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."

Comments

stole the graphical interface?

[jmcmunn]

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.

Re:stole the graphical interface?

[HyperChicken]

Paid to look. They didn't buy the ideas.

I'm terribly upset that they stole DOS for the measly price of a few thousand dollars

You have some upside-down view of the world. Stealing is not when you buy something.

Re:stole the graphical interface?

[TheAncientHacker]

At OOPSLA '87 (back in the pre-history days) we pretty much all were astounded that we had all been strongly influenced by a single article in Scientific American in the late '70s that showed off future trends in computing including the work at PARC. You never know what will be the thing that really sets off an industry. A fairly interesting group was there including Alan Kay (Smalltalk-72), Adele Goldberg (Smalltalk-80), Bjarne Stroustup (C++), Brad Cox (Objective C) - how much each of them inspired that article or was inspired by it is left to the reader.

Oh, the lost chances!

[ArcSecond]

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.

The difference between Apple and Microsoft

[teslatug]

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.

Re:The difference between Apple and Microsoft

[Budenny]

Yes, this is characteristic, but its surely not the real and most important difference in terms of outcomes? The real difference is the business model. Apple's model was and is to only let you run the OS on their hardware. This ensured that when the market raced away, they could only supply a tiny fraction of it. MS's model was to sell to anyone to run it on anything. Lots of hardware suppliers then entered the market. The result was that there were no supply constraints at all. Put it another way: the practical result of the Apple business model was to force most of its potential customers to buy from someone else. They just could not keep up with demand. This ensured they would become a niche platform, with all the consequences of that. Alas, they seem to be about to repeat history....

The moral at the level of strategy is this. When creating a booming market with a great product, ask yourself how all the demand will be met. You have to find a way to meet it yourself. Otherwise, someone else will. Apple didn't realise this. They thought their problem was stopping people running the OS on other hardware. Once you have seen the wrong problem, its very hard to recover.

Damn it!

[Anonymous Coward]

BOUGHT. BOUGHT the GUI from Xerox.

Microsoft was the one that stole it, don't mix the two!

timeline

[AtariAmarok]

"Hm... I prefer the OS9 interface. OSX has an ugly gaudy feeling to it."

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?

Lisa Cut Apple's Throat

[Bullfish]

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.

Well, YES, they did steal the idea....

[Simonetta]

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.

Re:Well, YES, they did steal the idea....

[NanoGator]

"Is any one else tired of hearing this shit about how Apple ripped off Xerox?"

Not as tired as we are about hearing how Microsoft stole everybody blind while everybody else was completely innocent and lovable and did no wrong.

Re:Well, YES, they did steal the idea....

[NanoGator]

"And not as tired as we are of straw-man appologists. Microsoft is a monopoly, the other guys aren't, so of course they are going to get the most flack."

You're just kidding yourself if you think MS is getting all that flack here because of their monopoly. It's cool to hate Microsoft. I don't have a problem with that. I don't have any love for MS either. But the hypocracy that is born from it is ridiculous and sometimes even dangerous.

There's a huge difference between apologizing for MS and showing a little objectivity. The business world is full of evils. Not even Google is exempt from this. But since all of the "sky is falling" attention is focused solely in Redmond's direction, you'll be blissfully unaware of it.

You'll pardon me for not finding your blind hatred of anything MS does admirable.

Apple invented less than you think...

[argent]

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.

Re:Not the first....

[MojoStan]

But the company that made the laser printer into something people would buy started with an A.

You misspelled "Adobe" (wink).

From "Triumph of the Nerds":

Despite the hype, by late 1984, the Mac's sales were disastrous...

Until someone invented a way to print exactly what was on the screen gui would be, well a lot of hooey. Apple's problem was the dot matrix printer. It gave everything a type-writer quality. But salvation was at hand - and once again it owed a lot to Xerox Parc. One of Parc's former brains, John Warnock, had invented a technology that allowed a laser printer to print exactly, precisely what was on your screen. He started a company called Adobe to market his invention - when along came Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs: But I heard a few times, people would tell me, hey there was these guys over in this garage at Xerox Parc you ought to go see em and I finally went and saw em and I saw what they were doing and it was better than what we were doing.

John Warnock, Co-founder, Adobe Systems: Steve Jobs came in, he told us about the Macintosh. He knew that the dot matrix printers, the old image writer that they had was not going to fly in a business environment. He had no...he and Atkinson had not been able to figure out how to drive laser printers and what we had figured out how to do what no-one else had figured out how to do was drive laser printers.