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The Birth of the Apple Lisa
Ton writes "People think Apple stole the GUI from Xerox, but it's much more subtle than that. Braeburn has posted a story about the development and birth of the Apple Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical interface. More on this subject at Andy Hertzfeld's (one of the original developers of the Mac) site Folkore.org."
I found one on ebay a few years back for quite a steal... definitely worth it; it's a great conversation piece. Too bad it has this burning smell while running. Works fine, though.
For some reason I had always thought the Lisa had 3.5 inch floppy drives. Weird.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Like it hadn't occurred to hundreds of people by that point that a graphical interface was a good idea? I mean don't think for a second that the first time someone pulled off a GUI, there weren't a hundred other companies immediately having meetings on how to take advantage of the idea. I'm guessing Apple was the quickest to implement.
" was more powerful than most minicomputers of the day. The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders, and stopped giving tours. Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted, and gave Steve and a team of engineers from the Lisa project a tour of the technologies at PARC.
Steve Jobs (who took only Bill Atkinson along on his first visit), who had a rather limited understanding of technology, was most impressed by the graphical interface he saw running on the Alto. The interface was nothing like today's desktop based interfaces, but was a huge jump forward from the command line interfaces used everywhere else. When the engineers returned they had a vision of what they wanted in the Lisa project. The Apple chairman was so impressed that he interrupted a demo given by Larry Tesler asking him why nothing was being done with the technology. For the second visit, Jobs brought along several members of the Lisa project, and was given a much more technical demonstration. The other engineers who went on the second visit, who were briefed by Jef Raskin before their visit, were equally impressed.
The Apple engineers were not the only ones to be impressed by the visit, the researchers at Xerox, long discouraged by Xerox's inability to release a product based on the technology developed at PARC, were impressed by Apple's seeming willingness to implement advanced technologies in their products.
The Lisa project changed dramatically. No longer was it to be a mere hardware upgrade to the Apple II line, the new focus of the Lisa project was software. The team wanted to implement all of the innovations they saw at PARC."
It's not really stealing, but rather just "implimenting" someone elses innovations.
Even if your first big dream is a total failure and an embarrassment forever after, with hard work you can still come back to be Slashdot's pony whore.
I suggest you read Slashdot
The Lisa was the first major one with a sophisticated non-text graphical interface for file access. However, it was not the first to use such an interface at all. Earlier offerings from Apple, Atari, Commodore, etc had many individual programs that had interactive graphic (non-text) interface and control. Probably would be better to say that it was the first commercial offering featuring the early version of today's GUI.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Does Xerox build an Operating System for X86 or PPC? i did not see one offered at Xerox's website, i did notice the name of Novell on their website so they probably use Novell/SuSE, seems ok to me but i was just wondering why Xerox has not built a Linux distro of their own or a different OS all together, or are they just interested in copiers & printers.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Whomever is screwing with the editors by resubmitting all the dupe articles, knock it off. Although you're making a funny point, you're also causing me to question my sanity.
I did see this same piece two weeks ago, didn't I?
That's how I first heard of the Lisa -- through YCDTOTV locker jokes.
Alasdair: "Oh, Christine!"
Christine: "Yes, Alasdair?"
Alasdair: "Did you know they made a computer called the Lisa?"
Christine: "I hope it doesn't talk!"
(note: Castmember Lisa Ruddy was portrayed as annoyingly, excessively talkative.)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
You know, if the guys leading Xerox in the 60s and 70s hadn't been morons, Xerox today would be equal to Xerox + IBM + Microsoft.
Yay for totally not getting it.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
This article pretty much illustrates the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple tried really hard to come up with a great, user friendly GUI for the Lisa, and in the end sold it for close to $10K to try and quickly recoup costs. Microsoft instead goes and buys a crappy OS (the early DOS) for $80K or whatever it was, sells the crap out of it to IBM and becomes the dominant player. Now Microsoft can afford to sell its OS dirt cheap as it makes up the cost in volume and monopoly practices. Apple still continues to design a great OS and sell it along with hardware at a high premium. Pretty much nothing has changed in the philosophy.
