Leap Technology

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): link And the Canon Cat: * Video about LEAP technology for the Canon Cat: ▶ this video 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.

More on the Canon Cat: link link There are also a few previous HN discussions on this machine. EDIT: I just have to post this lovely scene from the original video separately. This is about human-computer interaction after all, isn't it! ▶ this video Aren't we actually approaching an age where this kind of (almost-)single-purpose machines might be making a comeback? The focus this model seems to allow or enforce on the user feels kind of... healthy.

One of the first thing I added was Leap keys-type search, I didn't want modes. - Leap keys: ▶ this video The second was pragma-mark navigation, so I can always see a overview of the codebase. - navbar: link I also wanted a local copy buffer specific to the project I work on, so I could easily manage multiple copies of the clipboard data(it's part of how I work).

That looks seriously cool. Just the colors give me goosebumps :) completely offtopic: My dream is to build a super cheap child friendly computer, that the kids can build themselves, has a software keyboard that directly polls the gpio pins so that kids can modify their keyboard instead of having a keyboard controller (just so there is less mistery in what happens when a key is pressed). And the OS is something inspired from LEAP: ▶ this video that allowing you to evaluate code and apply it to your current file. A bit like your LOAD81 but with text. I have a prototype now: link but it has a long way to go.

This is kind of neat from a nostalgia standpoint, but I wish there was some kind of "Encyclopedia of Operating System UI," that broke UI features and paradigms down into their smallest units, described their mechanics, and tracked them across different operating systems and versions. Probably with a particular emphasis on defunct systems when there was a lot more diversity and innovation (e.g. the Canon Cat Leap Keys: ▶ this video)