Oral History of Larry Tesler, part 1 of 3

Meh. the Lisa was absolutely, positively, explicitly NOT a Mac. If you don't get that, then you misunderstand the business of computing in the late 70s / early 80s. The author also ignored Jef Raskin's work on the original Mac project (I wrote a serial driver for him in the early 80s for a 6809 prototype he was working on.) If you're going to make one of these Mac hagiographies, it's useful to point out the Canon Cat (which was more in line with Jef's original idea for the Mac) and then point out how different it was from main-stream Macs. And then point out WHY the Lisa was not a Mac. So... Why do people think the Lisa was a prototype Mac? It's easy to understand the confusion. It has a 68k processor, a mouse and a bitmap screen. It was even used as a development platform for the original Macs. But it is not a Mac. The Lisa didn't have "apps" and "files" in the same way we think about them. It had "tools" and "documents." The Lisa was strongly influenced by the Xerox Star. And while it's not exactly true to say the Lisa was Apple's version of the Star, there was definitely a strong resemblance. The Lisa (and the Star) came with all the functionality it would ever have built into the system. (This restriction changed later, but when launched, it was considered a complete system.) It had "apps" in the sense there were tool icons you could (double?) click to create a blank document of a specific type. But it took Apple over a year to decide they wanted to give third-parties the ability to write apps for it. I think Microsoft and the Mac team inside Apple were responsible for poking Apple management repeatedly until they relented and released a dev kit to third parties. I had an existing relationship with Apple as a contractor, so it wasn't too difficult for me to get on the list of "trusted" third parties. I'm pretty sure I was the first Lisa developer in Texas. But I digress. The Lisa was not a Mac. Later in its life, you could perform brain surgery on your existing Lisa to turn it into a FrankenMac, but out of the box? No. Not a Mac. They were later re-furbed and re-sold as Mac/XL, but I would argue that with their updated ROMs, they were no longer Lisas. And Lisa 2's weren't Macs, they didn't run Mac apps. I think they could use the same external profile 10Mb hard drive as the Mac, but so could the Apple ][ and Apple ///, and no one's trying to say they were Macs. If you have the time, here are a few decent videos up on YouTube about the development of the Star and Lisa: * Frank Ludolph and Rod Perkins talk about the Lisa UI: link * Mi amigo Jason talks about the Lisa and the Star: link * Larry Tessler talks about the Lisa: link * Larry Tessler's Oral History @ the CHM (Part 1): ▶ this video And the Canon Cat: * Video about LEAP technology for the Canon Cat: link Anyway... the Lisa was not a Mac. But it definitely was a step on the way to the Mac, as was the machine that eventually became the Canon Cat.

ATG pushed Apple to the forefront of computer Video. They came out with Road Apple Video codec (Road Pizza) in 1991. link link Look up S3TC/DXTC texture compression, S3 copied Apple video codec verbatim and patented it for 3D graphics use. Somehow Apple missed that and didnt fight initial patent, result was losing couple iphone court cases 10 years later and purging S3TC from mobile. Avid Media Composer was born and grew up on Mac hardware. Same goes for Adobe Premiere, all thanks to ATG work. link ATG might of saved Apple from going bankrupt in late nineties - Microsoft fucked up getting caught conspiring with Intel, paying third party contractor to steal QuickTime code link Thats the origin of the infamous "Microsoft saved Apple in the nineties" myth link In reality: >David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million. Oral History of Larry Tesler part 1 of 3 ▶ this video Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 2 of 3 link Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 3 of 3 link Oral History of Andy Grignon link Quicktime 1995-1998, iPod, iPhone link Currently Walmart of all places.