The RIAA thinks that I stole music using Kazaa, but it's much more subtle than that...
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
BOUGHT. BOUGHT the GUI from Xerox.
Microsoft was the one that stole it, don't mix the two!
for those tours. that million was to be converted to shares when they went public so that xerox nets a profit and so does apple.
sweet deal, no?
sum.zero
They really only got serious about it with OS-X. Their previous attempts were rather crippled. Apple's OS only got great and user friendly once they allowed/embraced the CLI.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Alanis Morissette.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
I seem to remember modding mine so it wouldn't lose the time. Seem to remember they either didn't have a battery backed clock or it was faulty.
threadeds blog
Apple never paid Xerox or did some kind of stock deal or hired a bunch of their disgruntled engineers when Xerox was too dim-bulbed to take advantage of their work. Apple used stealth Morris-Dancer Monkey Ninjas, who snuck in and took pictures of screens. Apple then went and used high powered scanners to read the computer code behind the screen shots.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Get with it. Read any article on questionable music copying/downloading. On Slashdot, the word "steal" is used to mean "any activity the writer does not like".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Where o where is the damning photo of Steve Jobs holding an imaginary phone and telling Woz how they won't succeed without ninjas and bears?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Does this have anything to do with Aqua? I don't know the timeline of this. Aqua was a step backwards, not progress: if you think "white on very light blue" is readable, you are kicking usability out the door.
There's a reason that black-on-white has been a standard for readable text for.... let's see.... 4,000 years?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
While Apple engineers were certainly inspired by PARC, to say they stole belittles the desktop innovations they did: Pull down menus, overlapping windows and a desktop trash bin.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I'm way past getting tired of the a-critical, as in having nothing to do with critical in any way it might be defined or construed, fawning over Apple by the /. masses.
/. geek to sit in front of, stand in front of, stand in the same room as, a Macintosh. Now they adopt a Unix-ish OS and suddenly they are darlings.
There was a time when you could not get the average
There was also a time when the average geek couldn't stand getting near a Unix box of any kind because their teachers had already done years if not a decade plus in front of the monsters and warned them of the horrors. Instead, they hacked early PCs, Apples, Commodores, anything else that might do for experimenting, proving their technical abilities, and didn't drive them to madness with esoteric idiocy that felt wrong the instant you looked at it.
I know I got that impression the moment I looked at Apple ProDOS and again when I looked at MS-DOS. It sent a shiver down my spine and I recall the pre-release demonstration events for the Macintosh where Lisa boxes were also on display. I remember thinking, "what the fark is this? We've seen the future, and it is a simple visual interface playing to natural human tendencies and abilities. What is this?! Why are these other systems still controlled by endless text that fights the unwinnable fight against Occam and his razor?"
If there is one thing Apple does deserve credit for it is being relentlessly gui-centric since the Lisa. If anything, Microsoft played catch-up to them until Windows XP with gui vs. text ratios and only their non-religious it's-business-and-not-personal way, easier accessibility of information for programming to it, and their no-nonsense recognition that Microsoft is a SOFTWARE COMPANY kept them ahead of the Mac. Had they gone straight to something as good as Windows XP from the start, Apple would no longer be in business now... but there's a learning curve to everything.
So I hope the true underlying reason that Apple's OSX should be appreciated isn't lost in orgasmic geek fawning: it's opened the platform somewhat compared to earlier, it's powerful and extensible, and it has a beautiful easy-to-use for end-users interface, and NOT simply because it has some relation to *nix. The core of being a geek should be to understand the reasoning behind things and not religious blind faith that something is because it is. Leave that to church on Sunday and life after death. Leave the OS to deconstruction and analysis in the light of reality.
FWIW, I was impressed with the Lisa when I first saw it. I wish Apple hadn't squandered that with their exclusivity and arrogance... but there's a learning curve to everything.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The reason Apple did not dominate was because they could not, or would not, bring the cost of their hardware in line with the dos/windows world.
Not only that, as the sole provider of the hardware they could not innovate fast enough or provide enough variety in configurations to keep up with the pace of the development or need in the PC world.
