Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
The first Lisa had 5.25" twiggy disks, the second gen may be what you're thinking of.
And what's with all these articles from the braeburn guys? How many comments do we need showing they don't bother researching ANY facts about the things they write about? It's really getting twee to see so much attention put on morons who can't get a few simple facts straight.
Go google info about the Lisa. you'll find more correct info out there by looking for it yourself.
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.
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
The Macintosh XL came later. It was the Lisa 2 hardware with a change of video board to make the pixels square so Mac software would look right on the Lisa screen. (Lisas has rectangular pixels that were taller than wide.)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
That is correct. What most people don't know is that the 128K Mac almost ended up with Twiggy drives as well. If anyone has a 128K (possibly even a 512K) original Macintosh, Pull the back cover off. You may have to remove the motherboard to see this (its been a few years, so I don't recall exactly). The metal frame that holds the front plastic bezel has punchouts in it for a 5.25" drive. So the decision to go with the 3.5" drive in the Mac was made fairly late in the design cycle.
Quite a number of years back, I attended one of the early MacHack's in Ann Arbor. Late one night, one of the Apple engineers (who had been around for the birth of the Macintosh) told the story about how they got the Sony 3.5" drive included. Apparently Steve wanted the Twiggy drive. Someone (not sure who) was doing the 3.5" drive development on the sly without letting Steve know about it. To do all this, they had to have someone from Sony there to work with them. One day Steve was seen coming down the hall... so they stuffed the little guy from Sony into a closet to avoid a ruckus with Teh Steve ! In the end, the SS-SD 400K Sony drive prevailed (over the, IIRC 360K, Twiggy drives). I have a hunch that getting the 3.5" drive in the Mac had something to do with replacing the Twiggy drive in the Lisa.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss