Inventing the Lisa User Interface (1997) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Inventing the Lisa User Interface (1997) [pdf]

bitsavers.org

64 pointsingve11 comments

Bill Atkinson's guest lecture in Brad Meyer's CMU 05-640 Interaction Techniques class, Spring 2019, Feb 4, 2019:

https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

Including polaroids of early Lisa development.

My first programming job was manipulating data on a Lisa for a neighbor, while I was in high school.

I loved that computer… it was so expensive and powerful! Then I went home to programming games in Basic on my CBM in the basement. With a tape drive.

> Xerox Corporation bought 100,000 shares and agreed not to buy more than 5 percent of Apple. ... the deal helped Apple gain access to Xerox's research laboratory

Oh interesting, I'd always understood it as Apple stealing ideas from an informal visit, not a business arrangement.

On a side note, I love the illustration style, some sort of colorful mixed-media collage of UI widgets and physical setting. Does anyone know any similarly-styled documents?

This artist "dustn" evokes similarly https://www.instagram.com/duztns/

I think we are supposed to forget about Lisa, so that the origin story of the Macintosh will seem more impressive.

Steve forgot about the real Lisa for years.

Point taken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs

What’s impressive about the Macintosh is that the team delivered a GUI—including significant design refinements from PARC and the Lisa—on top of a $2.5K machine with 128K of RAM.

Nonsense; who ever claimed that? And it’s not a knock on the Mac; if you ever have the opportunity to use an original Lisa and a Mac 128k side by side, you’ll observe that the Mac’s speed and UI improvements are pretty hard not to notice.

Still better than 90% of the crap web pages out there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com