Microsoft became so large because they rightly focused on only one side of the equation. They didn't have the risk of sitting on hardware. Old software can be discarded without much loss as the cost is mostly in development, not in production. As such if a hardware design would go over badly Microsoft was immune from the effect but Apple would not be as fortunate.
People over do it with all this "monopoly" trash talking about Microsoft that they ignorantly refuse to see the mistakes other companies made that basically handed dollars hand over fist to MS. Yes MS pulled some shennagins but their competitors gave them more than they could have wished for. You don't need a monopoly to beat poor execution or poor business practices.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Years ago, I worked with the Xerox 6085. I remember first seeing it, using it, and thinking, "Damn, this is good!" After all, I had only seen command-line interfaces. It had its problems: expensive, slow. It didn't have automatic pagination for documents so I would hit the "Paginate" button and go outside for a Coke and a smoke while waiting the 20 minutes it took to paginate some of the large documents I was word-processing. That was the most annoying thing about it.
:)
Anyway, I was yammering to everyone about this GUI thing. Most of the folks I knew who used DOS dismissed a GUI as a "toy." Then I met a guy who listened to me for like 30 seconds and said, "Oh, yeah, it's like the Lisa." I saw his Lisa computer and wanted one myself.
This guy was really a friend of a friend so we didn't see each other until a few years later when I was raving about my Mac 2 and he said, "Let me show you my Amiga....."
Wow! Thanks! We should have been listening to you all along, I guess!
PS: It sent a shiver down my spine when I read "orgasmic geek fawning."
While the machine and software were excellent for the time, it was Apple's boneheaded discontinuation and non-support of the Lisa that made Microsoft the company it is today and sent Apple into the corporate wasteland. I know more than one company that were sold on Lisa, bought is and deployed it. Then, they were told it was the end of the line - zip for you, nada. Had the knuckleheads at Apple even bothered to offer a discount on Macs to corporate Lisa buyers things might have been different. Instead, they got nothing so they shunned Apple. The instead bought MS and when Windows came out they never looked back. Thier employees cut their teeth on Windows machines, and then bought them for home where their kids got ahold of them. The rest is history. Yes, Apple sold a lot to schools, but home is where the fun is and most use came. It's been a Wintel world ever since. Since then, Apple has only gained among niche users in desktop publishing and more recently on media development. I don't count iPod as computer hardware. It is a straight consumer product. Had Apple behaved differently, the PC world could have been very different.
They did it in two weeks with a $100 budget.
Yes, they finally got around to taking the OS game seriously with OS-X. This is one of the reasons they are not the "Apple? Oh, is that company still around? Didn't they go bankrupt in 1987?" company anymore.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The Xerox Star came out in 1981, 2 years before the Lisa. The price tag was just too high and the thing never sold. The higher ups didn't understand the vision that went into the Parc research.
What you describe further on is copyright infringement, not theft. Were you earlier referring to a case of actual theft that you did not describe?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Yes, Apple did steal the idea for a graphic user interface from the demo visit that Jobs and crew made to Xerox PARC. Jobs and crew were primed for a completely new user interface for a low-cost (here meaning less than $50000 US 1981 dollars) business computer. They came, they saw, they copied.
Xerox hired great people who created a new computer environment. Xerox management saw it and realised that it could make them rich. Xerox slapped a $50,000 price on it, sat back, did nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Apple hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Apple management saw Xerox's work and realised that it could make them rich. Apple copied it, slapped a $10,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Atari hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Atari's 'management' saw Apples's work and realised that it could make them rich. Atari copied it, slapped a $1,000 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it bomb, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry people to see it.
Microsoft hired great people who wished to create a new computer environment. Microsoft management saw Atari's work and realised that it could make them rich. Microsoft copied it, slapped a $100 price on it, sat back, did next to nothing with it, and watched it soar, and have its central concept get stolen by the first hungry Unix programmers to see it.
The point? Stop your management monkeys from looking at the technology world as a means to get rich and more as way to build the framework and infrastructure that will allow wealth to be generated by new organizations and processes that are made possible by new technology. Then they will be able to make enough money to keep their pointy little heads happy.
