9 ms·

Byte Interviews the Apple Lisa Dev Team (1983)

155 points by easeout 3y ago

jbullock35 3y ago
Good interview. It includes insightful commentary on how Xerox did and didn't influence the project, starting with this: > BYTE: Do you have a Xerox Star here that you work with?
WillAdams 3y ago
For more of this sort of thing see: https://folklore.org/0-index.html https://folklore.org/0-index.html though I still think about what might have been when I read: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html and wish there was something readily available and well-supported along those lines now.
- musicale 3y ago
  Shame that Bill Gates was able to force Apple to kill MacBasic. I wonder if Apple would have included it in the box, or if it would have been popular, and if the Mac would have attracted more hobbyist programmers like the Apple II did? On the other hand, a couple of years later Apple introduced HyperCard, which really was a kind of end-user programming revolution, even if it largely became an evolutionary dead end (though HyperTalk influenced AppleScript and probably other languages as well.) Perhaps if HyperCard had been networked then it might have survived longer into the web/JavaScript era.
  - WillAdams 3y ago
    HyperCard was late to the show, and confused by not being released as a programming/development tool (usually you had to make a special change to enable that), and it was weird, and it made "Stacks", not programs/applications.
    - lostemptations5 3y ago
      [dead]
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      Originally, there was no separate "player" version of Hypercard, so the stack editing/development tools were universally available. The Hypercard player appeared as a separate thing after Clarus took over as Apple's software distribution arm. Typing "magic" in the message box of the Hypercard player converted it into a full version of Hypercard.
    - geerlingguy 3y ago
      Myst was created in HyperCard (I think?), one of the most popular computer games of all time (and recreated like 5 times now!).
      - WillAdams 3y ago
        Yes, and before that there was _The Manhole_ which was described as "Where Alice would have gone if Alice had had Hypercard".
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    The Mac was priced too far out of the hobbyist snack bracket. And Steve Jobs deliberately sealed it off to be un-expandable and mostly unfriendly to tinkerers.
    - lproven 3y ago
      And yet... It got there in the end. But in the early days, that opened up the niche for the Atari ST, the "Jackintosh", sold with the tagline "the power without the price". Dismissed these days but hugely important and influential in its time. And that also paved the way for the Amiga. But in the end, they tied their systems too closely to the low-end entry-level spec, which Apple did not do with the "sealed off" Mac. Which led to the Mac Plus, and the Mac II, and hundreds of models, still on sale today. While the ST and Amiga struggled into the 68030 era then mostly died out. So in fact, it's not really true, is it? It's not about the price, because... ... in the end, they got reasonably priced... ... and still sell today, 40 years later... ... there's always the 2nd hand market... ... they had cheaper rivals but those companies died, showing that keeping your prices high enough for healthy profits is in fact the long-term winning strategy. So: no. The MacBook Air is even more "sealed down." It has been on sale, that locked down, for 16 years, and yet it still sells ten million a year. https://gitnux.org/macbook-air-statistics/ https://gitnux.org/macbook-air-statistics/ So... no. Argument rejected on all counts.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        So, well, I was an Atari ST user back in the day. So. And yes the Mac dropped in price for a period in the late 80s, 90s, in the 030 era as you say. But this had a lot to do with dropping component prices and Apple's mass market strategy at that point. At that point in time my mother got a IIlc on educational discount and it was a far better deal than a PC of the same era, at least for what she was doing. And in that era they made it a relatively open platform at that point, too, with an expansion bus, and ADB and all that. But that was well beyond when Jobs was there. His original vision was a locked down appliance box. Though he changed his tune when he went over to NeXT. The original Mac was too expensive for regular middle class people, and it had no expansion ports. I don't think you can deny those two facts.
  - EricE 3y ago
    If they had built networking into Hypercard I doubt the web would have come to being - there would have been no need. I remember seeing somewhere Bill Atkinson talking about what a miss it was. Especially since AppleTalk was built into the Mac from day one :/
justin66 3y ago
One can read the entirety of Byte's US magazine output, without the blogspam: https://vintageapple.org/byte/ https://vintageapple.org/byte/ (I have no idea if the foreign language editions and so on made it online)
