-quilt mix of styles. I'm not saying it's in bad shape now, but aside from skins and themes, it's far from pretty. A more consistent interface will go a long way toward allowing Linux to creep out of the server market and onto non-hacker desktops.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Apple was right to bulldoze these. They were bad machines in alot of ways.
The boxes themselves looked.. unconventional. It looked more like a keyboard-driven beige oscilloscope than anything immediately recognizable as a computer. In terms of functionality, the Lisa lacked alot of commonly desired features which were in demand at the time (heh, like color) and seemed more like a machine that was trying desparately to be unique rather than truly functional. Whatever you _could_ do with one often took a great deal of time to accomplish, and the box itself would crash fairly frequently. Above that, it wasnt abundantly clear to the first-time user how to go about operating one, and why this sort of design was better than the conventional command-line driven concept used in personal computers in common usage at that time.
I think Apple's main motivation for killing the Lisa was that it would have been a public-relations disaster anyway. Better to drop the curtain on a bad product than to have the public drop the curtain on you. If youre going to make a splash with a new product and a new idea, you dont package it in the form of a failure.
(FYI, this was in a public library in my home town, in 1984. First GUI I ever saw, thats why I remember it.)
Bowie J. Poag
Project Manager, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://propaganda.themes.org)
Bowie J. Poag
Eeeeek! You're right!!! And to think I committed that huge gaffe in presence of the Master!!! I'm so ashamed! I deserve to be punished!!!!!!
(Thanks for the correction, Ed.)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
CLIs only seem "powerful" by comparison because text provides context-free representation, i.e., anything can be expressed in the same way (because the text ontology is streamlined and meta-identical), whereas a graphical representation is by definition more complex and therefore different ontologies must be used for different purposes.
However, I think that most people's notion of GUIs come from their experience with "traditional" GUIs (Mac, NeXT, Windoze, and the UNIX windowing systems). Many fine people have been working to introduce new paradigms for graphical representation; one such group is the Self gang at Sun Labs and Stanford. Self is an extremely powerful classless, message-passing based OO language, designed around the concept of "programming as experience", which attempts to immerse the user/programmer in a homoiconic, consistent and all-around graspable "world"; according to this philosophy, the Self graphical environment (ported to Squeak Smalltalk as Morphic) is one in which all objects are graphically represented (by way of "morphs"), and in which any object can directly interact with the user in a number of standard ways, having its properties easily accessed or modified. What all this means is that the Self environment is radically different from the traditional GUI, and easily provides at least as much power and flexibility as a CLI.
Self can be found at http://self.sunlabs.com, IIRC.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
True. Good GUI apps should have a very good keyboard interface. GUI != WIMP Interface.
Well, I'd call myself a hardcore Mac fan, at least until something better comes along. I like Aqua, and I like it because I think it's good UI, not just because I like the candy coating. I think the new UI is more consistent and better designed that what the Mac has now. Remember that the existing Mac OS was never designed for running multiple programs at once. That was hacked in later. It was never designed for color. That was hacked in later. It was never designed for large screens (the typical screen these days has 4 times the area of the 512x384 screen that Mac OS was originally designed for. And it was never designed for computer as fast as today's. Much of the flash is just a logical extension of things that have been in Mac OS for years (like window zooming, menu blinking, and shadows under windows).
Mac OS X is certainly different from Mac OS, and will take some getting used to, but I think it has an excellent UI. Of course I reserve final judgment until I've had a chance to use it for a few weeks.
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I remember being absolutely WOWed by the Lisa when I saw it introduced at the Personal Computer World show in London. This was the first GUI most of us had ever seen (or anyone outside of Xerox), and it was really mind blowing.
Still, as far as it's success goes, not only was it really slow, but it also cost around 10,000 pounds (UK), which back then was a LOT of money (my salary as a programmer was 6,000 at that time). I've always thought of the Lisa as more of a prototype for the Mac rather than the real production machine it was meant to be.
Someone may knock this down as overrated, since I'm taking advantage of my default-setting here, but I'll take that risk in the interest of interest :)
Anyhow, I followed the link helpfully inserted in this message's parent to blinkenlights and was amused, impressed, informed, delighted. I recommend that you go there for some interesting, thought-provoking trivia. I like the fact that in answering the question posed on this page ("What was the first personal computer?"), the underlying assumptions about what each of those words means are parsed, and the ambiguity inherent in the question is addressed forthrightly. I cannot guarantee that the answer given on this page is the absolute best one, but it seems well-justified. (And surprising, to me, since I'd never heard of their winner before.)