Stop being so fucking greedy. Greed is not good. In the long run, it doesn't work.
"You know, if the guys leading Xerox in the 60s and 70s hadn't been morons, Xerox today would be equal to Xerox + IBM + Microsoft."
In other words they wouldn't be a monopoly.
This "cache" was called a "disk image" and it wasn't really a cache (it remembered Finder's data structure for the disk but not any of the data on it). With 128K RAM, the Mac didn't have room to keep any "offline" disk contents in memory.
The reason for it, for those who don't remember, was that the original Macintosh had no hard drive. Thus, the only way to copy files between floppies was to create some representation of an "ejected" disk on the desktop. To copy: you'd eject the disk, put in a new one, and then drag "offline" documents from the disk image onto the 2nd floppy.
Yeh, I remember the Xerox Star at NCC in 1982, it came out just before the Lisa. The problem with both of them was that they were too expensive for the growing home computer market. Apple responded with the Mac, Xerox responded with a really good CP/M-80-based computer.
Actually, industry observers and commentators up until 1990 frequently said that the graphical interface was a bad idea. Check out the press from that time and you'll see arguments that GUI's are too slow, childish, disrespect the expertise of users, and reduce productivity because they take your hands off the keyboard.
And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level. Try booting one up in Win 2.0 some time...
BTW, a huge chunk of what we now consider standard interface stuff was invented for the Mac, such as the file interface.
This was in summer of 1983. I'd been writing Apple and PC programs for years in 6502 and 8088 assembly. I couldn't believe the $10,000 price tag, which was so outlandish you'd never even think of recommending it to clients (a 20meg Corvus hard disk was $3,500 or so at that time, iirc).
But the bitmapped GUI was unlike anything you'd ever imagined. It wasn't even obvious how to start working with the thing. No one else was talking about anything similar at that time, at least not for practical, widespread usage. I think you're wrong about the hundred companies scrambling to implement it. It was one of those ideas whose brilliance took quite a while to become apparent to most people.
About a year later I started hearing rumors out of Redmond about something totally new called "event-driven programming," and of course we know that MSFT dates the original creation of Windows to 1983, with 1.0 shipping in 1985.
Raskin had worked with user interface design as a professor for a decade before he started work with Apple. Xerox and Raskin pretty much drew from the same sources while both of them obviously had ideas on their own (Raskin didn't like the mouse, for instance, prefering his own LEAP model). The main idea behind the trip to Xerox was not to be inspired by Xerox, but for Jobs to see in practice what Raskin had been talking about. Read more here: Holes in the histories
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
They were weird, nonstandard higher-capacity 5.25" drives. I believe that they were able to write to both sides of the floppy at the same time, doubling the capacity.
My mother worked in a government office from the mid 70s well through to the 80s when she retired. The office was in a nearby industrial park to which we could walk from our house. Occasional visits to this typical boring office were livened up by the fact that it had computers in it. Usually they were several-years-behind things, such as mainframes with line printer interfaces and those old reel-to-reel tape drives. However, the office actually purchased a number of Lisa machines, possibly as many as 10. Ultimately they proved to be nothing more than red-ink generators as technology moved quickly and passed them by, but I have fond memories of popping by to see my Mom and the Lisas. I came by that office occasionally and watched the PC grow up; her office mates watched me grow up. It never seems like a special thing until you look back on it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
They had a huge chunk of metal shaped as cooling fins but those fins never had a thermal path to the mobo or other electronics inside.
Result: they often over-heated and parts failed. We had to keep FOUR Lisa's on hand as parts in order to support in a timely manner each Lisa we sold.
We finally took Lisa off the shelf and emphasized other PCs available at the time.
