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The Mac really pioneered square pixels (at least for consumer machines). Reportedly, some wanted them for the Lisa, as well, but, as the Lisa was behind schedul
by masswerk 4y ago
The Mac really pioneered square pixels (at least for consumer machines). Reportedly, some wanted them for the Lisa, as well, but, as the Lisa was behind schedule and working perfectly with non-square pixels already, the Lisa was denied this luxury. (One may also argue that in an office environment the horizontal resolution may have been more important than square pixels, which would have come at the cost of a third of the horizontal resolution. As usual, no free lunch…)
- bitsavers 4y agoThe Corvus Concept beat it to market, had a higher resolution bitmapped screen with square pixels, was built on top of the same SVS Pascal compiler as Lisa, and vanished because it's software was primitive, barely using the capabilities of the screen and had softkeys like the HP Amigo and no mouse. http://bitsavers.org/pdf/corvus/Corvus_Concept/ http://bitsavers.org/pdf/corvus/Corvus_Concept/ It's essentially what Lisa would have been if the UI direction hadn't changed because of Apple's exposure to the PARC Alto (which also had a 606x808 screen with square pixels). Fun fact: Mike Cook, the person who designed the Corvus Concept hardware, ended up going to Apple and designed the board for the LaserWriter II.
- masswerk 4y agoI didn't know the Corvus Concept, at all – thank you! Skimming the user manual, there's a label window below the screen, very similar to the soft function keys approach of the early Lisa concepts, indeed.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoWhy is bitsaver's informative comment downvoted to dead? Yes slightly off topic re: pixel shape but relevant to the overall topic