Hope someone else enjoys reading it like I did!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Anyway, back to my original point. Macs don't really have a CLI, and while not explicitly stated, the original post implied that GUIs are wholly dependent on a CLI.
We were having difficulty with the standards committee controlling the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax -- the graphics protocol upon which the Viewtron videotex terminals built by Western Electric were based. Specifically, there wasn't enough programmability. The Western Electric terminal was so limited in capacity that we had to fit the graphics interpreter into a very few number of bytes, and could afford only a few thousand bytes of dynamically downloadable store. I had been enamored with Forth ever since the Byte magazine article about it about a year or so earlier (my first digital purchase was an HP35 so reverse polish didn't bother me perhaps as much as it should have). Even so, I was hunting around for options. Jim Thompson, another senior staff member with the Viewtron project, was also interested in Forth -- enough so that he had subscribed to the Forth newsletter, which he shared with me. Jim was supposed to develop a menu system to run on the central system. I had specifically asked that his menu system never achieve Turing Machine equivalence, because I knew what sort of horrors lay in wait for us if it did. Nevertheless, Jim eventually implemented GOLFBAL "Game Oriented Language for Business And Leisure" -- and it was a Forth derivative. I had rejected Forth as anything but the low level protocol and engine for the telesoftware graphics system and was fairly horrified to discover what he had done. In any case, it was this immersion in Forth we brought with us to our meeting with the Xerox PARC folks.
Now, I swear on a stack of bibles that after I met with the PARC folks and discussed the problems of graphics communications, I had no idea the industry could end up being stuck with Postscript as a type-setting standard. I can say this for a certainty because:
I wanted to see a Novix-style reduction-to-hardware of the Forth virtual machine so that Forth would become the macro assembly language. Then we could use the Forth silicon machine to start running dynamically downloaded Smalltalk -- or some similar high level language -- compiled for the Forth stack machine which would provide much more powerful graphics specifications than Forth itself.
I never imagined the Smalltalk guys would actually depart from Smalltalk itself as a graphical specification language.
By the time the PARC guys spun off Adobe with Postscript and its Forth-like engine, I had become more interested in constraint/relational programming semantics than object oriented semantics because it more naturally fits graphics description, distribution, nondeterminism and parallelism not to mention databases.
It was summer of 1982 when I met with Tesler for the last time -- and he had just left PARC to go work on Lisa. We were sitting in the empty Astrodome, I think it was, next to the convention center where the Commodore 64 was being introduced to the world market as part of the precursor to Comdex. 64K of memory! At any rate, Tesler and I discussed the reason he had abandoned Smalltalk for the Lisa. I had thought that type inference coupled with artful use of assembly language libraries would be sufficient on the Motorola 68000 family, but Tesler was insistent that Object Pascal was necessary for adequate speed. Frankly, I was apalled that Tesler had so easily abandoned Smalltalk with type inference since he had made specific mention of it as an optimization technique in his Byte article. But in a recent email exchange about this history, he told me type inference was never of much interest to him -- that others at Apple were hooked on Object Pascal.
The horrifying thing about all this is that when Steve Jobs took off from Apple to found NeXT, instead of correcting the nonsense with Postscript and going straight for Smalltalk with type inference, he repeated the mistake, only this time with Objective-C. Then, as I understand it, Objective-C was the precursor to Java with its reliance on declaration rather than inference for type checking. This despite the fact that Sun already had the Self programming language in house with type inference and dynamic optimization technologies that realized the potential of Smalltalk at along last. Unfortunately the only technology to make it bigtime from Sun's Self project was the Hotspot JVM.
Although these aren't exactly the same mistakes over and over, we're still struggling to get a decent, widely-used dynamically typed language "for everyone" that includes a pure OO library for graphics. Python isn't easily deployable and although I'm a Perl bigot, even I realize we're unlikely to get Perlscript installed in every browser anytime soon. Anyway I'm partial to prototype languages like Self when it comes to Smalltalk offspring. I do have hopes for TIBET as a way of turning Javascript into a powerful programming system across many platforms -- as outrageous as that sounds. I know Bill Edney and Scott Shattuck were some of the first NeXT hackers, but we can all pray for a swift recovery. This isn't an official announcement or anything -- but Bill and Scott did do a presentation at Hackers so I figure I can mention it in the mode of a "hot rumor".
As I said, I'm more into constraint/relational stuff these days myself, but it sure would be nice if someone brought the power originally in Smalltalk the ubiquity it deserved almost 20 years ago.
Seastead this.
'
Ive mirrored the original site here
Around the time the Mac was in deep trouble (no hard drive, one floppy, really slow, lousy sales, no laser printer) Jobs killed off the Lisa division. This may have been done to make his Mac project look good.