Early attempts at portable multimedia. In the early 90s we could see that video, sound, networking, and portability were all going to combine at some point in the future, but there was no way we could get there with the tech of that era. The Toshiba T6600C/CDV from 1993, for example, comes to mind.
The mp3 player with camera (picture and video), games like super mario, mp3 songs obviously. I remember it was 2008 to 10-ish in our country when that device was popular… I remember recording a video of my friends in the field lol that was before I knew what facebook or youtube is…
If I recall correctly, in Steve Jobs’ biography, there was a passage about how after the team returned from their trip to Xerox and attempted to recreate the technology they saw, Bill Atkinson tried to implement the window multitasking features, not knowing that the people at xerox didn’t know how to do multiple windows that overlap and stack on top of each other and that could be switched with a mouse click, all they had done was give windows some backdrop shadows to give the impression of depth, but it wasn’t functional. So Atkinson figured out how to do actual multitasking between windows because he didn’t know that it was impossible
@@awesomegmg956 Win 95 has pre-emptive multitasking. Windows 1.0 had cooperative multitasking. The original MacOS had "task switching" (apps were put to sleep in the background). So very much like the multitasking of DOS shell, but with a monochromatic GUI like GEOS on the C=64, however predating it by a couple years. It's amazing the GUI elements were all there despite the technical limitations of the time.
I've always loved how humble Bill Atkinson is in interviews. He was a major part of so many incredible developments, and yet to hear him speak everything was inevitable. What a legend
I was very fortunate to work with a Lisa back in the day. It was the "front end" for AT&T's Tech Publications department photo typesetter. Being an early and avid computer hobbyist, with my start building S100 buss computers (IMSAI 8080, CP/M OS) I was blown away by the Lisa UI. I instantly bought the Mac 128 when it came out and used 3rd party hardware upgrades to bring it up to a Mac 512. The interface was indeed revolutionary, but the product too expensive, and lacked speed and sophistication. Those issues were later solved by the Amiga (full color, faster) and incorporating internal hard drives. All fond memories. Thx for posting. The Lisa deserves far more recognition, and its appearance is still amazingly cool.
1984, I was a senior in high school. I went to the local computer store to check out the Lisa. Wow, I was amazed. Two years later after, I joined the Air force, I bought a Mac Plus. HyperCard was incredible.
HyperCard was based on NoteCards. Much of Apple's technology was copied from elsewhere, but they did know how to improve on others' ideas and make them user friendly.
I was one of the few Lisa developers outside of Apple back in the early 80s. Getting dev tools from Apple was like pulling teeth. I was building a few custom apps for ComputerLand / BusinessLand, who were a Lisa reseller. They got agreement from Apple to give them a dev system so I could write a couple extensions. I think this should have told the Lisa team something... at least they should have figured out that custom apps were a thing. Even if they kept the "stationary" metaphor, opening it up to developers might have helped the Lisa. The early Mac team on the other hand were notorious for "seeking forgiveness instead of permission" with respect to the developer community. There's a story that Guy Kawasaki was trying to get an early Mac developer some docs and instead of waiting for Inside Macintosh to be finished, he just photocopied what they had and shipped them out. That's ABSOLUTELY the opposite of the Lisa team.
@compu85 first I wrote a demo / tutorial. Apple had (what I thought was) a very good tutorial that showed how to use the mouse and how to select and drag. CL had a few other features they wanted demoed, mostly in the spreadsheet. It was stuff that would be trivial with MacroMind Director a few years later, but was painstakingly written in Pascal and Assembly language. Later there was a simple inventory manager app which dragged on as there was significant vaciliation over whether it would support a network card (that I think never shipped) or would talk with a remote server over a modem. Microsoft eventually released a BASIC for the Lisa which made demos MUCH easier.
I worked for Digital Equipment's Terminals Business Unit when the Lisa came out. We ordered one immediately. When we took it out of the box I was awestruck as I got to use a mouse for the first time. When the Macintosh came out we bought one of those. It came fully assembled which was a refreshing contrast to our own PCs which arrived in about 5 separate boxes, each of which contained a piece of 8.5x11 inch paper containing the headline "READ ME FIRST" in big bold letters. To assemble our PC one build a literal tower of daughter boards of ever decreasing size, connected by tiny, flimsy ribbon cables that you had to insert yourself. Good times!
Menu bar at the top is my favorite thing about Mac OS. It's so easy to just move the mouse all the way up there instead of having to fiddle with the menu if it's attached to the window. It's a tiny little thing but it makes a difference
That is the worst thing! They killed off that when they morphed NextStep in to MacOS X when it was one of the worst aspects or Macs. It was OK with the the tiny compact Mac screens. Now I destroy my wrists just moving the mouse all the way to the top of a 4K screen to get to the menus then back to my working window.
@@pauledwards2817 It's easy to get your mouse to the top of the screen by just flicking it up there really quickly. It's the way all computers should work
Congrats to the whole crew. Love these new formats and I can't wait to see the upcoming Lisa documentary. This is what truly sets you guys apart from the competition. Very well done!
@@TheVerge I will share the living daylight out of it if it's on the same level as this one. There are so many amazing stories when it comes to computer history and the amazing people who were the pioneers of these times.
January 1983 my store’s owner/principal sent me to the Lisa roll-out. I became the Lisa Product Manager. I packed the Lisa, an Electrohome projector and an Apple Dot Matrix Printer into the back of my Subaru wagon and demoed Lisa to industries up and down the Mississippi. What fun days.
@@compu85 In the Jan roll-out we salesmen were taught to run through the Lisa apps: LisaWrite, LisaList, LisaProject, etc. I’d do that demo, perhaps a half our, unless the dreaded hourglass popped up. Then I’d do a demo of “restarted the Lisa and setting up your desktop…”
@ a computer projector used to demonstrate the Lisa. It was monochrome only (as was the Lisa’s display), measured about 10x10x36, and weighed about 30 lbs.
What a great summary of the Lisa! I'm glad I was able to help with this production :) For anyone wondering, the laugh is me after I tried to run Microsoft Excel, and open a document on another disk, with only one floppy drive. It took 25 disk swaps!
The first spread-sheet I was involved with was the Lucid 3D spreadsheet for the TRS-80 Model 100/102. It in 8k of EPROM and was always available since you plugged the EPROM into the back of the computer. I laugh every time I look at a Linux or Mac executable; "hello world" is at least 48k.
I was 12 when I saw Lisa on display for the first time a year before Macintosh. I asked my father if we could get one, and he looked at the price tag of $10,000 (about $30,000 adjusted). That day was the first time I had heard my father spewing the F-bombs and saying, "who in the f-cking mind would spend that much money on this useless sh-t!" Well, my father got me IBM PCjr. on the cheap: "penny wise, pound foolish" would be what I described my experience with the PCjr.
To me, the most revolutionary change in OS navigation is search. On a Mac or Windows machine, I just hit the spotlight shortcut or the windows key and type. I rarely mouse around and browse to anything.
Really enjoyed watching this one. I also don't think that the desktop will go anywhere anytime soon. No matter if AI advances to the point that it organises and does everything, sometimes we'll still want to be quiet and do things ourselves. Like to sit down and watch photos or read a document together, thus some kind of interface will persist and I believe the base UI of a "desktop" will always exist, even in VR/AR.
I think voice interfaces will have the biggest impact on those with the least tech interest/skill. My grandparents can't use online banking, but having an AI conversation with your bank account can be done by anyone who can speak.
At 8:16: "Apple went all-in on the Macintosh in 1984." Apple absolutely did not go "all in" on the Macintosh in 1984. Apple was "all in" on the Apple II series in 1984. That's part of why Jobs left/was fired. Jobs kept insisting they shut down the Apple II production lines and start making only Macs. But the Macs had a tiny profit margin compared to the Apple II, so... the suits were all about the money. 1993 is the date commonly given for when the Apple II was discontinued (though you could get an Apple II card for your Mac LC for quite a few years after that.) But I bet Mac profits matched Apple II profits somewhere in the late 80s.