I'm not sure that this article is very accurate. I recently read a book titled "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age" that tries to provide a detailed history of PARC. In the book they say Xerox developed the BitBlt machine instruction that makes it possible to have overlapping windows. On this page they said that Xerox never developed overlapping windows. According to the book, Steve Jobs told the Xerox employees something along the lines of "Look, we've already go a bit-mapped display on our Lisa project but we think you have some technology that can teach us how to make the GUI easier to use." Which makes sense because the System's Lab of Xerox had what was called the "learning research group" that tried to see how children would respond to the GUI. I also seem to remember a qoute from an apple employee who said he kind of wished they never would have visited Xerox because it tainted everything they created from that point on. While they did use some of the Xerox ideas alot of the Lisa was original research according to that guy. Anyway, the book goes into a lot more detail and some of that page does agree with it.. just saying.. it doesn't seem entirely accurate.
With some media you can do an eject (after a right click) rather than going down in the task bar on the
safely remove hardware icon.
Much better than just ripping it out.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macin tosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt&topic= Origins&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium
Windows 3.0 users did NOT "need to upgrade" to intel 386 based machines (which were several years old by then - not NEW as you state) because Windows 3.0 in 1990 supported 3 modes.
- Real mode (which ran on just about anything x86 available)
- Standard mode (which required an 80286 or above processor)
- 386 Enhanced mode (which, obviously, needed a 386 to run) and took advantage of all those "Advanced CPU" features you claim weren't supported in Windows until five years and 3 versions later.
Really, if you're going to make it up as you go along, let people know it's just fictional ranting.Chester Carlson invented electrophotography and helped found Xerox. He grew up dirt poor due to his parents being ill and unable to work. I think he worked three or more jobs while getting his college degree. When he invented xerography for more than a decade, no company was interested into producing it. Later on Xerox was founded as a partnership between him and Haloid. He became very wealthy after that but none the less gave back more than a $100 million to charitable causes.
This, to me, is a wonderful example of the frequently serendipitous nature of discovery and invention, and I'm amazed that moments like this don't become more legendary than they already are.
Tim
The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders, and stopped giving tours. Steve Jobs, convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the eighties, offered Xerox a killer deal. Apple, which was still privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted, and gave Steve and a team of engineers from the Lisa project a tour of the technologies at PARC.
Thanks, though I knew Xerox invested in Apple I didn't know how it came about. Do you have a link with this info? I'd like to be able to show people that Xerox invested in Apple and that Steve Jobs didn't just steal the idea of a gui. Also along the same lines dispite what many think that Microsoft stole the Mac gui and came out with Windows, Apple actually sold the rights to Microsoft. Hope I still have it, there was an article I read a few years back about this.
The Apple engineers were not the only ones to be impressed by the visit, the researchers at Xerox, long discouraged by Xerox's inability to release a product based on the technology developed at PARC, were impressed by Apple's seeming willingness to implement advanced technologies in their products.
The people at PARC came out with a lot of good things however unfortunately Xerox had trouble seeing a market and commericalizing those ideas.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I thought Windows was purposly designed so that you removed media by "ripping it out". They do this by flushing the data to the device as often as possible, ignoring errors, and recovering cleanly if the device was miswritten. Sounds bad, but the chances of failure are miniscule (much more likely to mess up the connector plugging it in), so IMH this is *right* and one of the areas where Windows is well ahead of either Linux or OS/X. Micorsoft does "get it" sometimes...
Bill Atkinson left the two PARC visits with a mistaken understanding of the capabilities of the Smalltalk software. While Tesler was giving a demo, Atkinson thought that he had seen two windows layered on top of each other, though they were just bordering each other.
l ltalk-72-1977.jpgl ltalk-72-simple.jpgp ng
I doubt the reliability of this story... This must have been a very early version of Smalltalk if it didn't have overlapping windows.
http://squab.no-ip.com:8080/collab/uploads/61/sma
http://squab.no-ip.com:8080/collab/uploads/61/sma
http://squab.no-ip.com:8080/collab/uploads/St-76.
Hmm... if Atkinson thought he saw overlapping windows, then to me whether PARC could have demo'd it or not doesn't matter. My point was that Bill THOUGHT it did (though he was really looking at adjacent, and not overlapping windows), and designed his system to meet the expected capability.
Tim
Of the three items you listed, only one is actually an Apple innovation... and that one is an innovation we'd be better off without: pull-down menus.
