Submitted by The Lisa, started in 1979 to provide an inexpensive business computer to Apple’s line-up, enjoyed little success. With its advanced object oriented UI and powerful office suite, the computer was priced well above the means of most businesses. Despite its failure, the Lisa influenced most user interfaces, and introduced many features unheard of in earlier systems (like the Xerox Star or VisiOn). Read the story of the development and demise of the Apple Lisa here.
A $10,000 original working Lisa recently sold on eBay for $10,000, sure inflation yada yada, but lets see any other computer get a ROI like that after 20 plus years.
Here’s Steve Jobs demoing the NeXT Computer
http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/graphics/movies/jobs_NS30_demo_…
And here are some recent screenshots of Mac OS X “Tiger” taking the evolution of the Apple operating system to the present
http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/PhotoAlbum2.html
Microsoft, yada yamediocreda, but one has to admit Apple leads in the user interface department. Supporting Apple is supporting progress, it’s cool being part of the agent of change instead of being medicore.
Please………..
Drop the “progress” thing. Everyone knows that nowadays Apple doesn’t have all that much do with innovation. During Wozniak’s era, Apple did innovate. Now it’s more about marketing, thats not innovation!
Selling a product using the “cool factor” makes business sense, but it has nothing to do with innovation.
Agreed. Mac OS has basically reverted in terms of UI ever since Jobs came back to apple and OS X came out.
-bytecoder
Hey, and you know what I like about me? My ability to be self-congratulatory.
heh, that jobs video was kinda funny.
i must say i liked that service integration system, something that i dont think windows have to any real degree (as for linux, it may have as soon as they get dbus or something similar realy integrated into the big desktops).
still, the video was way to much “wee, this is cool” and “we are first with everything” for my taste. no wonder jobs is able to woo the hordes
this is like what…the 2000th LISA article in the last 2 years…
I’m going to start a site that *only* has news on all the exciting new events in the Lisa world.
There is a good video on the Computer History Museum on Microsofts channel 9 site that has an interview with one of the Lisa’s designers.
I think the interface was a lot easier to use than today’s GUIs. You didn’t work with applications, you work with documents. Seems a lot more intuitive. Here’s one of the links in the article:
http://toastytech.com/guis/lisaos3.html
umm.. that is what the entire Mac OS has been like since the first mac.
No it’s not. Even today, you have to open an application to create a document.
umm… duh.
but the document centered interface is different than document centered execution.
I agree with the guys above. There seems to be a story on the history of the Lisa every fricking month. WE ALL KNOW THE HISTORY OF THE LISA NOW. It’s over. It’s done. Nothing new is happening. We only needed to read about it once.
…at the giant strides of 20-30 years ago. It is so much nicer than looking to the incremental ones of today. I think we should make up a term for this sort of thinking. I vote for ‘Cutting Edge Nostalgia’. Catchy right? It discribes this behaviour perfectly. Plus it gets bonus points for being an oxymoron.
I am surprised that there is no working emulator yet
I have been lusting after this emulator since I first laid my eyes on it. Heck there is even a newton emulator! I would love to play with the Lisa OS
When it was released the Mac was a crippled version of the Lisa and it’s amazing how long the Mac OS took to completely catch up with the Lisa’s UI.
One example of the inferiority of Mac OS is the horrible modal file dialogs that hung around until Mac OS 8. IIRC the whole idea of file dialogs to open and save documents was created because of the lack of multitasking in Mac OS. They integrated a mini-filemanager into applications because the Mac OS wasn’t capable of switching to the Finder when running another app. The Lisa’s document centric UI didn’t need anything like that, you used the main file manager for all those file operations. Unlike the Mac it was designed to allow efficient multitasking from the very start.
Probably the most ridiculous thing is that other companies like Microsoft copied Mac compromises rather than the more elegant Lisa. RISC OS is one of the only other OSes I can think of that’s close to being as document centric, which is one of the things that makes it a very elegant OS.
Actually, OS/2 was also (object) document orientated in some of of its operations.
For example, to create a new text file, you could drag from a ‘blank text file’ icon. You then rename the blank text file and then double click on it to open it in an ascociated application.
OS/2’s WPS took the idea even further as you could make nearly any type of object into a ‘template’. Create an empty .zip file. Call it ‘blank.zip’ and then check the ‘template’ flag in its properies. By way of further example, you might create a directory with a few files and some sub directories and then use that as a ‘new website’ template.
RISCOS drag and drop saving is also a very neat feature which promotes a logical way of interacting with documents. No doubt MS will ‘invent’ it soon.
This is a very interesting point. Everybody knows that the file dialogs you find in just about every OS on the planet really is a PITA. If the reason why we have to deal with them is because of a limitation in the Macintosh System Software that was eliminated ca 1988, it just shows how little UI designs have changed over the years and how we accept what we are used to as “the right way”, even when it’s not.
so maybe its time for the open source community to pick up the banner and implement these features into their favorite desktop system?
hey, why not stuff it into gnome? its as if they are trying to clone everything else apple so…
ok, that was inflamatory, sorry…
anyways, eliminating the need for a save dialog (i dont recall the last time i used a load dialog) would be great.
hmm, there is the new document submenu in windows tho if you right click inside a folder. dont know how many actualy use it as they may be to used to think in app terms. fire upp the app, create the stuff that needs creating, hit save as a browse to the place it should be saved…
Not only is this old news, as in it happened in the 70s, but how many times has OSNews recycled this? I think all the readers know what the Lisa was and how revolutionary it was for it’s time. Please spare us the introduction and tell us something new.
I for one thoroughly enjoyed the article and look forward to similar pieces in the future.