Film maker [David Greelish] wrote in to let us know about his recent documentary: Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa.
The documentary covers the life of the Apple Lisa. It starts with the genesis of the Lisa Project at Apple, covering its creation, then its marketing, and finally its cancellation. It then discusses the Apple Lisa after Apple, when it became a collectible. Finally the film examines the legacy of the Apple Lisa, today.
The Apple Lisa was an important step on the journey to graphical user interfaces which was a paradigm that was shifting in the early 1980s, contemporary with the Macintosh and the work at Palo Alto. The mouse. Bitmapped graphics. Friendly error messages. These were the innovations of the day.
Apple began work on the Lisa Project in October 1978 but most of its design goals changed after Steve Jobs and his team visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in November 1979. On January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa computer was released by Apple. Two years later it was re-branded as the “Macintosh XL” and was converted to run the Mac system software. Ultimately, on August 1, 1986, the Macintosh XL (Apple Lisa) was cancelled, so as to not interfere with Macintosh sales.
But the Apple Lisa is not forgotten. These days they are collectibles which you can acquire for a few thousand dollars. They are considered a symbol and harbinger of the very significant shift to the graphical user interface which today is commonplace and perhaps even taken for granted.
There is a fun anecdote in the film about what we know today as OK/Cancel. In fact with the Apple Lisa that was originally Do It/Cancel, but it turned out many people read “Do It” as “dolt”, so during usability testing the users were asking “why is it calling me a dolt!?” Thus “Do It” became “OK”.
If you’re interested in the old Apple Lisa be sure to check out LisaGUI which is a browser-based emulator you can use to see what it used to be like.
According to Andy Hertzfield, it was actually “Dolt” that was the problematic misreading, though of course it could have been both depending on the user.
https://folklore.org/Do_It.html
Oh, thanks for your comment. I checked in the video again and you are quite right, it was misread as “dolt”. I guess I am the dolt around here! Fixed now. Thanks again.
I remember my University had an Apple Lisa. When I finally found some spare time and wanted to check it out, I asked the attendant: “What is this machine? Why is nobody using it?”. The answer was: “It’s an Apple Macintosh, but less good.”.
For sure I should have asked if I could have it. :)
But well, I was just more interested in Unix, multiprocessing and multiuser systems then. But no chance of prying the Motorola Unix System V machine (I don’t remember which it was, except it was a VME system) out of their hands. :(
Friendly error messages were universally good! But the era is gone, because we are sadly shifting into “Something went wrong.” nonsense.
The worst are the messages that tell you precisely what’s wrong (e.g. “Array key 55723 does not exist.”) but provide no clues about what the message means or how to fix things.
At least that gives you something you can directly feed back to their support team.
As a developer who often gets fed support tickets, I love that kind of ticket because it means I have something more to work back from than “it didn’t work”.
I agree. I used to have … vigorous discussions, let us say, with a coworker whose position was that the purpose of error messages was to be useful to the developer/maintainer, and the end user’s ability to understand them was not a concern. It only got resolved after he just stopped coming in to work one day, and I took over the software he’d been responsible for.
I don’t think there is a conscious intent to patronise. It’s that modern software and its contexts are more complicated, plus most old-timey error conditions are now dealt with before the user sees them. If software reaches the point where all it can do is show an error message, the problem is likely so arcane that even the developer would struggle to fix it, let alone the user.
On old macs, you would get messages like “out of memory”, which you could fix by assigning more memory to the application, so it felt like you were being helped tto fix the problem. But modern systems are so helpful you won’t even see that message.
To code a friendly error message, you have to anticipate the specific problem AND be able to work out the root cause; but in that case, why not fix the problem instead of bothering the user?
(There has been interesting progress on friendly error messages for compilers, starting with Clang, but that’s a special case since programmers actively want to be dealing with stuff under the hood)
Sounds plausible. Yet same time, Windows 2000s/XPs era messages were quite spot on.
Kernel errors such as “7E” (STOP: 0x0000007E) were quickly being recognized as an HDD controller issue.
I don’t understand why these things must be hidden from the users now.
A quick search at the internet leads to computer help forums and other places.
There was this story about a German tinkerer who re-created the Lisa using discrete parts..
It also involved patching Macintosh’s System Software to run on in.
https://tinyurl.com/3wd8he36
Another interesting story involved the editor of German MACup magazine,
who published an article about a Do-It-Yourself Macintosh.
This article caused a Taiwan compny named Akkord to be interested and asking him for support in evaluating a commercial endevor.
Apple allegedly was so angry about this that he never was allowed to attend any Apple event anymore. 🥲
https://hackaday.com/2023/01/25/open-sourcing-the-lisa-macs-bigger-sister/#comment-6584876
I’m not sure if this is linked to the Unitron Macintosh somehow.
I vaguely remembered reading that the Brazilians sold the rights to their reverse-engineered firmware to a company in Taiwan.
https://lowendmac.com/2016/unitron-mac-512-a-contraband-mac-512k-from-brazil/
A really excellent short documentary about the Lisa was made by The Verge a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZjbNWgsDt8
At a former employer, I had the opportunity to take one (missing its keyboard) home. I declined, and have regretted it, but you can’t keep everything.
(I would probably have donated it to CHM)
Sadly, “…Ultimately, on August 1, 1986, the Macintosh XL (Apple Lisa) was cancelled, so as to not interfere with Macintosh sales…”.
IMHO, the two were aimed at different market segments – and priced somewhat accordingly. They would not interfere, they would COMPLEMENT each other. McIntosh was budget-priced student-level machine, Lisa was aimed at more advanced users with built-in Office stuffs, etc.
The major difference was Lisa wasn’t easily upgradeable without replacing entire motherboard. McIntosh in comparison offered at least SOME things that can be upgraded by vendors later.
Rewind to present and find Apple selling nothing but Lisas.