Pull-down menus were a hack to let them have a single-button mouse. Everyone else used contextual menus, and even Apple has in a backhanded way adopted them... and before you go all Fitt's Law on me, don't forget that there are *5* "best targets" on the screen for Fitt's Law, and "right under the mouse" is one of them.
Overlapping windows were NOT an Apple innovation. Smalltalk-72 had overlapping windows Smalltalk-76 had overlapping windows. Smalltalk-80 and Interlisp-D and the Xerox Star office system had overlapping windows. The Star came out before the Lisa! I don't know where the whole urban legend about Apple inventing overlapping windows came from, but it's not true.
The trashcan is just a special case of the Xerox Star Office System's document targets. You printed a document on the Star by dragging it to a printer icon. You sent mail by dragging the filled-out letter to a mailbox. The Star, as shipped, didn't have a trashcan, but they had supposedly considered and rejected the idea.
I thought I read somewhere that MS had to settle out of court at some point because some stuff MS did looked too much like Apple's stuff. Perhaps not with Windows 1.0, but with Windows 95 maybe?
I don't know or recall what it was about but back in the late '90s, I'm thinking 1997 or '98 when Apple and Microsoft announced that MS was investing I think it was $200 million in nonvoting Apple stock MS also paid Apple another $200 million to settle a lawsuit Apple brought against MS. This was when MacWorld had that expo in Boston and Bill Gates appeared "on stage" there via satellite.
FalconShould there be a Law?
One thing to remember is that the floppy drives in Macs have always been motorized. Yes, you can do the paper-clip trick, but the normal procedure was to tell the OS to eject the drive. Thus, Apple made assumptions about how and when the disk would be removed that are different from Microsoft's -- where PCs had drives with manually removed floppies. //gs!), the command-E menu option just ejected the disk so that you could swap it out and, later, swap it back. In contrast, dragging to the trash meant "I'm done with this floppy"
I think that this is why (as another poster mentioned) Microsoft implemented a scheme to enable floppies to be 'ripped-out' and Apple did not.
Also, since folks frequently had to play 'floppy-shuffle' for larger programs and data (I certainly remember playing this with my
It's not even worth commenting on all the biased and misleading statements in that article. But the Lisa was certainly not the first commercial computer with a GUI. And Smalltalk had overlapping windows.
Yes, this does work better in the Windows PC world than in the Mac world. How can anyone argue that jamming a tiny paper clip in a pinhole is a better eject methed than just pressing the eject button?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I've had xerox machines from both Canon and Xerox
They were Xerox's made by Xerox, if they were made by Canon then they weren't Xerox machines. Xerox is a trademark and as such only Xerox has the right to use or grant use of "Xerox".
Falcon
I don't know about Zaphod's brother,
But thanks for all the fish.
Should there be a Law?
That these two accounts are similar, but show some discrepancy, gives more credibility to what they have in common.
Tim
Also, I know of two other windowing workstations that were commercially available in 1981:
The PERQ
Lisp machines from LMI and Symbolics
The Lisa was not the first commercial GUI machine, though it probably does hold the title for the first commercial machine under $10K.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
ideas/knowledge don't fall into the domain of property, no matter what anyone with vested interests tell you.
I agree but try convincing the IP industry it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
and invented overlapping windows, drop down menus, highly readable screenfonts, a desktop with integrated file manager, file oriented OS (instead of an application oriented one), auto-eject floppies and a full office suite (Lisa Office System 7/7, care to ask why MS doesn't use the term Office System anymore for Office 2003?) to boot.
Not to mention auto power off and resume everything after power on(you have to see this to believe it) .
I've used the Lisa extensively in the late 80s and early 90s (before they became to fragile) and I absolutely adore this system. I wish it would be possible to come up with an emulator. It's a great computer that was at least 10 years before it's time.
They may of had but Apple also targetted students. Used to be Apple offered %50 off for Macs to students, now it's only about %10.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I remember a time when Slashdot was about linux!
The speed at which this post gets modded down is only proof of Slashdot's new Apple-whoring over-lords!
Have you seen the menu on the left of the main page? It's got a lot of differnet areas of coverage. As things grow they typically diversify.
