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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.
'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.
The Lisa was based on the Xerox Alto (See here, here, here, and here) from the early 70's, so it was certainly doable, although perhaps not with the single-chip-CPU concept that seems to be the only thing the kids of today can conceive of.
And no, I don't have one in my collection. Yet.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
But yes, many were scrapped, by Sun Remarketing, on Apple's order, iirc. They still sell Mac parts and used to have some Lisa stuff.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
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.
Both of those machines would have been a great machine for someone who couldn't afford the latest and greatest. Certainly, there are collectors out there who would be happy to take them.
Folks, please, before you toss a computer, look around to see if someone might either be able to use it or if someone wants to save it for posterity!
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I don't recall Englebart as being at Xerox; he's best known for his work 10-15 years prior at Stanford. Of course, I know that members of his team definitely did go on to work at Xerox Parc and worked on the Alto and such, which of course led to the Lisa, Macintosh, Windows, and a host of other things we take for granted today.
However, please remember that the computer industry was around for at least 30 years before the Lisa (take a look at this page for a bit of PC history.) It might have been the first such testing for the Personal Computer industry, but certainly not for the computer industry in general.
And therein lies one of the fundamental differences between GUI's and CLI's -- The former is much easier to figure out which the latter is far more efficient.
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.
>Heh, also from a Mac vs PC chicken or egg debate,
>they said that the Lisa UI was first introduced
>at the National Computer Convention in 1980,
>about 5 years before Windows 1 was released.
Chicken/Egg? Is there anyone who denies that the Lisa was the first graphical personal computer on the market? 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. (It might have hit the market even sooner if it had not been for their infighting.)
>Shouldn't windows 1 have been released in the >year 1? Just a question.
Nyuck nyuck.
>At any rate, im sure this will get flamed to
>hell, but at least now we have evidence to set
>the record straight.
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.
>Ironically enough, now we seem to be moving back
>towards a CLI, simply for the sheer power that
>comes with CLI. Gui is like putting a blanket
>over a puzzle and trying to put the puzzle
>together by moving the blanket around.
Well, CLI is certainly never going to be the interface of choice for your average desktop worker, just as manual transmission is not the favorite way of changing gears. The GUI is faster and easier for certain tasks. (I certainly prefer writing in a GUI vs. writing in vi.) The CLI is faster and easier for certain other tasks (e.g. managing a server, importing lists of users and rights). If you're referring to Linux, well, keep in mind that even Linux as it grows will have to encompass more than one interface paradigm.
The Microsoft method is to (as you said) put a blanket over the top, hide the complexity. I don't think it's emblematic of all approaches to writing a GUI, however. The GUI is one interactive way of accessing functionality, if it's written right. It's only when it begins to get in the way of the functionality (try adding ten users in a row, or setting up a piece of hardware without the wizard) that the GUI becomes a liability.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
When they say browser here, they don't mean a _web_ browser; instead they mean what became the Finder. The _web_ browser paradigm is based on hypertext within the document. The _document_ browser paradigm is based on a hierarchical file list and simultaneous (or triggered) display of the document.
Put another way, the document browser lacked the interactivity of a web browser. But it certainly was a precursor; it simply awaited the invention of a viable hypertext system by Tim Berners-Lee et al. to enhance its capabilities. These were all gradual evolutionary steps that had their roots in academic thinktanks long before the average person could make use of them.
Of course, the beauty of the Lisa was that Apple was actually trying to give this power to the average user.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for 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.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
>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.
Yep, I forgot that TWIAVBP. But my original point still holds: what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another.
As much as I'm a geek myself, I also know something of design and usability. And the last person I'd want designing my User Interface, GUI or CLI, is an engineer!
"Sure, see, just type cwer72 -woiuerxcvz and it'll do it right every time. Oh, yeah, it's mnemonic, you know the 1997 top ten hit by the frogmen?"
:)
----
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.
!100 means not 100;
If you're in a binary system, say 8 bit, then you actually have 11111011 = !100
=)
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
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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This space unintentionally left unblank.
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.
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.
NEW?!? ROTFL... I remember buying OS/2 Warp in late 1994 with these features. You can hardly call them NEW technologies...
--
A man who wants nothing is invincible
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.