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

It gets good here

[pcmanjon]

" 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.

Re: It gets good here

[ClosedSource]

You can spin things any way you like, but the fact of the matter is Xerox didn't grant any rights to Apple.

Eventually Xerox sued Apple, but the case was thrown out for the same reason that Apple's case against MS was thrown out. The courts didn't buy the argument that a program's "look and feel" were covered by copyright.

Apple never tried to argue in that case that their tour of Xerox entitled them to any rights, by the way.

Not the first....

[AtariAmarok]

"the first commercial computer with a graphical interface"

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.

Re:Lisa Cut Apple's Throat

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I *love* using apple computers, but I have to add to Mr Bullfish's point with a story about a friend of mine.

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

Star was $16K; also Lisp machines and PERQ

[alispguru]

According to here, the Star was $16500 at first release. They were great machines for their time, but not really at their best unless connected to a network with file servers and printers - stand-alone support was minimal. I can attest to that from my time at Xerox AI Systems (1986-88) - our stand-alone customers had to make do with Epson dot-matrix printers that sort-of worked, and we sent them system image updates on huge stacks of 5 1/4" floppies whose reliability was questionable on a good day.

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.