FalconShould there be a Law?
from the helluva-contraction-you-got-here dept.
It's interesting to know that CmdrTaco considers the Apple Lisa to be some kind of pre-natal spasm...
Or else he really was seeing overlapping windows.
I can't imagine how anyone could have demoed any of the Smalltalk systems without ever overlapping any windows. Smalltalk-72 had them, right from a very early stage, and I honestly can't see how someone giving a demo could have deliberately lined up two windows without overlapping them, and never actually overlapped any windows, unless they were trying very hard to avoid revealing that capability.
Which would be really weird, because the oldest published photos of Smalltalk-72 screens already showed overlapping windows.
PARC was fragmented into two camps: one which had all but given up on Xerox to bring Smalltalk to market and another headed by Adele Goldberg who, teary with rage, exclaimed."That's nuts! It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"
"This is bullshit! ... Scotty, tell them what we want! We need to tell them about Lisa!" -Steve Jobs
Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows.
:)
Aha, that makes a lot more sense. Though they definitely did have them by the time they showed Smalltalk-80 at NCC - I remember being boggled by a demo where a floating window (with a picture of Albert Einstein on it) drifted across the screen on top of other windows.
But it's entirely possible that some earlier versions didn't.
And of course before Mac OS X the scheduler made it almost a moot point, at least as far as having background programs writing into windows was concerned.
Ironically, with "screen-scraping" remote control programs on Windows we have returned to having to click on a window to get it to update.
Nice site to look at and poke around.
If he bought machines he had no use for, on the basis that later he could upgrade them (so they'd be useful then, perhaps?) then it's his own fault. Why did he buy a machine for $12,000 if it was of no use to him at that precise moment? You can't blame Apple for bad buying decisions - either the machine was worth the money or it wasn't in which case he shouldn't have spent it. Simple.
They really only got serious about it with OS-X. Their previous attempts were rather crippled.
In the time period in question (1982-1984) the Lisa and Macintosh OS was anything but crippled.
Compared to PC-DOS/MS-DOS, or AppleDOS, the Lisa/Mac GUI was extremely powerful. High-res graphics, a system Clipboard, WYSIWYG fonts, built-in sound....
Of course, it was lightweight compared to Unix, but Unix was expensive (more even than the $10K Lisa) and proprietary (Linux woud be almost a decade in coming, and BSD was more research project than product.)
> Or else he really was seeing overlapping windows.
> I can't imagine how anyone could have demoed any of the Smalltalk systems without ever overlapping any windows.
Yes, he saw overlapping windows - Alan Kay had come up with that idea. But Atkinson misunderstood the behavior they implemented.
This is from Stephen Levy's Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything:
That most of Windows was not shifted over to 32-bit operation until Windows 95. It certainly had 32-bit disk access, memory addressing, whatever though.
The death of the Apple Lisa is far more illuminating. The machine was way ahead of its time, but it had huge corporate fans including a few Fortune 100 companies. Lord knows what they expected it to do. The motherboards (roughly a foot square) slid into vertical slots and had snap-down tabs on either top corner, which made it easy to lever the board back out again. And swapped they were, over and over again, as board A overheated in machine B and got swapped into machine D, whose own board circulated back into machine B. With a smile. It generated billable hours and mileage. Until the advent of Mac OS X 10.2, there wasn't anything like it that actually worked, not for decades. The Lisa OS was SCO Xenix, IIRC.
I started on an LC too, in 1991 - my student work exposed me to dtp on the Mac two years previously. And I certainly did love the Mac, used to proselytise for it all the time.
When I finished university I lost access to any computer for several years. So by the time I did get a new computer, it had to be a Linux box - wasn't interested in Win95 machines, and Macs were still too expensive.
Haven't looked back since. I think the current crop of Macs is pretty much perfect, but I don't really think Apple will make the price-point necessary to really threaten Windows marketshare.
That being said, the contortions that dieshard Mac fanatics go through to defend their OS of choice have always made me seriously wonder about their sanity... Christ, people, you're always going on about how a computer must be a tool to use, not something tried out just for its own sake... are Macs exempt from this intrinsically?
