After yesterday’s trip down memory lane with OS/2 2.1, I will today take you even further back. With the help of the recently released Apple Lisa emulator, ToastyTech (another invaluable tool for (G)UI fanatics such as myself) updated its set of screenshots from the Lisa Office System (version 3), the first commercially available graphical user interface for home use. “This Lisa emulator tries to give you the full experience of using an Apple Lisa. The backdrop is a photo of a Lisa that changes as the power light comes on and when you ‘insert’ a disk. It even plays the sound of the Lisa disk drive running as you access the disk. To start the emulator you must press the ‘Power button’ just as you would start a real Lisa.” Read more for a few notes.The emulator, by the way, does require Lisa ROMs to function; some older Apple operating systems can be freely downloaded from Apple.com, but I’m not sure if Lisa ROMs are among those.
What has always intrigued me about these very early Apple GUIs, is how little they actually changed over time. If you take a look at the screenshots of the first release of the Lisa Office System, it is instantly recognisable as being an Apple product. It has the global menubar, a few icons with a clear meaning, you name it. Fast forward to today, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has the exact same layout and configuration (for better or worse, that’s up to you to decide).
Now, compare this to the difference between screenshots from Windows 1.0 and the recently released (no, really?) Windows Vista. It is a difference of night and day, a difference 395 times as large than that between Lisa and OS X.
Most people won’t really care one bit about things like this, but for GUI enthusiasts such as myself, this is extremely intriguing. I can look and compare these screenshots for hours on end.
Sometimes I wonder, do I, like, need medical attention?
PS: I will try to get my hands on a (legal!) copy of the Lisa ROMs, so I can dive into this in a little more detail. Stay tuned!.
…THIS is cool.
However, I’d question the assertion that the Lisa was the first GUI for home use…not many homes can afford to spend in the region of $10,000 on anything but a car – or the home itself. Business use – well-off-business use – yes.
Yes, in fact, the Lisa was intended for business use.
Wasn’t it Xerox who invented the GUI with their Alto minicomputer system in 1972?
Anyway, yeah… Apple’s computers were always expensive (even more than the original IBM PC).
But a computer with a GUI operating environment in the 1970’s was quite amazing. It took over a decade later for the PC to get even a primative operating environment known as Windows 1.0.
Edited 2007-03-13 00:18
The GUI predates even Xerox Parc. However Xerox put together the first ‘Digital Office’, putting the GUI to practical use, introducing networking, servers, productivity apps and even the laser printer.
“The GUI predates even Xerox Parc. However Xerox put together the first ‘Digital Office’, putting the GUI to practical use, introducing networking, servers, productivity apps and even the laser printer.”
I’d like to add postscript support, fonts, and some of the gadgeds coming with “Vista” and promoted as “new” or “revolutionary”, such as clock, calendar, mail notification. And 3D ego shooters. 🙂
Just have a look:
http://toastytech.com/guis/indexxerox.html
http://media.arstechnica.com/images/gui/7-AltoST.jpg
http://www2.iicm.tugraz.at/cguetl/education/projects/mischitz/image…
http://toastytech.com/guis/altomaze.jpg
But we all know MICROS~1 invented the mouse, the universe and everything. 🙂
All I know is that if it weren’t for Microsoft, I’d probably still be logging on to BBSes @ 2400baud with a side helping of incredibly proprietary hardware.
We’d still be stuck with fanatics. They’d just find someone else to piss and moan about…
Doubt it. Something else would have sprung up
I mean, just look at all the OSes prior and after Windows. *something* would have come along.
Edited 2007-03-13 02:05
And something has really come along and knocked MS from the top, eh?
what the heck does that to do with what I said? MS has a strangle hold on the desktop market right now. It would be hard for anything to take over. The only one coming close is Apple right now. And their market share is peanuts.
If MS didn’t exist, *some* other OS/company would have come around that would be huge right now. It was inevitable.
No, I don’t think it was inevitable, IBM is integral to the story, but not MS. if IBM had of stayed out of the personal computer business, I think there would be a lot more types of computers out there
That doesn’t exactly follow. The technology for creating desktop systems has been invented independently many times. The idea of the technology being there for so long, but nobody bringing it to market is… unlikely.
Heck, even without Newton we still would have calculus (courtesy of Leibniz). We’d surely have desktop computers without Bill Gates, a far lesser figure!
