Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Inside the flop that changed Apple forever”.
The year is 1984. Dawn of the Apple Macintosh, the Mac Wows the world with a graphical user interface and something called a mouse, it’s revolutionary, but it wasn’t Apple’s first try. This is the Lisa released a year before it’s pretty hard to find one. These days they were only sold for about two years, but you can find Lisa’s design influence everywhere because it helped create Computing, as we know it when Apple started working on the Lisa in the late 1970s, personal computers asked a lot more of users. Some models, like the Apple II, were hugely successful, but learning them was a commitment.
Most computers were command line, oriented you type, something at a computer and it typed some usually complained, but you know it was. It was sort of a textual interaction. That’S interface designer Bill Atkinson from an interview with the Computer History Museum. He and others at Apple knew that if they wanted to widen the appeal of computers, they’d need to evolve beyond that command line to something more visual.
We’Re going to try our best to show you rather than tell you about this program. The fill interfaces actually date back to the 19 90s and you’re named Douglas Engelberg in this now famous 1968 demo, Engelbert teases, the earliest glimpses of modern, graphically driven Computing Windows, hyperlinks. Even the mouse, I don’t know why they call it a mouse. Sometimes I apologize it started that way.
We never to change it. This then, fias were picked up by research, lab Xerox Park and built into a prototype called the alto. The alto boasted overlapping windows and pop-up menus driven by a mouse Apple, co-founder, Steve Jobs, learned about the alto and cut a deal with Xerox to see it. The system blew him away and he returned to Apple with a new Zeal for visual interfaces within you know, 10 minutes. It was obvious to me that all computers would work like this designers at Apple, took a lot of inspiration from the alto and Beyond got a room-sized experimental interface called dataland at MIT, which you flew around with a touch screen and a joystick and an IBM concept Called picture world full of office analogs, you actually sealed your emails in a virtual envelope and dropped them in an outbox Apple thought of office workers as its big New Market. So it felt natural to make a computer that worked like a virtual desktop, which is exactly what the Lisa became.
The Lisa was Apple’s vision for everything an office computer should be. It was so full of new Concepts that Apple produced a demo, video explaining everything. Now you can think of it as being like your office with a desktop and other office fixtures, here’s a place to store information, a folder and a place to get rid of information. A waste paper basket looking back from 2023. These ideas are second nature: icons drop down menus, pop-up Windows. If you’ve used any personal computer, you basically know how to use Elisa sort of. Oh God, I made it noise, some of it’s more literal than we’re used to you. Don’T technically launch applications.
Instead, you have these stationary pads with different kinds of paper: writing paper for a text, file, rows and columns for a spreadsheet to start a new document. You tear off a virtual sheet. It is funny this is so focused on neatness, but it does still put the default document in the messiest possible place. The way files move around is really literal too.
The Lisa ship, with a hard drive, called the profile which Apple took pains to connect to the real world. First, we’ll select and open the profile. You keep the folders in there right right. It’S just like a filing cabinet to work on a document. You first move it to the desktop, like you would in your office and then open it up when you’re done, you can put it away, which saves, closes and files the document away. Again, it does everything with these long animations, so you can follow along Apple.
Figured multitasking was important for office workers. So if you’ve got multiple documents open, you can just do the thing that feels natural and click the new window and all these apps play by. Basically, the same rules, a lot of these things that we discovered were a matter of trial and error, not inventing it right. The first time we bumbled into the Lisa user interface. One mistake at a time Bill Atkinson documented the Lisa development process in a series of Polaroids. So you can look back and see how a lot of these tools developed, the folder tabs were actually shaped, like folder tabs, with a little curve to them and when you shrunk one down and go back into the drawer, we think of a folder. Now, as a container that other things go inside of, but we were confused about that at the time, and so we actually thought of this as a folder but had text in it instead of having other things in it. Sometimes, Solutions created new problems which led to even better ideas. One point: we had a little pull down menus on each window, but the problem is if the window was over in the side, you couldn’t get all of the titles and who’s near the bottom. You couldn’t get all of the items, they moved the menus to the top of the screen, but that made users drag their Mouse a long way.
The solution to that was another now ubiquitous feature when you move the mouse faster. The cursor moves farther. So a rapid flick would take you right up to the top these weren’t all brand new mechanics. You can see similar ideas in, for instance, the 1981 Xerox star, but Apple’s ideas often feel more refined.
This demo, video for the star, shows you how to move an icon with a click and then a keystroke and then a second click using the move. Key, you can arrange your desktop in any way. You, like Apple’s version, was the one that lasted, drag and drop Apple. Well, it put a lot of work into the Lisa, but that wasn’t the only project on the table.
But what I’d like to do now is show you, the Macintosh in person Apple developed, the Lisa in parallel with the Macintosh, though, with very different intent. Well, the Mac came out only one year after the Lisa okay, it was a baby Lisa. It was. How do we make the lease affordable? How can we also make it um? No, not only lower cost but less stiff, we’re trying to make the leesa for an office worker.
We were trying to make the Mac for a uh 15 year old, even so. The Mac team borrowed people and ideas from the Lisa and apple advertised, the Mac as having Advanced Elisa technology in a far cheaper stripped down product and using the Mac. It’S hard to see it as anything, but a baby Lisa there are little tweaks. The housekeeping menu is gone and the now famous Apple menu has appeared.
The Mac acknowledges the existence of applications, but it couldn’t run multiple apps. At the same time, what switching apps looked like on a Mac? Give it just a moment as a reminder here is multitasking on Lisa, it’s so much fun, getting to see the ability to have multiple apps open at the same time as this cool luxury that was backtracked upon and not brought back until later, the trade-offs Apple made Paid off the Mac ran faster than the Lisa and it cost thousands of dollars. Less Apple went all in on the Mac in 1984 and it quietly discontinued the Lisa a year later, once the desktop metaphor got its hooks into the industry, it didn’t. Let go Microsoft.
Windows arrived in 1985, while Mac OS kept evolving today it can be hard to imagine computers turning out any other way. Let’S experience the World of Windows, 95., hello, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC, dude you’re, getting a Dell. Of course. Nothing lasts forever.
Hey Siri start a new note. What do you want it to say, notes on Lisa script, Voice, assistance in search have become a bigger and bigger part of computing routing people around the desktop mobile phones still use files and folders, but we rarely have to think about them or see them and with The rise of AI chatbots AR and VR the last vestiges of engelbert’s World of Windows and mice might finally vanish. In short, the error of the desktop metaphor might finally be ending, but no matter what becomes of user interfaces. Lisa’S design Legacy shines through.
It taught Apple that computers should be built for people, not the other way around sometime. There are ideas in air and the right person puts up a catcher Smith and catches the idea, and if they didn’t, somebody else would have caught it. Things would have progressed in that direction, but the Lisa contributed toward the idea that computers were for everyone. If you’re really curious about the Lisa now you’re.
In luck, we’ve got a big documentary coming about its life, death and afterlife. It’S a story of politics, personal Grievances and clandest and burial in a Utah landfill. That’S all coming soon, so stay tuned, .