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Don't have my copy handy, but ACC's "2001: A Space Odyssey" had a description of one of the first GUIs. In it Dave Boman puts his finger on a postage stamp picture on the computer display (built into the table) and it expands to the application.
I don't think ACC invented this, I think it was based on other scientists he had talked to.
The point: The GUI was completely obvious to anyone in computers back in the 70's and before, it's just that the cheap (<$2000) machines at the time didn't have anywhere near the power. I myself coded a program that created point and click type interfaces for other programs on a H89 running HDOS. (no mouse, you used the cursor keys to move the selection, and press enter to take the action)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
They weren't morons. Research and Development has always been bad at sales and business planning. The Parc was a successful prototype and Xerox didn't have the experience selling computers to hobbyists and enthusiasts in a mass market environment. It's like IBM at the time, they were about big iron, only it was big copying stuff instead of mainframes.
Jobs et al. had the benefit of being close to the situation - personal computing. This is pre-Lan parties, pre-inkjets, pre virtually everything. Poor Xerox corp. was making money hand over fist already and had a lab inventing stuff pretty far out of their expertise. They were really smart at doing that. I mean, the salespeople wouldn't have known what to do with that hardware. The whole business was built on copying forms. It's kind of like Sony, once they purchased media stuff, they couldn't invent the ipod. Only Xerox was much more focused and successfuly at the time.
Yes, at one time I had a tool for punching a notch so that you could flip it over and write on the back. Single-sided floppies were not certified for double-sided use, but most worked OK, although not suitable for critical data. The Lisa's floppies were designed to be written on both sides without having to flip them over. Because of the way the heads press against the soft disk surface, the heads could not both be at the same end of the drive. So a "normal" double-sided 5.25" floppy had a read slot in the floppy disk cover on both sides at the same end of the floppy, the read slots for a Lisa disk were at opposite ends.
for a musical history, see "Heart of the Apple Lisa ... A filk by Jordan Kare...http://www.jg.org/folk/artists/fredsmall/ap plelisa.html ...of the original work by Mr. Fred Small (includes chords) http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/theheart.htm
Remind me not to license anything from you for money. I don't want you accusing me of theft. RTFA,
MOD PARENT DOWN ! ! !
we would all be running 6502 clones instead of x86 clones.
In a way, we do. The ARM/XScale chip at the heart of the majority of instant-on, low-power PDAs, mp3 players (incl iPods), mobiles phones, etc, is basically a 32-bit descendent of the 6502.
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and invented overlapping windows
Overlapping bitmapped window systems were invented at PARC, AT&T, and several other places. Overlapping windows in general were even older than that.
drop down menus
Present in Smalltalk (with a slightly different look).
highly readable screenfonts
Apple was bitmapped like everybody else. When they came out with TrueType, outline fonts and hinting had already been used for on-screen display by Sun, NeXT, and IBM. The technology behind it came from Adobe and several other companies.
file oriented OS (instead of an application oriented one) [...] a full office suite
Two huge design mistakes that the industry has been suffering from ever since.
Not to mention auto power off and resume everything after power on(you have to see this to believe it).
Apple didn't invent that either, and it's also a feature that other systems had at the time (including Smalltalk).
Apple saw the idea, but implemented it correctly
Apple saw the idea and marketed it correctly. Big difference. Technologically, the software that Apple produces (to this day) sucks. You're right, though, that among the machines Apple has put out, the Lisa was probably technologically the best and most original.
The PERQ
So *that's* what it was. My Dad worked as a coder for ICL (a PERQ reseller) in the 1970s and 1980s. Every so often he'd bring back these huge machines in the boot of the car and set them up at home. Early in the 1970s I was blown away when he coded a few early games on VDU machines - this was years before Apple/Atari/Commodore machines became common.
I remember in his office, being put playing with these weird paper white screen machines. Sometime around 1981 or so. That was why, when I saw a Mac a few years later, I remember thinking "why is this a big deal? didn't they do that years ago?" I just thought the paper white screens had, you know, gone out of fashion and that green and black screens were the new hotness.
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