If it wasn’t for Microsoft, we’d actually wouldn’t have been condemned to Win 9x in the 90s because we would have had operating systems by Digital Research, headed by the late Gary Kildall, who made the very first operating system for the home computer, as well as the programming language PL/M, CP/M(which was more advanced than DOS at the time when IBM was deliberating between DR and MS, as well as that operating system that made history), and several other things as well that were overshadowed by Bill, but were pretty important.
Oh do shut up. Windows has been behind competitiors every year, year in year out. When Windows 1.0 was out, Lisa and Macs were years ahead. When Windows 3.0 was out, GEOS was years ahead technologically. Vista has just come out, with supprise supprise, all the features competitiors had between 2000-2006.
Oh do shut up. Windows has been behind competitiors every year, year in year out. When Windows 1.0 was out, Lisa and Macs were years ahead.
When Windows 1.0 came out the Mac couldn’t even run more than one program at a time. The Switcher that allowed task switching didn’t arrive until 86 and the Multifinder didn’t come until even later. The Lisa and Amiga obviously had Windows 1.0 beat though, but the design goals were obviously different. Windows 1.0 needed to run on common IBM compatible x86 hardware and be able to run DOS programs and these goals limited Windows 1.0 for obvious reasons. This is not to say that Windows 1.0 would necessarily been the best desktop OS at the time had those restrictions not been in place, but I think it’s an imporant consideration when making such evaluations. I love technology for technology’s sake as much as the next geek, but it needs to be accessible and accepted by its target audience to be useful.
I just can’t help myself. When Windows 1.0 came out, not only wasn’t the Mac able to run more programs at a time, but neither was Windows 1.0 which didn’t even have windows (sic!). The usefulness of Macs did come from the fact that some smaller applications, like the oh-so-famous calculator widget (desklets was their name in thos times?) could be ran along with the big application in front. As you note, in fact, the Switcher came out a few months after Windows.
How useful Windows 1.0 was for its audience can be seen in the number of copies it and Windows 2.0 sold. It was really not until Windows 3.0 that MS came even close, if not to MacOS (and surely not to the likes of Workbench or the already-around Unix workstations), at least to the likes of GEM.
BluenoseJake, you may want to know that widgets existed a long time before Konfabulator ;-).
As far as Lisa is concerned, I’d rather guess that the real problem was its price. A personal computer is a personal computer, and if a large institution can afford to pay — how much was it? 9,995$? for a fscking computer, I can hardly imagine a home user spending that much in 1982.
“I’d like to add postscript support, fonts, and some of the gadgeds coming with “Vista” and promoted as “new” or “revolutionary”, such as clock, calendar, mail notification. And 3D ego shooters. 🙂 ”
I’d like to mention that Apple had nothing to do with gadgets, Konfabulator existed long before apple came up with the Dashboard, and even the windows sidebar existed before that. Apple just stole the concept from Konfabulator, which at that time was a Mac only product, since then, they have moved to Windows
No, they didnt invent the GUI. They invented what we now associate “desktop computer” with
They did invent quite a bit. But not everything.
This guys computer had most everything
even video conferencing!
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/dce-bio.htm
In the 60s no less.
Anyways, I’m pretty sick of everyone giving Apple the credit of “inventing the GUI”… *sigh*
But they just say “first commercially available” machine. Though I believe the Xerox Alto was actually sold some and the Star was available if you really wanted it, and I think before the Lisa. I could be wrong.
here the link of douglas engelbart demo.
http://video.google.fr/url?docid=-8734787622017763097&esrc=sr1&ev=v…
as said, they had pretty everything we have today ( except color ).. this video freaks me out more than Lost Season 1. ( love the keyboard sound lol )
I really think computer science didn’t grew as fast as it can =).
edit : btw , that was my first osnews comment. cheers ^^
Edited 2007-03-13 09:32
Wasn’t it Xerox who invented the GUI with their Alto minicomputer system in 1972?
The did come up with the design that Apple used but I believe it was just a research system that Xerox had created, not a commercial release. It was after all, created by Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Apple was the first to present it to the masses.
all this regurgitated chatter regarding the advent of the GUI. You’s think people would have it down already! if you look at the Xerox Star and the Alto… and compare it to the Lisa and the Mac, you will see that they are NOT all that similar. Apple was the first to market with the “desk-top: metaphor…. the star and alto were TOTALLY different! they may have been the begining of the GUI, but apple did not COPY Xerox GUI. they just took the idea and RAN with it!
