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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.
" 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.
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.
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!
So Microsoft took the good business approach and Apple paid the price for early adoption. Big deal.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
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....."
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.
Back around 1990 or so he bought a Mac IIfx. That thing was trippy scary fast for the time, and it cost him a HUGE pile of cash - something like $12,000. Which is a huge amount of money for a computer by todays standards and just short of extortionate back in 1990. However it had that weird 64 pin memory, so upping the RAM cost a freakin' fortune, and it was never used again, which meant that this machine was a $13,000 DOORSTOP. That pissed him off. But he was a Believer, and he went back to the Kool-Aid trough again in summer of 1995 and bought a Quadra 950 for about $8,000. It was discontinued a few months later, and at the time with no realistic upgrade path, except to spend another $8000 on a 9500.
At that point he said "FUCK APPLE" - he had invested over $20,000 on TWO computers, both of which were doorstops. He was able to strip the 950 for some parts, at least. Since then, he's been a Wintel Guy ever since.
Apple has a habit of doing that - building extremely expensive machines that have no useful upgrade path. Now that computers are so friggin cheap, upgrape path doesn't mean that much, but back in 1990 it really did.
I bought an LC (or was it an LC-II? I don't remember...) back in 1991 because it was a colour macintosh for less than $2000, which I thought was FANTASTIC. I think it had 8 megs of RAM. But, with no upgrade path, it was useless after a few years, and then I bought my Quadra 650 for about $1700. The Quadra was great - it worked like a champ for years and I finally sold it to someone who is still using it for word processing running Word 5, FreeHand 5, and Quark 3 to this very day.
Apple's crude discontinuation of Lisa was just the first in a series of major customer mis-steps by Apple. (full disclosure: both of my Apple computers died in April, so now I'm running a cheapy Wintel box, but only until the MacIntel boxen arrive. Then I'll get a MacIntel powerbook. YAY!!! I look forward to getting back to OSX. Windows makes my day long and grim, and the software I use precludes Linux, for now.)
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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"?
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.
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.