- Tempest1981 3y ago
  Nice. Found the article on pages 90-114 of this 536 page PDF. Fewer typos/errors, and tons of nostalgic ads... but takes a while to load: https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198302_Byte_Magazine_Vol_08-02_Standards.pdf https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198302_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...
  - justin66 3y ago
    If you're into the ads, Jason Scott has a project going to scan all the old Computer Shopper magazines. I haven't looked to see exactly where things stand with that. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 I recently started looking at ads in the old Byte magazines and among the things I was reminded of was how long the Z80 held on among the Byte crowd. And how much money (more apparent if you adjust for inflation) hobbyists and aspiring professionals were willing to spend on their hardware and software toys in the eighties. Having grown up in that time makes things like (a timely example) some people whinging about the cost of a Raspberry Pi 5 feel so irritating and inexplicable.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      There was a much smaller difference between high and median incomes in the early 80s, so the original Mac would have been around 1 month's salary - not trivial, but not an impossible reach for many people. Lisa was far out of that bracket. But business S-100 systems had been selling for $2k to $20k and up since the 70s, so $10k for Lisa's advanced features would have seemed realistic. Today most people are paying far more in student debt, health insurance, and housing costs. So although nominal income is three times higher, free disposable income hasn't kept pace. It's true that hardware today is commoditised and much, much cheaper. But at the low end, those old II/Mac systems were still more affordable to middle class families than a straight inflation conversion suggests.
sema4hacker 3y ago
An interesting interview with Dan Smith, who was the User Interface Coordinator for the Lisa, and then switched to the Mac project, is at https://archive.org/details/Semaphore_Signal_26 https://archive.org/details/Semaphore_Signal_26
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
"Tesler: Each engineer set his or her own schedule. Some engineers work something like Monday through Friday from nine to five. Others work all day at the office, then go home and work all night there. And what an individual engineer does may vary from time to time. Daniels: These people have pride. They set their own milestones and they want to meet them, so they'll put in extra work to do that. Tesler: We decided a long time ago that since the project would obviously go on for more than a few months — a couple of years — we couldn't have this constant pressure on everybody, because people would just crack. " This is great managerial wisdom right here. From everything I've read, Larry Tesler really was someone great. RIP
icemanind 3y ago
"The 'mouse' pointing device is about the size of a package of cigarettes and has one button on top". God bless the 80s!
- MegaDeKay 3y ago
  And you'd have to pop the ball out every now and then to clean the crud that had built up on the x & y rollers that otherwise made the on-screen pointer stick and skip. Good times.
  - hyperdimension 3y ago
    And even though we're well into the future of optical mice, when my Bluetooth mouse disconnects for a few seconds, the habit of thunking it on the desk a couple times persists... (to unstick the ball)
    - dhosek 3y ago
      Then there were the first-gen optical mice which required special mousepads with a grid on them for the mouse to know how it was being moved.
wisemang 3y ago
> We had a couple of real beauties where the users couldn't use any of the versions that were given to them and they would immediately say, "Why don't you just do it this way?" and that was obviously the way to do it. So sometimes we got the ideas from our user tests, and as soon as we heard the idea we all thought, "Why didn't we think of that?" Then we did it that way. I’d love to hear some specific examples of this. Things that we probably take totally for granted now but weren’t at all obvious during the initial design and implementation phases. This isn’t the kind of shit you get from A/B testing.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  You might find the example in section 4.2 of this interesting: https://www.applefritter.com/content/enlisting-user-help-software-design https://www.applefritter.com/content/enlisting-user-help-sof...
  - rahkiin 3y ago
    Interesting, thank you! I believe they are describing the invention of the clipboard: two-step cut-and-paste instead of defining a selection and a destination and then executing a move command.
insane_dreamer 3y ago