1:40 Xerox PARC, Alto. 2:32 Lisa UI/UX 5:51 1981 Xerox Star 6:16 Lisa led to consumer Mac 8:20 1985 Microsoft Windows 9:44 Lisa documentary in the works
Great video. The Lisa was not forgotten! Well-known to those who love the history of personal computing. I never used one growing up, but I certainly knew about them. I appreciate that this video reminds us of Apple's strength: taking existing ideas, improving them, then delivering them to the world in a shiny package. The Lisa is case-in-point. So is the iPad. Both were invented by others. Steve Jobs famously claimed the FingerWorks technology was Apple's, but it was not. Apple saw the value in multi-touch and grabbed it. Then they changed the world with it. Outstanding video and a cool trip down memory lane for [at least] this Gen-Xer.
So The Verge is working on a documentary about the Lisa, the story of Nike and the Air Jordan is coming soon, there's a movie about the Blackberry's rise and fall and the backstory of Tetris just debuted on Apple TV+. This is the year of the "back in the day."
I thought, the UA-cam Channel of The Verge was dead, because it was flooded with audio podcast videos and boring videos. This is classic. Classic background story, classic best, classic The Verge. Please do more of this. And of course, no more audio podcast records.
The Lisa was definitely easier to use than the 1980 IBM home. computer, but one of the biggest problems with my Lisa was that it crashed all the time, and had to be restored using the system disks. Trying to save data on a 256 floppy was incredibly time consuming, as you had to save nearly every minute. You had to keep a floppy disk installed, and change it often. as it filled up quickly - so doing a document meant you had a stack of floppies sitting around that you hope you kept them in order. When the ubiquitous "cherry bomb" showed up on your screen, the computer died and you had to reinstall the disk OS from floppies, and then install each working floppy again. It makes nice press to talk about how great the Lisa was, but it weighed almost 50 pounds, and required many trips to computer gurus to keep it running. It also cost around 10K. After a few hard years, I moved to the Mac SE which still cost almost 3K. I have owned many macs over the years, and still use Macs, My newest computer being a Mac Air 2018, my oldest functioning are 2 white Macbook 2010, and several iMacs 2010. Without Macs, I would never leaned to use a computer - thanks Steve Jobs
I went from a manual typewriter to an electric, and was amazed when they came out with word processors. Only big companies and lawyers could afford them, and they required a lot of learning to use. We still used pencils and paper in the 80s, so a computer was sort of a plus. I didn't realize that the Lisa was the Edsel of computers at the time. I have used a computer for over 40 years now, and still don't know much about how they work, except they now seldom crash.
I really love Bill's comment at around 9:37: "there were ideas in the air and someone raises up a catcher's mitt and catches it." It definitely felt that way. As an engineer / developer, it was hard to understand why people would want to use an Apple II when a Mac was available (this was a time frame when I never had to buy my own development systems.) Watching NeXT develop over the late 80s was a treat since it seemed like they were doing everything right (and now their work is the basis of all iProducts.) One thing I give Apple credit for is understanding what features typical consumers like. They didn't invent the personal computer, but the Apple II was a great microcomputer at just the right time. They didn't invent an office automation system, but the Lisa was MUCH more affordable than the Xerox Star. They didn't invent the laser printer (or even PostScript) but they understood how ground-breaking desktop publishing would eventually become so made sure the LaserWriter, PostScript and PageMaker/Quark/etc were available on the Mac. iPod? Definitely not the first MP3 player, but maybe the first "good" MP3 player. iPhone? not the first smart phone, but definitely a GOOD smartphone. It always seemed that Apple could see which way the tech winds were blowing and took the time to figure out what HAD to be added to a product to make it compelling. Of course they're now struggling with services. It just doesn't seem to be in their DNA. I sort of think they're releasing the VR goggles 'cause they feel they have to release SOMETHING new. But at least they're not pushing a ChatGPT "solution" on us. Siri is great for what it is, but it seems that Apple figured out long ago that it's not the be-all / end-all solution for everyone's problems. Maybe Apple could get into internet search now that bing and google have abandoned it for... whatever the heck they're doing now.
Kind of hilarious that at around 5:01, you can see "Note from Jef" and "Letter to Jef". That's Jef Raskin whose storied career at Apple supposedly came to an end when Jobs got kicked off the Lisa project and horned in on Jef's Macintosh project.
To quote my father, "Bill Atkinson was a genius, and I don't use that word lightly". At the time of this quote, my father was very deep in HyperCard stack development, but also knew Atkinson was responsible for a lot more than that. I emailed Bill thanking him for making my Dad's life better, as I was a kid and didn't know to not waste people's time like that. He replied thanking me for the email - Such a nice guy!
Bill is indeed a very gracious man. As an aside, the last time I was at the doctor's office at Stanford, I noticed the clinic had several of his photos framed on the wall. Turns out he's a talented photographer as well.
I did a lot of my college work on the Lisa in the 80s. Thought it was amazing and liked it more than the Mac. The first two engineering jobs I had were at companies that had mainframes and I did not use Windows until the early 90s. The first thought in my head when using Windows was that it was just like a Lisa, but in color.
I don't see the visual desktop style UI going away any time soon. The simplified UIs on mobile devices make sense, but just become limiting when used on a desktop with multiple screens. I kind of realised this the first time I opened the Calculator 'app' on a Windows 10 (iirc) laptop and it filled the screen.
AND, in a legal and just way. Not only Jobs has signed a license deal with Xerox, he has also hired a few original GUI inventors. The team has invented not only drag and drop, but also menu line. Later, at NeXT, Jobs himself has invented what is now called Dock.
It popularized the idea that “GUI = good, CLI = bad”, which turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. But not before Microsoft had hard-wired it into its own OS.
I quite liked my Lisa 2 at the time… 5MB disk + floppy. It cost a small fortune, but i think i recovered the price over a couple of years - then traded it for an XT clone with the NEC V20 chip, and kept running! It was used to write printed user guides for DOS programs, and I used three of them on-screen in tv commercials - pretending to be CAD stations. No frame bars or other problems, ut a lot of long days! It’s certainly hard to think back to those days!
2:18 This was at the MIT Media Lab. Its director was a guy named Nicholas Negroponte. Among other things, he went on to mastermind the “One Laptop Per Child” project -- you know, the ultracheap, virtually childproof machine that ran Linux, that Microsoft was so determined to kill.
This was brilliant! More like this please. What about one on the Microsoft Courier or the entire WebOS phone/tablet ecosystem? Ooh I got one: HD DVD, the superior “next-gen” format that lost out to Blu Ray.
I really don't think AR / VR is actually the interface of the future. Maybe for gaming, but for work it's much harder to do anything with a headset on then it is with a keyboard and mouse.
I think that AR will be the next big game-changer, but not for another 10-20 years. It needs to be at the point of having a functional realtime responsive HUD overlay being displayed in high FPS on glasses which are only slightly heavier than typical eyeglasses. But at that point, all bets are off. The separation between computer and user would be nearly gone. Like, imagine walking down the street, saying "Siri, direct me to the nearest taco stand" and simply seeing an arrow floating in front of you. Or looking at a restaurant sign and being able to see their menu on one side of your vision. Videoconferencing with the picture in a translucent pop-up window. Integrated AR games along the lines of Pokemon Go. Digital clothing overlays that show different patterns to different viewers. The interface would probably be a combination of voice and eye-tracking. Traditional computers would still be needed for some precision work, like 3D modeling and such, but AR like this could easily take over every function of cellphones and then some, while being always-active and *right there* in view all the time.
I loved the Lisa, we sold a bunch of them to a gold mining company in North Queensland. About the only painful aspect was an odd RS232 interface used for printers.
Unfortunately I have been the owner of many things with a half life of months rather than years -I have been the owner of a Borgward Isabella auto, a Ducati 90 dirt bike, a Vespa moped, as well as the Lisa. Every one of these items was so frustrating to own, that they ended up in the discard pile. I did give the Lisa to a friend for safe keeping when I had to move, and found out later that he sold it. Money has never been my sole object in life, and I have been fortunate to live a life full of unusual things, and experiences.
At around 6:35 there's an implication the Mac and the Lisa were made in parallel. That's a little misleading. Lisa development started in '78 and was always going to include a bit-mapped graphical screen with a WIMP interface. While the Mac project kicked off sometime around 79, Raskin's original idea was much more like the IA/Canon Cat. Jobs was kicked off the Lisa project in September of 1980 and horned in on the mac project a bit later. The Lisa was about 50% of the way to completion at the end of 1980 while the Mac was essentially 0% along. It might be clearer to say they overlapped, and with Jobs bouncing from the Lisa to the Mac project, they did inherit much of the Lisa concept. The stories I heard from Larry Tessler and Burrell Smith was the Lisa guys were pretty clearly separated from the Mac guys, but they (Lisa team) would come by from time to time and make encouraging noises. Saying they were developed in parallel implies (to me) they were launched at the same time, which isn't exactly true.
Apple’s upcoming AR/VR headset will probably be seen at the Lisa of 2023. It’s bulky, expensive, and few people will probably use it. But I have confidence that it will lead the way in what AR/VR software becomes
“Today, it can be hard to imagine computers turning out any other way.” In the broader sense, this summarizes one of the big problems in studying history.
No but it’s getting used less and less. I checked with some kids using phones. For them the only concept is “files” which for them is just a word to describe some “stuff” they want to access.
@@PRH123 Not there is not such concept there for them. Never was. It’s “Home Screen” just an abstract concept = the root place / view where I have my apps. Desktop and such for many younger people is not even used if they use a laptop that has it. Why? Because they don’t need it. It has no concept value for them
@ a phone screen is just a smaller desktop, just like any other computer, only a little smaller. It has icons for applications, and for files. A desktop.
@ nope. That is just what you see / read it as. It’s not intended to represent a desktop at all. It’s not a visual skewmorpic representation of a desktop. It’s just a screen. And that is why it’s referred to as (home) screens. It does not represent any physical item really. The apps yes they have and iconographic representation so we can call them icons. Files don’t exist on the phone. It’s just apps, and webbapps/ links to webpages. Apple official use the term folder to group apps. But there is no longer any visual connection to it as being a folder. Ask younger people and many don’t know what an app folder is “ah you mean a GROUP of apps they say So no the general concept ode a desktop is slowly going away. And it’s not odd. Just the word desktop younger seldom use. It’s a table or desk. Try ask a young person what they have on their desktop and they will lookup oddly at you “desktop… you mean.. what I have on my table.. I mean what I have on my desk?
Apple targeted the Lisa at Corporate America. The Macintosh was targeted at Higher Education. (Apple II was mainly focused on K12). Of course, the Lisa suffered from two main problems. 1) Steve Jobs had taken over the Macintosh Project and tried to kill off the Lisa by starving it of resources and 2) The Lisa cost $10K plus another $5K for a ProFile. The Macintosh's popularity didn't really take off until the LaserWriter printer and AppleTalk both of which were initially only available on the Mac. The early days of Apple were quite interesting as well as pretty chaotic with lots of infighting, politics, and other issues that afflict easy stage companies 😐
The Lisa was overdesigned and over spec'd. It would have failed anyway, just like the Apple III. The Mac was, from the outset, intended to be cheap and as minimal as possible. And it was supposed to be sold for less $1000 until Apple marketing massively increased the price.
@@kirishima638 Yes. The Lisa was over-designed, but back then nothing like it existed outside of Xerox.The Sun and Apollo workstations had just come to market, but their systems were designed for Engineers not Office workers. Apple was rife with competing product groups, in their early days, and Apple III was another victim. I didn't realize that Macintosh was originally supposed to sell for under $1K. Maybe Apple Marketing felt it needed to be priced higher or it might kill off the Apple II which was THE cash cow at the time.
@@kirishima638 Lol 😂 It’s easy to pin this on Scully, but the seeds of Apple’s dysfunction go back to when Steve was running his own fiefdom while waiting to become CEO. I worked at Apple from 1987 -1992 or what used to be called ‘The Scully Years’. Still have an autographed copy of his book. Apple had largely ironed out their product overlap issues, with the cancellation of the Lisa and Apple III and were riding the Mac horse for all it was worth. What killed Apple, in those years, was lack of innovation and a disastrous lawsuit against Microsoft which only encouraged them to copy MacOS even more. Windows 95 was the result and it nearly destroyed Apple for good.
In the mid '80s, my grandfather got us two Lisas on loan from the University of Michigan that had been converted to run the Mac operating system. They had cost over $10,000 each but since they were so bad Apple had given the school their money back.
I went to a computer camp at Virginia Tech in the 1980s. They had one Lisa computer in their lab, and it had a combat game in black-and-white. I remember the background music for the game was Flight of the Valkyries. I can’t remember much about the game other than that I thought it was a good game.
Was it in the late 1980s? The Lisa used in this demo actually came from VT - they required it as part of their Computer Science program. The final programming project was to do a game, the original owner of this machine made Reversi. Since Macworks didn't really use the speaker, it's likely you were playing with someone else's software project - in UniSoft Unix a program could beep the speaker as much as it wanted!
@@compu85 Yes, I think it was the summer of 1988. Cool that the computer in the video was from VT! Their computer camp was great. We learned Turbo Pascal. BTW, one day they took us to another lab on campus (possibly the robotics lab). There they showed us another computer that costed $75k. This one had amazing 3D graphics for the time. It had a 3D flight simulator app that blew me away. I remember thinking that when I grew up, I needed to somehow acquire $75k so that I could get one of these computers :)
Android smartphones still use folders quite prominently. For all of iOS's pros, its folder system (or lack of) drives me nuts. I always feel like I have to jump through loops and menus just to get a file from one app to open with another. And for all of Android's cons, I like how I can put things in ANY folder and if I open another app, I can just simply navigate to that folder to open those files.
If you want to do that you can just use the file manager app. But in 99 % of the cases for everyday users you don’t need it. It’s more only when the bridge between iOS and say downloading items from a browser that is not supported by any app on the phone that you need it. But in most cases then people store it anyway on their cloud solution either through tre browser or a dedicated app for it
The basic desktop metaphor will live on because of so many people are handling both physical and digital documents, messages, deals, pictures, maps, database acquired information and archives at work and when organising private life. Because it works. We still keep archives, libraries, use note books and store important documents, like wills, deeds or contracts in safe places. The digital desktop is a logical extension of this. For many specific work related tasks, for entertainment, SoMe and so on, very different GUs will evolve. They will all exist side-by-side a long time.
It's cool exploring ideas that flopped in the end but still influenced the world today. But with Lisa being just one piece in a whole industry moving in the same direction, it's hard to argue that it was really revolutionary or why it stood out amongst other similar Desktops at the time. Especially with its stand-out features (i.e. multitasking) not being unique to it at the time. I guess it was just an early example of "apple didn't do it first, but did it well" (so that's why we remember it).
If you compare the Mac GUI to the Windows 1.0 GUI, you'll see how much more advanced the Mac GUI was. The Windows 1.0 GUI windows didn't overlap--they just tiled. Other windowing systems out there were even more primitive at the time. So I disagree with you that "the whole industry was moving in that direction" in 1984. IBM certainly hadn't. Digital Equipment Corporation with their minicomputers certainly hadn't.
“Sometimes there are ideas in the air, and somebody puts up a catcher’s mitt and catches it. And if they didn’t, somebody else would have caught it.” - Bill Atkinson My mom, who was born in 1932, talked about this exact idea in the ‘70s. She had come up with the idea of making smaller vinyl records with just one song on a side, and 45RPM singles came out shortly after. So she “caught” the idea around the same time as someone else, but they had the ability to make it real.
Yes, even the original Mac had stationary pads. But - on the Lisa it was the only way to create documents. The Office System doesn't have a File / New command.
Bill Atkinson's humble last words will stay with me for the ages. They made it happen but today those ideas are so common place that even he sees them as inevitable.
One thing I don’t understand what Apple didn’t use when developing a computer with a graphical user interface was the Xerox computer had a portrait oriented monitor, which makes sense if you’re working in an office, and you’re producing documents that most likely will be printed out in a portrait oriented format. Today, most people use tablet devices and can easily choose between portrait and landscape orientation by turning the device left or right 90 degrees, but that wasn’t the case with desktop computers then.
@@compu85 The dimensions would be the same, only the orientation of the screen would be vertical and not horizontal, so I don’t see how that would mean greater resolution for a portrait oriented screen.
@@collegeman1988 a 12" CRT has about a 6" tall and 8.5" wide raster area. Turned on its side, that means the screen isn't big enough to show a normal sheet of letter paper at 1:1 scaling. But wide-ways, it works fine, you can show the full width and about 1/2 of the document on the screen. Apple chose the 12" screen and fonts used specifically for that reason.
The Mac project was underway at the same time as Lisa. The Lisa did not influence the Mac. The Mac project, led by Jef Raskin, was well along when Jobs buried the Lisa and took over the Mac.
Mac also didn't sell well. Xerox provided far more than just the mouse, as Alan Kay references. Ethernet, laserjet printing, OO programming. Jobs also said he failed to see how big these were because he was blinded by the mouse. Also, Atkinson wasn't a programmer when he joined Apple. He was a neurochemist. Crazy. Oh also, the Lisa, later called the Mac XL, was cancelled hundreds were buried in a desert.
Fascinating! They got so many things right. Forty years on the most intuitive Linux desktop environments such as XFCE and Cinnamon have many similarities to the Lisa and Mac.
Don’t forget Apple also pioneered Wi-Fi to the general consumer in the late 1990’s with the very first computer to have it built in, the “iBook G3”. Steve Jobs used a hula-hoop to show nothing was physically attached to the machine for connection to the internet and that was mind-blowing. Their old Airport routers were beautiful and the precursors to Linksys being in every American household. They also pioneered personal printing at-home with their Laserjets to connect directly to the Mac back in the mid-80’s. Apple more than any other company under the leadership of Jobs seemed to understand the importance of all the ideas Xerox wasn’t using at ‘PARC’ down in Palo Alto all those many decades ago.
Regardless of how good a GUI design becomes, anyone who wants to be proficient using a computer needs to learn how to use a few commands at the command line. Knowing only 10 or 12 useful commands will make a huge difference, whether using a Mac (which has something like BSD Unix underneath) or a Windows PC (which has something like the old DOS commands underneath).
It all depends what you intend to do. For most everyday situations today you never need to touch a shell. Look at iphone etc there you don’t even need really to understand the core file structure etc. basically you just pick the application. That fits your tasks and go ahead
Most of the times I use it, I’m not even really using commands. I’m using it to open a file browser window in a specific location which would require lots of double clicking otherwise, or running a few utilities which are much faster than launching their GUI wrappers (like 7zip or ffmpeg). But I agree it’s important for anyone who isn’t a casual user to be able to feel comfortable in a terminal, sometimes it’s the only way to access certain directories or hidden files. Plus SSH-ing is much faster than VNC for a lot of tasks if you have, say, a laptop and a desktop.
7:26 While the point is literally laughing at how long it took to switch app's - I'm still amazed at what is actually happening, with such ease for the human operator - so awesomely quickly!
I think we do have to mention Commodore Amiga and its Workbench OS (see the name?). It was a full-color, full Multitasking OS that came in pretty cheap computer packages like the A500. I feel like there was a lot of cross-talk between Workbench and MacOS throughout the years. Still, seeing how such stuff evolved, is really cool!
Yes I remember that. A friend of mine bought one of the early Macs to help his family and their business. I think it was on a cassette tape but not sure since it was so long ago but I do remember some kind of training program came with it.
7:20 This is confused terminology. Lisa couldn't *_run_*_ "multiple applications at the same time"_ either. Having two programs "open" at the same time is not the same as both executing (running) at the same time. None of them had preemtive multitasking (except simple interrups).
@@OhMeadhbh In a way, but it does not really *RUN* _"multiple applications at the same time"_ (sic). Only one is active and running at a time. The others are passive, although still loaded into memory (usually) together with their data.
@@herrbonk3635 The Lisa can have multiple applications running at the same time. For example, you can have the terminal application going, saving a file, while you work on something else. The print manager can run while you're working on something else - you can print a drawing while working on a word processing document. Granted, none of this is very fast but it does work.
One of the reasons that the Lisa failed other than it's extreme was that Steve Jobs refused to allow the engineers to install a fan and as a result it ran extremely hot and burned out components and so its reliability suffered greatly.
That wasn't the Lisa... that was the Apple III and to some extent the original Macintosh. The Lisa 1 and 2/5 do not have cooling fans, but they do have fairly good airflow and don't tend to overheat. The power supply even has an over-temperature sensor, and will do a graceful shutdown of the system if it's getting too hot. That said, I did add a fan to the power supply in the system shown here. It runs slowly, so it's nearly silent.
What other forgotten-but-influential tech deserves more recognition?
Commodore Amiga 1000. A beautiful machine years ahead of its time and still with a global fan base today.
Commodore computer.
Early attempts at portable multimedia. In the early 90s we could see that video, sound, networking, and portability were all going to combine at some point in the future, but there was no way we could get there with the tech of that era. The Toshiba T6600C/CDV from 1993, for example, comes to mind.
The mp3 player with camera (picture and video), games like super mario, mp3 songs obviously. I remember it was 2008 to 10-ish in our country when that device was popular… I remember recording a video of my friends in the field lol that was before I knew what facebook or youtube is…
@@ChrisSkitch came here to read that comment👍❤
If I recall correctly, in Steve Jobs’ biography, there was a passage about how after the team returned from their trip to Xerox and attempted to recreate the technology they saw, Bill Atkinson tried to implement the window multitasking features, not knowing that the people at xerox didn’t know how to do multiple windows that overlap and stack on top of each other and that could be switched with a mouse click, all they had done was give windows some backdrop shadows to give the impression of depth, but it wasn’t functional. So Atkinson figured out how to do actual multitasking between windows because he didn’t know that it was impossible
That's true and even move windows wasn't present on Xerox, Bill Atkinson made it possible!
nice one!
Bill is a genius.
Yap, I would say what they saw was something like Dosshell or Norton Commander and implemented Windows 95.
@@awesomegmg956 Win 95 has pre-emptive multitasking. Windows 1.0 had cooperative multitasking. The original MacOS had "task switching" (apps were put to sleep in the background). So very much like the multitasking of DOS shell, but with a monochromatic GUI like GEOS on the C=64, however predating it by a couple years. It's amazing the GUI elements were all there despite the technical limitations of the time.
I've always loved how humble Bill Atkinson is in interviews. He was a major part of so many incredible developments, and yet to hear him speak everything was inevitable. What a legend
I was very fortunate to work with a Lisa back in the day. It was the "front end" for AT&T's Tech Publications department photo typesetter. Being an early and avid computer hobbyist, with my start building S100 buss computers (IMSAI 8080, CP/M OS) I was blown away by the Lisa UI. I instantly bought the Mac 128 when it came out and used 3rd party hardware upgrades to bring it up to a Mac 512. The interface was indeed revolutionary, but the product too expensive, and lacked speed and sophistication. Those issues were later solved by the Amiga (full color, faster) and incorporating internal hard drives. All fond memories. Thx for posting. The Lisa deserves far more recognition, and its appearance is still amazingly cool.
1984, I was a senior in high school. I went to the local computer store to check out the Lisa. Wow, I was amazed. Two years later after, I joined the Air force, I bought a Mac Plus. HyperCard was incredible.
Why the Airforce needed apple, play games ? Bullet calculations ?
HyperCard was based on NoteCards. Much of Apple's technology was copied from elsewhere, but they did know how to improve on others' ideas and make them user friendly.
I was one of the few Lisa developers outside of Apple back in the early 80s. Getting dev tools from Apple was like pulling teeth. I was building a few custom apps for ComputerLand / BusinessLand, who were a Lisa reseller. They got agreement from Apple to give them a dev system so I could write a couple extensions. I think this should have told the Lisa team something... at least they should have figured out that custom apps were a thing. Even if they kept the "stationary" metaphor, opening it up to developers might have helped the Lisa. The early Mac team on the other hand were notorious for "seeking forgiveness instead of permission" with respect to the developer community. There's a story that Guy Kawasaki was trying to get an early Mac developer some docs and instead of waiting for Inside Macintosh to be finished, he just photocopied what they had and shipped them out. That's ABSOLUTELY the opposite of the Lisa team.
What apps were you developing? Do you know if they shipped?
@compu85 first I wrote a demo / tutorial. Apple had (what I thought was) a very good tutorial that showed how to use the mouse and how to select and drag. CL had a few other features they wanted demoed, mostly in the spreadsheet. It was stuff that would be trivial with MacroMind Director a few years later, but was painstakingly written in Pascal and Assembly language. Later there was a simple inventory manager app which dragged on as there was significant vaciliation over whether it would support a network card (that I think never shipped) or would talk with a remote server over a modem.
Microsoft eventually released a BASIC for the Lisa which made demos MUCH easier.
And yes, they "shipped" to numerous ComputerLand / BusinessLand locations, but no, they didn't ship as shrink-wrap software to a general market.
I worked for Digital Equipment's Terminals Business Unit when the Lisa came out. We ordered one immediately. When we took it out of the box I was awestruck as I got to use a mouse for the first time. When the Macintosh came out we bought one of those. It came fully assembled which was a refreshing contrast to our own PCs which arrived in about 5 separate boxes, each of which contained a piece of 8.5x11 inch paper containing the headline "READ ME FIRST" in big bold letters. To assemble our PC one build a literal tower of daughter boards of ever decreasing size, connected by tiny, flimsy ribbon cables that you had to insert yourself. Good times!
What you described was all of Steve job's mantra: surprise and delight.
Menu bar at the top is my favorite thing about Mac OS. It's so easy to just move the mouse all the way up there instead of having to fiddle with the menu if it's attached to the window. It's a tiny little thing but it makes a difference
That is the worst thing! They killed off that when they morphed NextStep in to MacOS X when it was one of the worst aspects or Macs. It was OK with the the tiny compact Mac screens. Now I destroy my wrists just moving the mouse all the way to the top of a 4K screen to get to the menus then back to my working window.
@@pauledwards2817 It's easy to get your mouse to the top of the screen by just flicking it up there really quickly. It's the way all computers should work
I agree, I love the menu bar!
I think I've read that it was Larry Tesler's suggestion.
The coolest thing about the Lisa was Lisa Simpson having one. Ready for the documentary though!
I really like this new direction of the Verge. Keep it up!
On it!
Congrats to the whole crew. Love these new formats and I can't wait to see the upcoming Lisa documentary. This is what truly sets you guys apart from the competition. Very well done!
Thank you so much for this comment! 🥰 Now we're even more excited to share the doc.
@@TheVerge I will share the living daylight out of it if it's on the same level as this one. There are so many amazing stories when it comes to computer history and the amazing people who were the pioneers of these times.
Same here - It's so nice to see "fresh content" about the Lisa, not just a copy paste :)
January 1983 my store’s owner/principal sent me to the Lisa roll-out. I became the Lisa Product Manager. I packed the Lisa, an Electrohome projector and an Apple Dot Matrix Printer into the back of my Subaru wagon and demoed Lisa to industries up and down the Mississippi. What fun days.
What did you typically do in your demos?
@@compu85 In the Jan roll-out we salesmen were taught to run through the Lisa apps: LisaWrite, LisaList, LisaProject, etc. I’d do that demo, perhaps a half our, unless the dreaded hourglass popped up. Then I’d do a demo of “restarted the Lisa and setting up your desktop…”
What’s an electro home projector?
@ a computer projector used to demonstrate the Lisa. It was monochrome only (as was the Lisa’s display), measured about 10x10x36, and weighed about 30 lbs.
@@L0vbn56y wow, are those measurements in inches, or centimeters?
What a great summary of the Lisa! I'm glad I was able to help with this production :)
For anyone wondering, the laugh is me after I tried to run Microsoft Excel, and open a document on another disk, with only one floppy drive. It took 25 disk swaps!
The first spread-sheet I was involved with was the Lucid 3D spreadsheet for the TRS-80 Model 100/102. It in 8k of EPROM and was always available since you plugged the EPROM into the back of the computer. I laugh every time I look at a Linux or Mac executable; "hello world" is at least 48k.
I was 12 when I saw Lisa on display for the first time a year before Macintosh. I asked my father if we could get one, and he looked at the price tag of $10,000 (about $30,000 adjusted). That day was the first time I had heard my father spewing the F-bombs and saying, "who in the f-cking mind would spend that much money on this useless sh-t!" Well, my father got me IBM PCjr. on the cheap: "penny wise, pound foolish" would be what I described my experience with the PCjr.
Seems that was the whole market’s reaction too :)
To me, the most revolutionary change in OS navigation is search. On a Mac or Windows machine, I just hit the spotlight shortcut or the windows key and type. I rarely mouse around and browse to anything.
Really enjoyed watching this one. I also don't think that the desktop will go anywhere anytime soon. No matter if AI advances to the point that it organises and does everything, sometimes we'll still want to be quiet and do things ourselves. Like to sit down and watch photos or read a document together, thus some kind of interface will persist and I believe the base UI of a "desktop" will always exist, even in VR/AR.
I think voice interfaces will have the biggest impact on those with the least tech interest/skill. My grandparents can't use online banking, but having an AI conversation with your bank account can be done by anyone who can speak.
At 8:16: "Apple went all-in on the Macintosh in 1984." Apple absolutely did not go "all in" on the Macintosh in 1984. Apple was "all in" on the Apple II series in 1984. That's part of why Jobs left/was fired. Jobs kept insisting they shut down the Apple II production lines and start making only Macs. But the Macs had a tiny profit margin compared to the Apple II, so... the suits were all about the money. 1993 is the date commonly given for when the Apple II was discontinued (though you could get an Apple II card for your Mac LC for quite a few years after that.) But I bet Mac profits matched Apple II profits somewhere in the late 80s.
1:40 Xerox PARC, Alto. 2:32 Lisa UI/UX 5:51 1981 Xerox Star 6:16 Lisa led to consumer Mac 8:20 1985 Microsoft Windows 9:44 Lisa documentary in the works
Great video. The Lisa was not forgotten! Well-known to those who love the history of personal computing. I never used one growing up, but I certainly knew about them. I appreciate that this video reminds us of Apple's strength: taking existing ideas, improving them, then delivering them to the world in a shiny package. The Lisa is case-in-point. So is the iPad. Both were invented by others. Steve Jobs famously claimed the FingerWorks technology was Apple's, but it was not. Apple saw the value in multi-touch and grabbed it. Then they changed the world with it.
Outstanding video and a cool trip down memory lane for [at least] this Gen-Xer.
So The Verge is working on a documentary about the Lisa, the story of Nike and the Air Jordan is coming soon, there's a movie about the Blackberry's rise and fall and the backstory of Tetris just debuted on Apple TV+.
This is the year of the "back in the day."
That “and its afterlife” tease has me excited, the Macintosh XL is pretty underrated and strange
I thought, the UA-cam Channel of The Verge was dead, because it was flooded with audio podcast videos and boring videos. This is classic. Classic background story, classic best, classic The Verge. Please do more of this. And of course, no more audio podcast records.
The Lisa was definitely easier to use than the 1980 IBM home. computer, but one of the biggest problems with my Lisa was that it crashed all the time, and had to be restored using the system disks. Trying to save data on a 256 floppy was incredibly time consuming, as you had to save nearly every minute. You had to keep a floppy disk installed, and change it often. as it filled up quickly - so doing a document meant you had a stack of floppies sitting around that you hope you kept them in order. When the ubiquitous "cherry bomb" showed up on your screen, the computer died and you had to reinstall the disk OS from floppies, and then install each working floppy again. It makes nice press to talk about how great the Lisa was, but it weighed almost 50 pounds, and required many trips to computer gurus to keep it running. It also cost around 10K. After a few hard years, I moved to the Mac SE which still cost almost 3K. I have owned many macs over the years, and still use Macs, My newest computer being a Mac Air 2018, my oldest functioning are 2 white Macbook 2010, and several iMacs 2010. Without Macs, I would never leaned to use a computer - thanks Steve Jobs
I honestly don't know how you guys put up with floppy disks as your primary media for as long as you did! A lot of patience I guess.
