- The year is 1984, dawn of the Apple Macintosh.
The Mac wowed the world with a graphical user interface
and something called a mouse.
It's revolutionary, but it wasn't Apple's first try.
This is the Lisa released a year before.
It's pretty hard to find one these days.
They were only sold for about two years
but you can find Lisa's design influence everywhere
because it helped create computing as we know it.
When Apple started working on the Lisa in the late 1970s
personal computers asked a lot more of users.
Some models like the Apple two were hugely successful
but learning them was a commitment.
- Most computers were command line oriented.
You type something at a computer and it typed some,
usually complained, but you know it was
it was sort of a textual interaction.
- That's interface designer Bill Atkinson
from an interview with the Computer History Museum.
He and others at Apple knew that if they wanted to
widen the appeal of computers, they'd need to evolve
beyond that command line to something more visual.
- We're going to try our best to show you
rather than tell you about this program.
- Visual interfaces actually date back
to the 1960s and an engineer named Douglas Engelbart.
In this now famous 1968 demo,
Engelbart teases the earliest glimpses of modern
graphically driven computing.
Windows, hyperlinks, even the mouse
- [Douglas] I don't know why we call it a mouse,
sometimes I apologize.
It started that way, we never did change it.
- These then futuristic ideas were picked up by research lab
Xerox Park and built into a prototype called the Alto.
The Alto boasted overlapping windows and pop-up menus
driven by a mouse.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs learned
about The Alto and cut a deal with Xerox to see it.
The system blew him away and he returned
to Apple with a new zeal for visual interfaces
- Within, you know, 10 minutes
it was obvious to me
that all computers would work like this.
- The designers at Apple took a lot
of inspiration from the Alto and beyond.
They checked out a room sized experimental interface
called Data Land at MIT,
which you flew around with a touchscreen and a joystick,
and an IBM concept called Picture World
full of office analogs.
You actually sealed your emails in a virtual envelope
and dropped them in an outbox.
Apple thought of office workers as its big new market
so it felt natural to make a computer that worked
like a virtual desktop
which is exactly what the Lisa became.
The Lisa was Apple's vision
for everything an office computer should be.
It was so full of new concepts that Apple produced
a demo video explaining everything.
- Now you can think of it as being like your office
with a desktop and other office fixtures.
Here's a place to store information, a folder,
and a place to get rid of information, a waste paper basket.
- Looking back from 2023,
these ideas are second nature.
Icons, dropdown menus, popup windows.
If you used any personal computer
you basically know how to use a Lisa, sort of.
Oh God, it made a noise.
Some of it's more literal than we're used to.
You don't technically launch applications.
Instead, you have these stationary pads with different kinds
of paper, writing paper for a text file.
Rows and columns for a spreadsheet.
To start a new document you tear off a virtual sheet.
It is funny that this is so focused on neatness
but it does still put the default document
in the messiest possible place.
The way files move around is really literal too.
The Lisa shipped with a hard drive called the profile
which Apple took panes to connect to the real world.
- First, we'll select and open the profile.
- You keep the folders in there right?
- Right, it's just like a filing cabinet
- To work on a document you first move it to the desktop
like you would in your office and then open it up.
When you're done, you can put it away,
which saves, closes and files the document away again.
It does everything
with these long animations so you can follow along.
Apple figured multitasking was important for office workers
so if you've got multiple documents open
you can just do the thing that feels natural
and click the new window
and all these apps played by basically the same rules.
- A lot of these things that we discovered
were a matter of trial and error,
not inventing it right the first time.
We bumbled into the Lisa user interface
one mistake at a time.
- Bill Atkinson documented the Lisa development process
in a series of Polaroids, so you can look back
and see how a lot of these tools developed.
- The folder tabs were actually shaped
like folder tabs with a little curve to them
and when you shrunk one down, it'd go back into the drawer.
We think of a folder now
as a container that other things go inside of
but we were confused about that at the time
and so we actually thought of this as a folder
but had text in it instead of having other things in it
- Sometimes solutions created new problems
which led to even better ideas.
- One point we had little pull down menus on each window,
but the problem is if the window was over in the side
you couldn't get all of the titles and if it was
near the bottom, you couldn't get all of the items.
- They moved the menus to the top of the screen
but that made users drag their mouse a long way.
The solution to that was another now ubiquitous feature.
When you move the mouse faster, the cursor moves farther
- So a rapid flick would take you right up to the top.
- These weren't all brand new mechanics.
You can see similar ideas in, for instance,
the 1981 Xerox Star, but Apple's ideas often
feel more refined.
This demo video for the Star shows you how to move an icon
with a click and then a keystroke and then a second click
- Using the move key
you can arrange your desktop in any way you like.
- Apple's version was the one that lasted, drag and drop.
Apple, well, it put a lot of work into the Lisa
but that wasn't the only project on the table.
- What I'd like to do now is
is show you the Macintosh in person.
- Apple developed the Lisa in parallel
with the Macintosh though with very different intent.
- Well, the Mac came out only one year after the Lisa.
Okay, it was a baby Lisa.
It was how do we make the Lisa affordable?
How can we also make it now not only lower cost
but less stiff?
We're trying to make the Lisa for an office worker.
We were trying to make the Mac for a 15 year old
- Even so, the Mac team borrowed people and ideas
from the Lisa and Apple advertised the Mac
as having advanced Lisa technology
in a far cheaper stripped down product,
and using the Mac, it's hard to see it
as anything but a baby Lisa.
There are little tweaks.
The housekeeping menu is gone
and the now famous Apple menu has appeared.
The Mac acknowledges the existence of applications
but it couldn't run multiple apps at the same time.
This is what switching apps looked like on a Mac.
(upbeat music)
- Just a moment.
- As a reminder, here's multitasking on Lisa.
It's so much fun getting to see the ability to
have multiple apps open at the same time as this cool luxury
that was backtracked upon and not brought back until later.
Still, the trade-offs Apple made paid off.
The Mac ran faster than the Lisa,
and it cost thousands of dollars less.
Apple went all in on the Mac in 1984 and it quietly
discontinued the Lisa year later.
Once the desktop metaphor got its hooks into the industry,
it didn't let go.
Microsoft Windows arrived in 1985
while Mac OS kept evolving.
Today it can be hard to imagine computers
turning out any other way.
- Let's experience the world of Windows 95.
- Hello, I'm a Mac.
- And I'm a PC.
- Dude, you're getting in Dell.
- Of course, nothing lasts forever.
Hey Siri, start a new note.
- What do you want it to say?
- Notes on Lisa script.
Voice assistance and search have become a bigger
and bigger part of computing,
routing people around the desktop.
Mobile phones still use files and folders
but we rarely have to think about them or see them.
And with the rise of AI chatbots, AR and VR
the last vestiges of Engelbart's world
of windows and mice might finally vanish.
In short, the era of the desktop metaphor
might finally be ending
but no matter what becomes of user interfaces,
Lisa's design legacy shines through.
It taught Apple that computers should be built
for people, not the other way around.
- Sometime there are ideas in air and the right person puts
up a catcher's mitt and catches the idea, and if they didn't
somebody else would've caught it.
Things would've progressed in that direction
but the Lisa contributed
toward the idea that computers were for everyone.
- If you're really curious about the Lisa now,
you're in luck.
We've got a big documentary coming
about its life, death, and afterlife.
It's a story of politics, personal grievances
and a clandestine burial in a Utah landfill.
That's all coming soon, so stay tuned.