This type of interview, with such detailed technical questions and answers, with actual engineers (not product spokespeople), would be impossible these days.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Not impossible, but it would likely be relegated to a video on some obscure YouTube channel with no transcript and a few hundred views. Though for the biggest orgs (Microsoft and Apple of today), there are too many layers of red tape and lawyers, so in that case I'd fully agree.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  One of my favorite interviews in recent years was the Chris Lattner interview by the three guys on the Accidental Tech Podcast https://atp.fm/371 https://atp.fm/371 All of the hosts are very technical.
  - insane_dreamer 3y ago
    yeah, but at the time of the interview Lattner had already left Google; it's very unlikely he would have been able give that interview while still working on TF at Google (which was my point about the Byte/Apple interview)
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Lattner worked for Apple…
      - insane_dreamer 3y ago
        yeah but not when he gave that interview
WD-42 3y ago
Wayne Rosing is still working on technical problems at Las Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara. Absolute legend of an engineer. There is a LISA in the conference room there :)
- lisper 3y ago
  "Rosing: ... We felt it was worth risking a theft to gain the increased productivity of people working at home." This is so ironic because Wayne was the one who shut down WFH at Google when he took over from Urs Holzle back in 2001. That was one the things that caused me to leave.
GoofballJones 3y ago
Man, I really miss Byte. Subscribed to it for years. Loved that it covered a wide variety of topics.
- zabzonk 3y ago
  and loved the covers!
- Lio 3y ago
  Byte was great. I've the discussion of the NEC 7220 here. It was widely available here in the UK and in a pre-world wide web age it was one of the most important ways of knowing what was going in the US market. Well for a young me anyway. I loved it. I remember the issue detail the NeXT Cube particularly.
lapcat 3y ago
> In software, we drew mostly experienced people from other companies and very few people straight out of school. Even the ones we took out of school generally had lots of job experience. In fact, one time I surveyed the applications group and found an average of nine years' work experience in software. When we looked at resumes, we tried to find people with several years of experience in development. We made exceptions if someone had specialized in something we were interested in or was a top student who also had good summer experience. We wanted an experienced team because what we've been doing is a very major software effort. It's very complex, and there's such a large body of software to crank out and make reliable that it takes experienced people. The remarks about team-building were very interesting too.
cebert 3y ago
> When did you do the hiring? It’s crazy to think Apple Lisa devs were hired without needing to solve several Leetcode problems.
coldcode 3y ago
I had a Lisa on my desk in late 1983, along with an Apple II and Apple III and later a PC/XT (not sure if that appeared before they took the Lisa away). The Lisa was for evaluation, so I wrote some reports with it but didn't get to write any code. It was ridiculously expensive, but I could tell that it represented the future of personal computing. Explaining to my friends how it worked was difficult; even the concept of a mouse, much less fonts and a bit-mapped display, was foreign to them. None of my friends even owned any kind PC so they had little to compare my description to.
- dhosek 3y ago
  I remember reading the accounts of the Lisa in (I think) Softtalk when I was in high school and thinking that this sounded like an absolutely amazing system. Of course, even a $666.66 Apple ][+ was not in the cards for my family¹ so a $10,000 Lisa was never going to happen, but I still dreamt of it. ⸻ 1. Until my cousin got me a Spectravideo 318 when I was a senior in high school to write some demo programs for the local dealer, I never had a computer of my own and to get computing time I had to either show up before school or stay after and use the school computer lab, assuming it was even an option.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  It's a shame they abandoned it so quickly for the Mac, and let that project suck away all the air in the room, or allowed a competing project like that at all instead of concentrating efforts. The Mac stole from the Lisa but just aesthetic / UX aspects, and produced something that didn't grow well over the years... no memory protection, single tasking, etc. Things that impacted them very badly in the late 80s and into the 90s when customers wanted/expected these things and System 7 did not cut it. Lisa really was the superior platform in many ways and it really would have come down to finding a way to get prices lower through economies of scale. Another couple years and the 68k and supporting chips and RAM were way cheaper and you could make a fairly beefy machine in that class for pretty cheap (as Tramiel showed with the Atari ST.)

155 points by easeout 3y ago

Good interview. It includes insightful commentary on how Xerox did and didn't influence the project, starting with this: > BYTE: Do you have a Xerox Star here that you work with?

WillAdams 3y ago

For more of this sort of thing see: https://folklore.org/0-index.html https://folklore.org/0-index.html though I still think about what might have been when I read: https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html and wish there was something readily available and well-supported along those lines now.

musicale 3y ago
Shame that Bill Gates was able to force Apple to kill MacBasic. I wonder if Apple would have included it in the box, or if it would have been popular, and if the Mac would have attracted more hobbyist programmers like the Apple II did? On the other hand, a couple of years later Apple introduced HyperCard, which really was a kind of end-user programming revolution, even if it largely became an evolutionary dead end (though HyperTalk influenced AppleScript and probably other languages as well.) Perhaps if HyperCard had been networked then it might have survived longer into the web/JavaScript era.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  HyperCard was late to the show, and confused by not being released as a programming/development tool (usually you had to make a special change to enable that), and it was weird, and it made "Stacks", not programs/applications.
  - lostemptations5 3y ago
    [dead]
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    Originally, there was no separate "player" version of Hypercard, so the stack editing/development tools were universally available. The Hypercard player appeared as a separate thing after Clarus took over as Apple's software distribution arm. Typing "magic" in the message box of the Hypercard player converted it into a full version of Hypercard.
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Myst was created in HyperCard (I think?), one of the most popular computer games of all time (and recreated like 5 times now!).
    - WillAdams 3y ago
      Yes, and before that there was _The Manhole_ which was described as "Where Alice would have gone if Alice had had Hypercard".
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  The Mac was priced too far out of the hobbyist snack bracket. And Steve Jobs deliberately sealed it off to be un-expandable and mostly unfriendly to tinkerers.
  - lproven 3y ago
    And yet... It got there in the end. But in the early days, that opened up the niche for the Atari ST, the "Jackintosh", sold with the tagline "the power without the price". Dismissed these days but hugely important and influential in its time. And that also paved the way for the Amiga. But in the end, they tied their systems too closely to the low-end entry-level spec, which Apple did not do with the "sealed off" Mac. Which led to the Mac Plus, and the Mac II, and hundreds of models, still on sale today. While the ST and Amiga struggled into the 68030 era then mostly died out. So in fact, it's not really true, is it? It's not about the price, because... ... in the end, they got reasonably priced... ... and still sell today, 40 years later... ... there's always the 2nd hand market... ... they had cheaper rivals but those companies died, showing that keeping your prices high enough for healthy profits is in fact the long-term winning strategy. So: no. The MacBook Air is even more "sealed down." It has been on sale, that locked down, for 16 years, and yet it still sells ten million a year. https://gitnux.org/macbook-air-statistics/ https://gitnux.org/macbook-air-statistics/ So... no. Argument rejected on all counts.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      So, well, I was an Atari ST user back in the day. So. And yes the Mac dropped in price for a period in the late 80s, 90s, in the 030 era as you say. But this had a lot to do with dropping component prices and Apple's mass market strategy at that point. At that point in time my mother got a IIlc on educational discount and it was a far better deal than a PC of the same era, at least for what she was doing. And in that era they made it a relatively open platform at that point, too, with an expansion bus, and ADB and all that. But that was well beyond when Jobs was there. His original vision was a locked down appliance box. Though he changed his tune when he went over to NeXT. The original Mac was too expensive for regular middle class people, and it had no expansion ports. I don't think you can deny those two facts.
- EricE 3y ago
  If they had built networking into Hypercard I doubt the web would have come to being - there would have been no need. I remember seeing somewhere Bill Atkinson talking about what a miss it was. Especially since AppleTalk was built into the Mac from day one :/

justin66 3y ago

One can read the entirety of Byte's US magazine output, without the blogspam: https://vintageapple.org/byte/ https://vintageapple.org/byte/ (I have no idea if the foreign language editions and so on made it online)

Tempest1981 3y ago
Nice. Found the article on pages 90-114 of this 536 page PDF. Fewer typos/errors, and tons of nostalgic ads... but takes a while to load: https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198302_Byte_Magazine_Vol_08-02_Standards.pdf https://vintageapple.org/byte/pdf/198302_Byte_Magazine_Vol_0...
- justin66 3y ago
  If you're into the ads, Jason Scott has a project going to scan all the old Computer Shopper magazines. I haven't looked to see exactly where things stand with that. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5543 I recently started looking at ads in the old Byte magazines and among the things I was reminded of was how long the Z80 held on among the Byte crowd. And how much money (more apparent if you adjust for inflation) hobbyists and aspiring professionals were willing to spend on their hardware and software toys in the eighties. Having grown up in that time makes things like (a timely example) some people whinging about the cost of a Raspberry Pi 5 feel so irritating and inexplicable.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    There was a much smaller difference between high and median incomes in the early 80s, so the original Mac would have been around 1 month's salary - not trivial, but not an impossible reach for many people. Lisa was far out of that bracket. But business S-100 systems had been selling for $2k to $20k and up since the 70s, so $10k for Lisa's advanced features would have seemed realistic. Today most people are paying far more in student debt, health insurance, and housing costs. So although nominal income is three times higher, free disposable income hasn't kept pace. It's true that hardware today is commoditised and much, much cheaper. But at the low end, those old II/Mac systems were still more affordable to middle class families than a straight inflation conversion suggests.

sema4hacker 3y ago

An interesting interview with Dan Smith, who was the User Interface Coordinator for the Lisa, and then switched to the Mac project, is at https://archive.org/details/Semaphore_Signal_26 https://archive.org/details/Semaphore_Signal_26

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

"Tesler: Each engineer set his or her own schedule. Some engineers work something like Monday through Friday from nine to five. Others work all day at the office, then go home and work all night there. And what an individual engineer does may vary from time to time. Daniels: These people have pride. They set their own milestones and they want to meet them, so they'll put in extra work to do that. Tesler: We decided a long time ago that since the project would obviously go on for more than a few months — a couple of years — we couldn't have this constant pressure on everybody, because people would just crack. " This is great managerial wisdom right here. From everything I've read, Larry Tesler really was someone great. RIP

icemanind 3y ago

"The 'mouse' pointing device is about the size of a package of cigarettes and has one button on top". God bless the 80s!

MegaDeKay 3y ago
And you'd have to pop the ball out every now and then to clean the crud that had built up on the x & y rollers that otherwise made the on-screen pointer stick and skip. Good times.
- hyperdimension 3y ago
  And even though we're well into the future of optical mice, when my Bluetooth mouse disconnects for a few seconds, the habit of thunking it on the desk a couple times persists... (to unstick the ball)
  - dhosek 3y ago
    Then there were the first-gen optical mice which required special mousepads with a grid on them for the mouse to know how it was being moved.

wisemang 3y ago

> We had a couple of real beauties where the users couldn't use any of the versions that were given to them and they would immediately say, "Why don't you just do it this way?" and that was obviously the way to do it. So sometimes we got the ideas from our user tests, and as soon as we heard the idea we all thought, "Why didn't we think of that?" Then we did it that way. I’d love to hear some specific examples of this. Things that we probably take totally for granted now but weren’t at all obvious during the initial design and implementation phases. This isn’t the kind of shit you get from A/B testing.

CharlesW 3y ago
You might find the example in section 4.2 of this interesting: https://www.applefritter.com/content/enlisting-user-help-software-design https://www.applefritter.com/content/enlisting-user-help-sof...
- rahkiin 3y ago
  Interesting, thank you! I believe they are describing the invention of the clipboard: two-step cut-and-paste instead of defining a selection and a destination and then executing a move command.

insane_dreamer 3y ago

This type of interview, with such detailed technical questions and answers, with actual engineers (not product spokespeople), would be impossible these days.

geerlingguy 3y ago
Not impossible, but it would likely be relegated to a video on some obscure YouTube channel with no transcript and a few hundred views. Though for the biggest orgs (Microsoft and Apple of today), there are too many layers of red tape and lawyers, so in that case I'd fully agree.
scarface_74 3y ago
One of my favorite interviews in recent years was the Chris Lattner interview by the three guys on the Accidental Tech Podcast https://atp.fm/371 https://atp.fm/371 All of the hosts are very technical.
- insane_dreamer 3y ago
  yeah, but at the time of the interview Lattner had already left Google; it's very unlikely he would have been able give that interview while still working on TF at Google (which was my point about the Byte/Apple interview)
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Lattner worked for Apple…
    - insane_dreamer 3y ago
      yeah but not when he gave that interview

WD-42 3y ago

Wayne Rosing is still working on technical problems at Las Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara. Absolute legend of an engineer. There is a LISA in the conference room there :)

lisper 3y ago
"Rosing: ... We felt it was worth risking a theft to gain the increased productivity of people working at home." This is so ironic because Wayne was the one who shut down WFH at Google when he took over from Urs Holzle back in 2001. That was one the things that caused me to leave.

GoofballJones 3y ago

Man, I really miss Byte. Subscribed to it for years. Loved that it covered a wide variety of topics.

zabzonk 3y ago
and loved the covers!
Lio 3y ago
Byte was great. I've the discussion of the NEC 7220 here. It was widely available here in the UK and in a pre-world wide web age it was one of the most important ways of knowing what was going in the US market. Well for a young me anyway. I loved it. I remember the issue detail the NeXT Cube particularly.

lapcat 3y ago

> In software, we drew mostly experienced people from other companies and very few people straight out of school. Even the ones we took out of school generally had lots of job experience. In fact, one time I surveyed the applications group and found an average of nine years' work experience in software. When we looked at resumes, we tried to find people with several years of experience in development. We made exceptions if someone had specialized in something we were interested in or was a top student who also had good summer experience. We wanted an experienced team because what we've been doing is a very major software effort. It's very complex, and there's such a large body of software to crank out and make reliable that it takes experienced people. The remarks about team-building were very interesting too.

cebert 3y ago

> When did you do the hiring? It’s crazy to think Apple Lisa devs were hired without needing to solve several Leetcode problems.

coldcode 3y ago

I had a Lisa on my desk in late 1983, along with an Apple II and Apple III and later a PC/XT (not sure if that appeared before they took the Lisa away). The Lisa was for evaluation, so I wrote some reports with it but didn't get to write any code. It was ridiculously expensive, but I could tell that it represented the future of personal computing. Explaining to my friends how it worked was difficult; even the concept of a mouse, much less fonts and a bit-mapped display, was foreign to them. None of my friends even owned any kind PC so they had little to compare my description to.

dhosek 3y ago
I remember reading the accounts of the Lisa in (I think) Softtalk when I was in high school and thinking that this sounded like an absolutely amazing system. Of course, even a $666.66 Apple ][+ was not in the cards for my family¹ so a $10,000 Lisa was never going to happen, but I still dreamt of it. ⸻ 1. Until my cousin got me a Spectravideo 318 when I was a senior in high school to write some demo programs for the local dealer, I never had a computer of my own and to get computing time I had to either show up before school or stay after and use the school computer lab, assuming it was even an option.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It's a shame they abandoned it so quickly for the Mac, and let that project suck away all the air in the room, or allowed a competing project like that at all instead of concentrating efforts. The Mac stole from the Lisa but just aesthetic / UX aspects, and produced something that didn't grow well over the years... no memory protection, single tasking, etc. Things that impacted them very badly in the late 80s and into the 90s when customers wanted/expected these things and System 7 did not cut it. Lisa really was the superior platform in many ways and it really would have come down to finding a way to get prices lower through economies of scale. Another couple years and the 68k and supporting chips and RAM were way cheaper and you could make a fairly beefy machine in that class for pretty cheap (as Tramiel showed with the Atari ST.)