@@kirishima638
I went from a manual typewriter to an electric, and was amazed when they came out with word processors. Only big companies and lawyers could afford them, and they required a lot of learning to use. We still used pencils and paper in the 80s, so a computer was sort of a plus. I didn't realize that the Lisa was the Edsel of computers at the time. I have used a computer for over 40 years now, and still don't know much about how they work, except they now seldom crash.
There were reasons to kill Lisa line and info like this describe why.
@@kirishima638 Everything was smaller but yeah it was slow.
I really love Bill's comment at around 9:37: "there were ideas in the air and someone raises up a catcher's mitt and catches it." It definitely felt that way. As an engineer / developer, it was hard to understand why people would want to use an Apple II when a Mac was available (this was a time frame when I never had to buy my own development systems.) Watching NeXT develop over the late 80s was a treat since it seemed like they were doing everything right (and now their work is the basis of all iProducts.) One thing I give Apple credit for is understanding what features typical consumers like. They didn't invent the personal computer, but the Apple II was a great microcomputer at just the right time. They didn't invent an office automation system, but the Lisa was MUCH more affordable than the Xerox Star. They didn't invent the laser printer (or even PostScript) but they understood how ground-breaking desktop publishing would eventually become so made sure the LaserWriter, PostScript and PageMaker/Quark/etc were available on the Mac. iPod? Definitely not the first MP3 player, but maybe the first "good" MP3 player. iPhone? not the first smart phone, but definitely a GOOD smartphone. It always seemed that Apple could see which way the tech winds were blowing and took the time to figure out what HAD to be added to a product to make it compelling.
Of course they're now struggling with services. It just doesn't seem to be in their DNA. I sort of think they're releasing the VR goggles 'cause they feel they have to release SOMETHING new. But at least they're not pushing a ChatGPT "solution" on us. Siri is great for what it is, but it seems that Apple figured out long ago that it's not the be-all / end-all solution for everyone's problems. Maybe Apple could get into internet search now that bing and google have abandoned it for... whatever the heck they're doing now.
Great video, filming setup and archive images are perfect. Thank you !
Kind of hilarious that at around 5:01, you can see "Note from Jef" and "Letter to Jef". That's Jef Raskin whose storied career at Apple supposedly came to an end when Jobs got kicked off the Lisa project and horned in on Jef's Macintosh project.
To quote my father, "Bill Atkinson was a genius, and I don't use that word lightly". At the time of this quote, my father was very deep in HyperCard stack development, but also knew Atkinson was responsible for a lot more than that. I emailed Bill thanking him for making my Dad's life better, as I was a kid and didn't know to not waste people's time like that. He replied thanking me for the email - Such a nice guy!
Bill is indeed a very gracious man. As an aside, the last time I was at the doctor's office at Stanford, I noticed the clinic had several of his photos framed on the wall. Turns out he's a talented photographer as well.
@@OhMeadhbh Indeed he is
I did a lot of my college work on the Lisa in the 80s. Thought it was amazing and liked it more than the Mac. The first two engineering jobs I had were at companies that had mainframes and I did not use Windows until the early 90s. The first thought in my head when using Windows was that it was just like a Lisa, but in color.
Oh my gosh! More of this! I love this digital archeology.
I don't see the visual desktop style UI going away any time soon. The simplified UIs on mobile devices make sense, but just become limiting when used on a desktop with multiple screens. I kind of realised this the first time I opened the Calculator 'app' on a Windows 10 (iirc) laptop and it filled the screen.
Let’s be honest, regardless of what you think of Apple, the Macintosh revolutionised personal computing more than almost anything else.
AND, in a legal and just way. Not only Jobs has signed a license deal with Xerox, he has also hired a few original GUI inventors. The team has invented not only drag and drop, but also menu line. Later, at NeXT, Jobs himself has invented what is now called Dock.
💯
Along with the iPhone for smartphones
It popularized the idea that “GUI = good, CLI = bad”, which turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. But not before Microsoft had hard-wired it into its own OS.
@@kurtmagbujos and iPads too
I quite liked my Lisa 2 at the time… 5MB disk + floppy.
It cost a small fortune, but i think i recovered the price over a couple of years - then traded it for an XT clone with the NEC V20 chip, and kept running!
It was used to write printed user guides for DOS programs, and I used three of them on-screen in tv commercials - pretending to be CAD stations. No frame bars or other problems, ut a lot of long days!
It’s certainly hard to think back to those days!
2:18 This was at the MIT Media Lab. Its director was a guy named Nicholas Negroponte. Among other things, he went on to mastermind the “One Laptop Per Child” project -- you know, the ultracheap, virtually childproof machine that ran Linux, that Microsoft was so determined to kill.
This was brilliant! More like this please. What about one on the Microsoft Courier or the entire WebOS phone/tablet ecosystem? Ooh I got one: HD DVD, the superior “next-gen” format that lost out to Blu Ray.
This is a second generation Lisa. The first generation Lisa had two "Twiggy" 5.25" 800k floppy drives (which were mechanically problematic).
I really don't think AR / VR is actually the interface of the future. Maybe for gaming, but for work it's much harder to do anything with a headset on then it is with a keyboard and mouse.
what would limit you from using a keyboard and mouse in vr?
I just said almost the same thing in a different comment.
The concept of VR is now about 30 years old, and still really no closer to practical use.
No one wants a VR headset glued to their head all day long.
I think that AR will be the next big game-changer, but not for another 10-20 years. It needs to be at the point of having a functional realtime responsive HUD overlay being displayed in high FPS on glasses which are only slightly heavier than typical eyeglasses. But at that point, all bets are off. The separation between computer and user would be nearly gone.
Like, imagine walking down the street, saying "Siri, direct me to the nearest taco stand" and simply seeing an arrow floating in front of you. Or looking at a restaurant sign and being able to see their menu on one side of your vision. Videoconferencing with the picture in a translucent pop-up window. Integrated AR games along the lines of Pokemon Go. Digital clothing overlays that show different patterns to different viewers. The interface would probably be a combination of voice and eye-tracking.
Traditional computers would still be needed for some precision work, like 3D modeling and such, but AR like this could easily take over every function of cellphones and then some, while being always-active and *right there* in view all the time.
Excellent video! I would love to see more on retro tech!
I loved the Lisa, we sold a bunch of them to a gold mining company in North Queensland. About the only painful aspect was an odd RS232 interface used for printers.
Unfortunately I have been the owner of many things with a half life of months rather than years -I have been the owner of a Borgward Isabella auto, a Ducati 90 dirt bike, a Vespa moped, as well as the Lisa. Every one of these items was so frustrating to own, that they ended up in the discard pile. I did give the Lisa to a friend for safe keeping when I had to move, and found out later that he sold it. Money has never been my sole object in life, and I have been fortunate to live a life full of unusual things, and experiences.
At around 6:35 there's an implication the Mac and the Lisa were made in parallel. That's a little misleading. Lisa development started in '78 and was always going to include a bit-mapped graphical screen with a WIMP interface. While the Mac project kicked off sometime around 79, Raskin's original idea was much more like the IA/Canon Cat. Jobs was kicked off the Lisa project in September of 1980 and horned in on the mac project a bit later. The Lisa was about 50% of the way to completion at the end of 1980 while the Mac was essentially 0% along. It might be clearer to say they overlapped, and with Jobs bouncing from the Lisa to the Mac project, they did inherit much of the Lisa concept. The stories I heard from Larry Tessler and Burrell Smith was the Lisa guys were pretty clearly separated from the Mac guys, but they (Lisa team) would come by from time to time and make encouraging noises.
Saying they were developed in parallel implies (to me) they were launched at the same time, which isn't exactly true.
