Wrege Lisas Design Popular Computing

IT WAS -THE· MOST INTE·NSIVE AND COSTLY EFFORT IN PERSONAL COMPUTER HISTORY ,i specialist in both user-interface design as well as the Smalltalk programming environment. Tesler, in fact, Apple. That funky bastion of Computing Power for had given the group its demonstration at Xerox headthe People, sporting its rainbow-striped logo like a quarters -in Palo Alto, where he had worked on the slap in the face to big business and corporate chic. The Smalltalk design team. He came to Apple, he says, company that cared more about creative technology 'because he.wanted to see the ideas he worked on "in than making a buck, or so the basement hackers who · hundreds · of . thousands of machines. Apple could bought the first Apples believed. That company has develop products fast and at lower cost," he adds. slowly grown up, sold its stock like any other public . Some 15 .or 20 Xerox engineers were to migrate to corporation, and hired the best , ·· · Apple during the course of the Lisa advertising and public relations project, most of them coming for agencies in Silicon Valley. The the same reason Tesler did-to see hackers' company has now decided their work widely marketed. to tap the Fortune 1000 crowd. With the target now in its sights, In 1979, Apple management Apple created Personal Office decided to build an office system Systems, a new corporate entity for the eighties. By December, a headed by John Couch, to support core group of designers was kickthe growing team of ·engineering . ing around some pr~liminary ideas. and marketing specialists. The The group included Apple coteam started by balancing .founder and chairman of the board engineering and marketing wish lists. Steve Jobs, vice-president for softThe engineering group wanted a ware development John Couch, 12 machine that would be transparent software engineers, and ·6 hardto the user, intuitively easy to ware designers. Their goal was the creation of a machine that would copy and complement operate. "Of course marketing wanted every feature the way people naturally work. in the world for no price at all-and they wanted it Early in its work the group saw Smalltalk, the yesterday," says Daniels jokingly. "Together we slowrevolutionary personal computer programming sys- ly worked out compromises and engineering tradetem designed in the 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto offs. In the end, we didn't really deviate much from Research Center. The Smalltalk system features a bit- our basic goals." mapped video display, mouse control, and a so-called Architecture modeless environment. "We designed Lisa's architecture by committee," Says Bruce Daniels, an Apple technical manager, "We were turned on by Smalltalk because it fit our says Tesler. "That's usually a bad idea. Severalpeople idea of an easy-to-use system, and we started talking wanted to be the architect and several offered to be, about doing something like it. We didn't have to sell but no one person emerged who had the breadth of exthe idea to Ste…