Apple hired some of the people from Xerox PARC
Actually the Xerox Star featured a desktop metaphor similar to that of the Lisa/Mac. Apple did come up with a decent number of new ideas, but there were more similarities between the Xerox and Apple GUIs than there were differences.
Maybe without Xerox and other pioneers leading the way Apple would still have developed a GUI. But without the work at Xerox it’s pretty obvious that the GUI developed at Apple, and at every other company afterwards, would have been very different.
I’m just impressed that the Lisa guys felt confident enough about their spare clock-cycles to implement a calculator and clock with rounded windows!
There’s actually an interesting story behind the rounded borders in Lisa! http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Round_…
Edited 2007-03-13 00:32
<it>There’s actually an interesting story behind the rounded borders in Lisa! http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Ro… [/i]
Yes, folklore.org truly does rock! Especially if you are Mac/GUI/Computer History freak like me. Everyone should check it out, you might learn something
http://www.folklore.org
I remember seeing the Lisa in a magazine — I think it was Byte, but am not sure. In any event, I really wanted it! Would’ve been a lot better than my TRS-80 Color Computer! Alas, I had not the funds to purchase it….
I think the biggest mistake with the Lisa was the advertising campaign.
Check it out:
http://www.pisoftware.com/images/esquire/page-8.jpg
I’m sure Bill saw that ad and… well you know the rest of the story…
Talking about Bill:
http://offsetdesign.co.uk/static/lisa_advert.jpg
🙂
Long, long ago hard drives were rather large expensive things and a customer crashed without a backup. I took it to a drive repair and data recovery shop down the road and dropped it off, when I picked it up I had to go around the back to delivery, looked in a window and there it was, this enourmous clean room cut into aisle after aisle of Apple Lisa workstations manned by people in what appeared to be some sort of white space suits, very surreal.
I recently came across an old video demo of the Lisa:
http://youtube.com/v/a4BlmsN4q2I
The OS/2 article from yesterday reminded me of it, mainly the way that now-basic concepts are explained in great detail.
Unfortunately, the emulator is not very useful if you don’t happen to have the ROM and the OS. So, how do you find software for a 30 year old computer system?
Edited 2007-03-13 11:28
how do you find software for a 30 year old computer system?
In this case, Emule (or other P2P app) is your friend
After years of toiling with a cassette based TRS-80 model 1 and then an Apple ][ (with TWO diskettes, I may add!), running UCSD Pascal and Apple FORTRAN, getting a Lisa was a godsend.
It had a hard drive. A HARD DRIVE! 5MB! More room than you could possibly ever fill. Sure, you had to turn it on first, and let it stabilize a bit before turning the Lisa on, but it rocked. You could then fire up the Modula-2 compiler.
Alas, I had gotten it by promising to write a dental office records system for a friend of my dad’s and never got around to it, so he took it back. Sigh. Back to the Apple ][.
Sometimes I wonder, do I, like, need medical attention?
Sometimes I wonder why you don’t leave remarks like that where they belong – on your blog
Sometimes I wonder why you don’t leave remarks like that where they belong – on your blog
OSNews IS a blog.
I wonder if anyone knows of a Mac Classic emulator?
This was the PC of choice at my High School, and I remember being hugely impressed at MS Word on the tiny, greyscale screen (WYSIWYG … Wow!).
All I had at the time was Word Perfect 5.1. Although I still maintain that WP 5.1 had the best Print Preview screen (It had this 3D fly over view). Not bad for a PC running at 20Mhz.
There’s a few Mac emulators around. Either Basilisk II or Mini vMac should do the trick. Naturally, it needs the system ROMs and whatnot. As Thom mentioned, you can find most of them on Apple’s website.
Sometimes I wonder, do I, like, need medical attention?
No, just a perfectly normal geek
You don’t need more medical help than the rest of us 
Sometimes I wonder, do I, like, need medical attention?
You do not [yes you do] need medical [psychological] help, you are [not] fine [sane]. Don’t [foget to] listen to the voice[s] in your head. Got it?
We agree with you
– and yes, that’s all of me agreeing with all of you.