Kinda wild just how skeumorphic all elements of PC UI design are. Right down to the fundamentals
Apple’s upcoming AR/VR headset will probably be seen at the Lisa of 2023. It’s bulky, expensive, and few people will probably use it. But I have confidence that it will lead the way in what AR/VR software becomes
Definitely interested in more Lisa.
There’s one famous one in South Korea 🫢
Stay tuned!
I love these little tech documentaries that the verge does
“Today, it can be hard to imagine computers turning out any other way.” In the broader sense, this summarizes one of the big problems in studying history.
Yes, true historians do not judge historical events with a contemporary outlook.
Just like the command prompt hasn't completely disappeared, the desktop metaphor will not completely disappear either.
No but it’s getting used less and less. I checked with some kids using phones. For them the only concept is “files” which for them is just a word to describe some “stuff” they want to access.
@@litjellyfish and they view those files on a desktop
@@PRH123 Not there is not such concept there for them. Never was. It’s “Home Screen” just an abstract concept = the root place / view where I have my apps.
Desktop and such for many younger people is not even used if they use a laptop that has it. Why? Because they don’t need it. It has no concept value for them
@ a phone screen is just a smaller desktop, just like any other computer, only a little smaller. It has icons for applications, and for files. A desktop.
@ nope. That is just what you see / read it as. It’s not intended to represent a desktop at all. It’s not a visual skewmorpic representation of a desktop. It’s just a screen. And that is why it’s referred to as (home) screens. It does not represent any physical item really. The apps yes they have and iconographic representation so we can call them icons. Files don’t exist on the phone. It’s just apps, and webbapps/ links to webpages.
Apple official use the term folder to group apps. But there is no longer any visual connection to it as being a folder. Ask younger people and many don’t know what an app folder is “ah you mean a GROUP of apps they say
So no the general concept ode a desktop is slowly going away.
And it’s not odd. Just the word desktop younger seldom use. It’s a table or desk. Try ask a young person what they have on their desktop and they will lookup oddly at you “desktop… you mean.. what I have on my table.. I mean what I have on my desk?
I remember our lab at work had an Apple Lisa. Consider that in early 1980’s the spreadsheet was functional.
The spreadsheet has a ton of built in functions. I was quite amazed reading the help file!
I am blown away by how good this video is! Kudos!
Apple targeted the Lisa at Corporate America. The Macintosh was targeted at Higher Education. (Apple II was mainly focused on K12). Of course, the Lisa suffered from two main problems. 1) Steve Jobs had taken over the Macintosh Project and tried to kill off the Lisa by starving it of resources and 2) The Lisa cost $10K plus another $5K for a ProFile. The Macintosh's popularity didn't really take off until the LaserWriter printer and AppleTalk both of which were initially only available on the Mac. The early days of Apple were quite interesting as well as pretty chaotic with lots of infighting, politics, and other issues that afflict easy stage companies 😐
The Lisa was overdesigned and over spec'd. It would have failed anyway, just like the Apple III.
The Mac was, from the outset, intended to be cheap and as minimal as possible. And it was supposed to be sold for less $1000 until Apple marketing massively increased the price.
@@kirishima638 Yes. The Lisa was over-designed, but back then nothing like it existed outside of Xerox.The Sun and Apollo workstations had just come to market, but their systems were designed for Engineers not Office workers. Apple was rife with competing product groups, in their early days, and Apple III was another victim. I didn't realize that Macintosh was originally supposed to sell for under $1K. Maybe Apple Marketing felt it needed to be priced higher or it might kill off the Apple II which was THE cash cow at the time.
@@karmadave Blame Scully.
@@kirishima638 Lol 😂 It’s easy to pin this on Scully, but the seeds of Apple’s dysfunction go back to when Steve was running his own fiefdom while waiting to become CEO. I worked at Apple from 1987 -1992 or what used to be called ‘The Scully Years’. Still have an autographed copy of his book. Apple had largely ironed out their product overlap issues, with the cancellation of the Lisa and Apple III and were riding the Mac horse for all it was worth. What killed Apple, in those years, was lack of innovation and a disastrous lawsuit against Microsoft which only encouraged them to copy MacOS even more. Windows 95 was the result and it nearly destroyed Apple for good.
@@karmadave Oh definitely. But it was Scully who doubled the price of the mac.
In the mid '80s, my grandfather got us two Lisas on loan from the University of Michigan that had been converted to run the Mac operating system. They had cost over $10,000 each but since they were so bad Apple had given the school their money back.
I went to a computer camp at Virginia Tech in the 1980s. They had one Lisa computer in their lab, and it had a combat game in black-and-white. I remember the background music for the game was Flight of the Valkyries. I can’t remember much about the game other than that I thought it was a good game.
Was it in the late 1980s? The Lisa used in this demo actually came from VT - they required it as part of their Computer Science program. The final programming project was to do a game, the original owner of this machine made Reversi. Since Macworks didn't really use the speaker, it's likely you were playing with someone else's software project - in UniSoft Unix a program could beep the speaker as much as it wanted!
@@compu85 Yes, I think it was the summer of 1988. Cool that the computer in the video was from VT! Their computer camp was great. We learned Turbo Pascal. BTW, one day they took us to another lab on campus (possibly the robotics lab). There they showed us another computer that costed $75k. This one had amazing 3D graphics for the time. It had a 3D flight simulator app that blew me away. I remember thinking that when I grew up, I needed to somehow acquire $75k so that I could get one of these computers :)
@@mrkcur Might have been a SUN workstation!
My first programming job - for my university’s writing workshop, during the summer - was on the Lisa. Nostalgia…
Were you working in the Lisa Workshop, or in one of the Unix environments?
Really good work on this one. It's great to see the ideas of Engelbart's team included in the story, and Bill Atkinson is such a legend.
As a person in IT I don't care about the desktop. As a office worker, this is the life changing experience in computer desktop
Android smartphones still use folders quite prominently.
For all of iOS's pros, its folder system (or lack of) drives me nuts. I always feel like I have to jump through loops and menus just to get a file from one app to open with another.
And for all of Android's cons, I like how I can put things in ANY folder and if I open another app, I can just simply navigate to that folder to open those files.
That is my biggest gripe with iOS
With Android security each new version makes this process more difficult. But yes, every app can access download folder.
If you want to do that you can just use the file manager app. But in 99 % of the cases for everyday users you don’t need it. It’s more only when the bridge between iOS and say downloading items from a browser that is not supported by any app on the phone that you need it. But in most cases then people store it anyway on their cloud solution either through tre browser or a dedicated app for it
Lisa was my dream machine, but I couldn't afford it so next year I "settled" for an original mac, which I still have.
The basic desktop metaphor will live on because of so many people are handling both physical and digital documents, messages, deals, pictures, maps, database acquired information and archives at work and when organising private life. Because it works. We still keep archives, libraries, use note books and store important documents, like wills, deeds or contracts in safe places. The digital desktop is a logical extension of this. For many specific work related tasks, for entertainment, SoMe and so on, very different GUs will evolve. They will all exist side-by-side a long time.
It's cool exploring ideas that flopped in the end but still influenced the world today. But with Lisa being just one piece in a whole industry moving in the same direction, it's hard to argue that it was really revolutionary or why it stood out amongst other similar Desktops at the time. Especially with its stand-out features (i.e. multitasking) not being unique to it at the time. I guess it was just an early example of "apple didn't do it first, but did it well" (so that's why we remember it).
Still doing things well today… lesser bugs than android competitors
@@romella_karmey True that can't be denied, but also still doing things "bad", still no freedom of side-loading on mobile
@@StormofBytes LUL I literally sideloaded tons of API using Scarlet on my 14 PM I watched modded UA-cam and listen to modded Spotify
If you compare the Mac GUI to the Windows 1.0 GUI, you'll see how much more advanced the Mac GUI was. The Windows 1.0 GUI windows didn't overlap--they just tiled. Other windowing systems out there were even more primitive at the time. So I disagree with you that "the whole industry was moving in that direction" in 1984. IBM certainly hadn't. Digital Equipment Corporation with their minicomputers certainly hadn't.
