Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting Apple’s ill-fated Lisa computer, 40 years on

arstechnica.com

55 pointspseudolus25 comments

> Jef Raskin, an early Apple employee who wrote the manual for the Apple ][, had visited PARC in 1973. He believed that GUIs were the future. Raskin managed to persuade the Lisa project leader to change the computer into a GUI machine. However, he couldn’t convince Jobs, who thought Raskin and Xerox were incompetent.

I knew Jef a little and I think "incompetent" was unfair (OK it's allegedly Steve jobs who said it so all his statement/opinions were dialed up to 11). Jef was thoughtful, but I would say some of his ideas were utopian and he was somewhat ineffective, probably because of that.

Which leads to:

> After being kicked off the Lisa team, Jobs strong-armed his way into Raskin’s Macintosh project. Raskin loved GUIs, but he had different ideas for his computer...

The project was indeed Jef's, but his vision was very text-oriented. I consider the actual Mac to be a complete reboot of what he was working on (but I was not there and perhaps others who were would disagree -- hopefully someone who knows will comment).

The Cannon Cat was Jef's vision, and it didn't even have a GUI.

> Canon Cat is primarily the creation of Jef Raskin, the originator of the Macintosh project at Apple. After leaving the company in 1982 and founding Information Appliance, Inc., he began designing a new computer closer to his original vision of an inexpensive, utilitarian "people's computer".

It features a text user interface, not making use of any pointer (mouse), icons, or graphics. All data are seen as a long "stream" of text broken into several pages. Instead of using a traditional command line interface or menu system, the Cat makes use of its special keyboard, with commands being activated by holding down a "Use Front" key and pressing another key. The Cat also uses special "Leap keys", which, when held down, allows the user to incrementally search for strings of characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

That wikipedia page links to a great note by Jef on his vision, which is what I remember him describing on a couple of occasions. He was working on it pretty much to the end of his life as far as I know.

https://www.apple-history.com/gui_raskin2

> The project was indeed Jef's, but his vision was very text-oriented.

From the descriptions I have read, I get the impression that text-oriented is both an excellent description and somewhat misleading.

I don't know if you knew him or his work of that era well enough, but it's still worth asking: is it a case of Raskin viewing computers as fundamentally text-oriented, or a case of him viewing people's interaction with computers as fundamentally text-oriented (i.e. through a keyboard).

The reason why I bring this up is because people seem to have very particular views of what text-oriented means these days. For some it will be the command driven interface of the Unix shell. For others, it will be memories of MS-DOS applications (many of which adopted WIMP-like metaphors in the later days). Neither perspective seems to reflect Raskin's vision.

From talking with him I don't know that it meant a command-line itself (I have no idea), but it was very much focused on using the keyboard to control reading and navigation, as opposed to Mac's (of the 80s) very mouse-centred interface (remember it didn't even have arrow keys).

There is a document he wrote for Apple all about his ideas of what the mac should be, surely findable somewhere with some google-fu. I assume jobs just took one look at it and chucked it straight into the bin.

He was an interesting thinker.

GeekyBear mentions the Cannon Cat, and posts a link that goes down an interesting rathole.

Thank you for pointing out the articles. Along the way, I found several evenings of reading that should cover Raskin's ideas for the Macintosh in much greater detail:

https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/earlymac.html

I had a Lisa on my desk back in early 1984 (along with an IBM PC/XT, an Apple III and an Apple II of some kind). It was an amazing device that clearly showed the direction of computing in the future. It was also way overpriced and underpowered (a 5 MhZ 68000 is not exactly fast), but while I didn't get a chance to write anything for it as it was just an eval unit, reading the documentation was mind bogglingly different than anything I had ever seen. Of course it was the Mac that actually lead to the future (and then Windows 3 that took over years later), but the Lisa pointed the direction.

One thing the emulator probably doesn't adequately convey is just how painfully slow the Lisa was. We had a lab full of them in college, and I was very excited to use the new GUI. But it was almost unusably slow, and I suspect that had more to do with its failure than the price. DOS applications, while ugly, were lightning fast by comparison.

1983 TV ad for Lisa with Kevin Costner, "I'll be home for breakfast." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJRx79sl1yk

Right. I'll be home for breakfast, and hopefully by the time I get back to work this LisaDraw file will finish opening.

What a great article. I’m a proud Ars Technica subscriber so if you enjoyed this article consider subscribing.

I loved Ars Technica in the past, but the site and forums seems to have become such a one-sided echo-chamber of left-wingers that nowadays I visit the site much more rarely then I used to. This is mainly related to let's say healthcare and political topics.

It seems to me that HackerNews has more balanced audience, which suits me better.

I have never seen evidence of this at all. Maybe reconsider your own biases.

I do think the quality has fallen overall at Ars Technica though. Particularly on their car articles, which for a long time now have been just regurgitated press releases filled with lame industry speak and no critical analysis. I also don't like that they are recycling Wired articles so often rather than posting original content. Great articles like this one are becoming less and less common.

I have definitely seen it. The site went from ridiculous levels of Elon Musk worship (How dare you say it's misleading for Tesla to use the name Autopilot) to constant hit pieces following his recent fall from grace on the left.

> The site went from ridiculous levels of Elon Musk worship (How dare you say it's misleading for Tesla to use the name Autopilot) to constant hit pieces following his recent fall from grace on the left.

I guess this is one way to view it. Or you could see it as them giving him the benefit of the doubt when he was a gifted tech businessman, and then not doing so when his purchase of Twitter led to an emperor-has-no-clothes moment.

> Or you could see it as them giving him the benefit of the doubt when he was a gifted tech businessman

Musk hasn't changed at all. Calling a lane keeping feature "Autopilot" has always been exceptionally misleading and dangerous.

What has changed is that he's now on the left's version of a Nixonian enemies list.

Seems more likely Ars opinion of Musk has little to do with wings or wingnuts. Seems more likely it's tech's so-called meritocracy bias: he's been re-weighed on the merits and this time found wanting.

That said, both wings have tried to politicize #elongate, so I can see how people imagine any opinion on Musk is politically polarized.

Check any topic including forum discussions on the COVID vaccines or COVID related policies and read the discussions. It should be very clear by then that the forum is a complete echo chamber.

Everybody not agreeing with government or WHO/CDC policies is regarded a retard and downvoted into oblivion.

I think you are mistaking a pro-science bias for a left-wrong bias.

I don’t agree it’s a pro-science bias, but YMMV.

As stated before, I see there’s a much more balanced discussion on this topic on HN and as such, I prefer HN over Ars Technica, as it’s less of an echo chamber.

My professor often said that the Lisa was the best machine that Apple ever made because it allowed the user unlimited control. He said it was very fun and easy to hack on, write drivers, etc.

I find it especially interesting to compare this article to their other one announcing the story:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/pione...

It was a magical machine. I remember programming a chess game in Pascal, and all the API calls were like a hundred characters long.

This is a great article. Funny how Apple became so successful because of Jobs and yet sometimes despite Jobs.

Interesting to know how much better the Mac could have been if they stuck to their Lisa guns more.

Oh how I lusted after Lisa.

Alas, she was way out of my league.

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