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The Birth of the Apple Lisa

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the helluva-contraction-you-got-here dept.

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."

3 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Stole by christurkel · · Score: 4, Informative

    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/
  2. Didn't want the graphical interface... by Sithech · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Don't quote history you don't actually know by TheAncientHacker · · Score: 5, Informative
    Actually, 80386 support in Windows started with Windows/386 2.10 in 1988 but why mess up a mythology with something as messy as facts.

    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.
    1. Real mode (which ran on just about anything x86 available)
    2. Standard mode (which required an 80286 or above processor)
    3. 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.