VCF East: Xerox Star vs. Apple Lisa

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: ▶ this video * 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: 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.

I don't see a clear advantage over the the ZXCV shortcut placement which the Macintosh team chose. (The original Finder had no specific Redo shortcut because it was single-undo and ⌘-Z performed both undo and redo.) Even well-placed dedicated keys on a Xerox-style (or later Sun-style) "fun cluster" ▶ this video to the left of the alphabetic cluster would have forced the hand to move further away from the home row. Of course ZXCV is much less well-adapted to the left-handed, but that would probably be true of any dedicated keys as well, unless they were mirrored on both sides of the keyboard.

I remember trying out Plan 9 a few years ago. I like its underpinnings; I like how the designers pushed the Unix notion of "everything is a file" to its limits, with various services being presented to the operating system as file servers implemented using a protocol named 9P. It's a cool research operating system with a lot of very interesting ideas, but ultimately it's not my daily driver due to a lack of hardware and software support, though I am working on a research project (but for conventional *nix operating systems) that takes advantage of 9P. Carmack's description of the rio GUI is apt; rio is heavily based on Xerox PARC's Cedar environment from the mid-1980s (link). I had a hard time getting used to rio, though eventually I learned it. I even purchased an old Sun three-button mouse (with no click-wheel) since Plan 9 didn't like my click-wheel mouse. rio does not adopt a lot of the conventions that were introduced by the Apple Lisa, Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows, resulting in a completely foreign experience for most new Plan 9 users. There is a misconception that Apple and Microsoft simply stole the idea of GUIs from Xerox PARC without further innovating on it. This misconception is false; the Apple Lisa and the Apple Macintosh introduced many GUI conventions that were not present in Xerox PARC's GUIs (this video comparing the Apple Lisa to the Xerox Star highlights the differences: ▶ this video), and Windows introduced additional innovations. Back to Plan 9, the result is a GUI that has many conventions that were explored by Xerox PARC but were not adopted by the Mac or Windows, such as mouse chording (link). Hence, there's a learning curve for those accustomed to conventional GUIs. Even so, the ideas behind rio seem to do a good job with exploiting Plan 9's architecture and showing how it could support a more tools-oriented design. Moreover, it was borrowed from Xerox PARC's Cedar. It would have been quite a research effort to create a Mac- or Windows-like GUI for Plan 9 that made full advantage of Plan 9's "everything is a file" architecture. Merely implementing a Mac- or Windows-like GUI to Plan 9 might not have taken full advantage of Plan 9's architecture, which I think is the key difference between Plan 9 versus other operating systems. Perhaps in some alternate universe where Apple and AT&T merged in the 1990s and Apple built their successor to the classic Mac OS on top of Plan 9 with Apple people like Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Alan Kay joining forces with Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike....come to think of it, it's quite interesting to think about that possibility, though I don't think Apple would have made its post-1997 comeback without Steve Jobs, no matter how good "Mac OS Plan 9" would've been.