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

People think...

[PsiPsiStar]

The RIAA thinks that I stole music using Kazaa, but it's much more subtle than that...

Stole

[christurkel]

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.

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.

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

Didn't want the graphical interface...

[Sithech]

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.

Don't quote history you don't actually know

[TheAncientHacker]

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.