What's up with the showing of your background and lightning setup? I see it everywhere now.
“Sometimes there are ideas in the air, and somebody puts up a catcher’s mitt and catches it. And if they didn’t, somebody else would have caught it.” - Bill Atkinson
My mom, who was born in 1932, talked about this exact idea in the ‘70s. She had come up with the idea of making smaller vinyl records with just one song on a side, and 45RPM singles came out shortly after. So she “caught” the idea around the same time as someone else, but they had the ability to make it real.
Absolutely wonderful video. Interesting all the way through. Keep it up!
3:42 Sounds like the Stationary Pad feature still found in macOS today.
Yes, even the original Mac had stationary pads. But - on the Lisa it was the only way to create documents. The Office System doesn't have a File / New command.
I'm here for information like this !!! This was awesome
Great video Verge team! I learned something new.
the sound mixing in this video is fantastic
I love this kind of videos!!! I wonder if there´s a Doc about the BBS times...
I mostly use Windows and Android devices but truly, it was Apple that set the foundations for how desktop computer and smartphone OS's should operate.
lol.
Amazing video, thank you. I will wait for that documentory on LISA.
3:55 I think subtitle meant to use the word “took pains”?
Can’t wait for the documentary!
Bill Atkinson's humble last words will stay with me for the ages.
They made it happen but today those ideas are so common place that even he sees them as inevitable.
One thing I don’t understand what Apple didn’t use when developing a computer with a graphical user interface was the Xerox computer had a portrait oriented monitor, which makes sense if you’re working in an office, and you’re producing documents that most likely will be printed out in a portrait oriented format. Today, most people use tablet devices and can easily choose between portrait and landscape orientation by turning the device left or right 90 degrees, but that wasn’t the case with desktop computers then.
One word: cost. That big screen needs more ram to do the full bitmap image. And then more CPU cycles to draw it.
@@compu85 The dimensions would be the same, only the orientation of the screen would be vertical and not horizontal, so I don’t see how that would mean greater resolution for a portrait oriented screen.
@@collegeman1988 a 12" CRT has about a 6" tall and 8.5" wide raster area. Turned on its side, that means the screen isn't big enough to show a normal sheet of letter paper at 1:1 scaling. But wide-ways, it works fine, you can show the full width and about 1/2 of the document on the screen. Apple chose the 12" screen and fonts used specifically for that reason.
The Mac project was underway at the same time as Lisa. The Lisa did not influence the Mac. The Mac project, led by Jef Raskin, was well along when Jobs buried the Lisa and took over the Mac.
Mac also didn't sell well. Xerox provided far more than just the mouse, as Alan Kay references. Ethernet, laserjet printing, OO programming. Jobs also said he failed to see how big these were because he was blinded by the mouse. Also, Atkinson wasn't a programmer when he joined Apple. He was a neurochemist. Crazy. Oh also, the Lisa, later called the Mac XL, was cancelled hundreds were buried in a desert.
The Lisa turned into the macintosh XL running the macintosh operating system, didn’t sell great either though... Such a shame, revolutionary systems!
And then the leftover stock was buried in landfill. One reason why they’re so rare nowadays.
The Lisa used for the demo was part of Virginia Tech's CS program - students were required to buy them in 1986!
One must not downplay the legacy and impact of Apple on modern computing and technological leaps.
I love these videos on retro computing, it makes me feel grateful for what we have today. Great work!
Fascinating! They got so many things right. Forty years on the most intuitive Linux desktop environments such as XFCE and Cinnamon have many similarities to the Lisa and Mac.
Don’t forget Apple also pioneered Wi-Fi to the general consumer in the late 1990’s with the very first computer to have it built in, the “iBook G3”. Steve Jobs used a hula-hoop to show nothing was physically attached to the machine for connection to the internet and that was mind-blowing. Their old Airport routers were beautiful and the precursors to Linksys being in every American household.
They also pioneered personal printing at-home with their Laserjets to connect directly to the Mac back in the mid-80’s.
Apple more than any other company under the leadership of Jobs seemed to understand the importance of all the ideas Xerox wasn’t using at ‘PARC’ down in Palo Alto all those many decades ago.
Regardless of how good a GUI design becomes, anyone who wants to be proficient using a computer needs to learn how to use a few commands at the command line. Knowing only 10 or 12 useful commands will make a huge difference, whether using a Mac (which has something like BSD Unix underneath) or a Windows PC (which has something like the old DOS commands underneath).
It all depends what you intend to do. For most everyday situations today you never need to touch a shell. Look at iphone etc there you don’t even need really to understand the core file structure etc. basically you just pick the application. That fits your tasks and go ahead
Most of the times I use it, I’m not even really using commands. I’m using it to open a file browser window in a specific location which would require lots of double clicking otherwise, or running a few utilities which are much faster than launching their GUI wrappers (like 7zip or ffmpeg).
But I agree it’s important for anyone who isn’t a casual user to be able to feel comfortable in a terminal, sometimes it’s the only way to access certain directories or hidden files. Plus SSH-ing is much faster than VNC for a lot of tasks if you have, say, a laptop and a desktop.
This was fantastic. Nicely done.
7:26
While the point is literally laughing at how long it took to switch app's - I'm still amazed at what is actually happening, with such ease for the human operator - so awesomely quickly!
Please, more stuff like this. Thanks.
I think we do have to mention Commodore Amiga and its Workbench OS (see the name?). It was a full-color, full Multitasking OS that came in pretty cheap computer packages like the A500. I feel like there was a lot of cross-talk between Workbench and MacOS throughout the years. Still, seeing how such stuff evolved, is really cool!
I want to see the other documentary!❤
Does anyone remember the Macintosh had a training program, that showed you how to use a Mac just like you would use your desk in your office?
Yes I remember that. A friend of mine bought one of the early Macs to help his family and their business. I think it was on a cassette tape but not sure since it was so long ago but I do remember some kind of training program came with it.
@@ace942 I'm glad I'm not crazy making it up!
Yes. The Lisa had a guide too - called LisaGuide! Having the machine show you how to use it was quite a fancy thing in 1983!
I loved this video. Super interesting and insightful
BIG fan of your work, thanks a lot for an excellent content! Greetings from Denmark ❤❤❤❤
7:20 This is confused terminology. Lisa couldn't *_run_*_ "multiple applications at the same time"_ either. Having two programs "open" at the same time is not the same as both executing (running) at the same time. None of them had preemtive multitasking (except simple interrups).
cooperative multitasking is still multitasking.
@@OhMeadhbh In a way, but it does not really *RUN* _"multiple applications at the same time"_ (sic). Only one is active and running at a time. The others are passive, although still loaded into memory (usually) together with their data.
@@herrbonk3635 The Lisa can have multiple applications running at the same time. For example, you can have the terminal application going, saving a file, while you work on something else. The print manager can run while you're working on something else - you can print a drawing while working on a word processing document. Granted, none of this is very fast but it does work.
Man. This one gave me goosebumps
I love videos like this!
The verge has become my favorite tech channel by far and these mini docs on tech are just making it better.
One of the reasons that the Lisa failed other than it's extreme was that Steve Jobs refused to allow the engineers to install a fan and as a result it ran extremely hot and burned out components and so its reliability suffered greatly.
That was the Apple III.
That wasn't the Lisa... that was the Apple III and to some extent the original Macintosh. The Lisa 1 and 2/5 do not have cooling fans, but they do have fairly good airflow and don't tend to overheat. The power supply even has an over-temperature sensor, and will do a graceful shutdown of the system if it's getting too hot.
That said, I did add a fan to the power supply in the system shown here. It runs slowly, so it's nearly silent.
I stand corrected and thank you for fact-checking me. I could have sworn it was the Lisa but you are correct.
This was a fkin awesome video! Well done folks!
Glad you fkin liked it!!
Loved this! More like this please.
What computer was more ahead of all competition at that time , Shure the Amiga with Multiprocessing and Muktitasking in 1985
More of this please!
Great video!
8:39 - when everybody's Siri goes off...
Everything is so literal! I love things that are literal!